Well, Yoast doesn't add much on-site SEO to a site, most of the features are SEO fluff. There's also Yoast features like adding noindex and nofollow to parts of the site that can seriously damage your site SEO wise. Really concerning so many people think Yoast SEO is awesome!

Check Yoasts PageSpeed Insights results PageSpeed Insights

Mobile is 27/100 that's shit! I've checked that test a dozen times over a month and EVERYTIME it reports the "Reduce Server Response Time" issue, that means the server is running slow for some reason and page speed is a Google ranking factor.

The image, database and caching optimization you mention are all good steps. Have you confirmed it's impact using the PageSpeed Insights tool I linked above?

On sharing your content over social media I've not seen any evidence this has any direct SEO value.

Facebook for example is just another website and it's links are all nofollow and we know nofollow stops SEO benefit passing through links. For there to be direct SEO benefit Google would have to treat Facebook as a special case. Not only has Google said they don't treat social media activity in a special way, Facebook is a competitor to Google, Facebook can block Googlebot at any time, doesn't make sense for Google to use Facebook as a direct ranking factor any more than it would using Warrior Forum as a direct ranking factor.

Backlinks are still very important, more important than on-site SEO. My preferred way to build them is link bait, give your users something worth linking to.

David

A PBN may be your best choice..

A little risky, but if done right that seems to be the way to go...

Link bait.
Link outreach (maybe same thing)

Try to get good links and do not get tempted (like I have) to get lots of links...

I can give you someones info on PBN if you decide to go that route. (no affiliate)
He knows his stuff

Are you using low competition keyword phrases?

There are some keywords that you will never be able to rank.

Has any of your pages ranked on page 1-10?

Well first and foremost, thank-you for thanking the time to respond. I did do lots of research on my own, however getting your advice helps me.

I read other post and see many senior members stat that the will stop answering “newbie” questions, I feel that is a shame because I am sure they have lots of valid experience they could share. But on the other hand, I can’t blame them, to have the same questions asked over and over again, can become tedious.

First, PageSpeed Insights, being a newb, never heard of it before. Ran my site, scored 75/100 but it still showed me there are areas I can still improve, so thank-you for that.

Yoast, well… Being new to WP and SEO, at least it pushed me to learn about the importance about SEO structure, I can say that much for it. I configured Yoast based on articles I read as stated above, but I see SEO-Dave point. Now my only concern is, how valid where those articles, am I really optimized the correct way?

Does anyone here know of a “Valid article” on Yoast optimization?

I think I have to concentrate my efforts about learning Backlinks, I am totally lost on this subject.

Example,

Exchanging links with a website that ranks higher than you, is that considered a good backlink?

How can you build good backlinks without being penalized by Google?

I think you missed my point on Yoast, you'll find loads of Yoast tutorials explaining which settings to use for awesome SEO, but they are wrong.

Yoast doesn't add much SEO to a site.

The only useful feature that can potentially increase rankings is the Yoast title tag. By adding a Yoast title tag WordPress will have two keyphrases to work with rather than one.

With 99.99% of themes WordPress will use the original WordPress post title for all internal links anchor text unless you are running a rubbish theme which uses anchor text like "Continue Reading" for internal links. WordPress will also use it for the main header of an article, if it's a reasonably well built theme it will be in an H1 header.

The Yoast title tag will be used for one thing, the title tag of the post, that's it.

So if you have a post with post title

Why Yoast Sucks at SEO

And add the Yoast title tag

Yoast SEO Review

The majority of the on-site SEO (internal links anchor text, H1 header etc...) will still be using "Why Yoast Sucks at SEO".

So the main on-site SEO is still reliant on the WordPress post title you set, not the Yoast title tag.

All the other Yoast SEO features are fluff, breadcrumbs are not a killer SEO feature, sitemap not a killer SEO feature, meta tags not a killer SEO feature....

Don't get me wrong, Yoast has some nice features, but their SEO impact is minimal at best and some cause serious damage.

Other than the Yoast title tag which 99.99% of themes DO NOT take advantage of, Yoast features are fluff SEO, they do not increase rankings.

If SEO theme developers knew what they were doing they could use the Yoast title tag for internal links, for the H1 header etc... but they don't. I only know of one theme which does, that's the theme I developed. Was easy to use the Yoast title tag for internal links etc...

Yoast can also cause serious SEO damage, noindex and nofollow are damaging features, there's lots of Yoast tutorials which advise noindexing tags and categories, that's SEO nuts! To use Yoast or other SEO plugins you really need to understand SEO to not feck up your sites SEO. I've seen loads of sites damage their rankings by using the Yoast and similar plugins incorrectly.

You are right to concentrate on backlinks, the reason why the Yoast domain has decent rankings despite rubbish on-site SEO, crap loads of backlinks, not the plugin or the Genesis theme framework (that's an SEO joke).

Backlinks are still more important than on-site SEO.

David

As far as your page speed concern you need to optimize your images and code to get better page load speed.

Hmmm you say you have read and done a lot and then all you have done is "Install Yoast" and other bla bla bla...

And you still don't know how to create backlinks and you have read a lot about SEO ....



If you ask me bro, you have learnt absolutely nothing and spent time reading stuff which you were not.
Find a proper SEO guide and go through it to understand basics, then put things into practice and things should start happening ...

Without seeing your site its impossible to point out your weak spots, use catergories to make use navigation easy with structured data, dont worry about all the fluff of dropping the kw in every title and tag you can, ensure your content is relevant and deeply nested in your site. Ensure the front page is good looking and try and have as few boxes as possible. Make a link wheel of annoy ous social accounts, and use them to to send frequent social signals, you dont need to link every day from the same fb page though.

I am not saying any ones methods are correct or incorrect but the above method has been working well for me recently on a number of clients sites. One thing you can be sure of is Google wont peaniliase you for having to much social interaction!

Dang.. I thought I was good to go now that I Nondexed tags/categories to avoid dupes...

Guess now I am even more confused....

This SEO stuff sucks....

Just when you think you got one thing right...

Someone tells you it is wrong

So instead of going to the next step you start over with step 1

One day.... One day it will all come together.....NOT

if its a money site stop using wordpress period

I am new to SEO, however as I mentioned I have read many articles on SEO optimization, I have done much more than just install Yoast.

This first thing I did was optimize my page for speed, its still not as fast as I would like but I don’t think I can get it any faster without using a CDN.

Every new article I post, I do the following:

Make sure my article title contain the keyword I am posting about.

Example

Title: Black cats are popular at Halloween
Keyword: Black Cat

P.S I really don’t talk or write about Black Cats.

Optimize images and ensure they have ALT tags. I also add descriptions to the images and make sure they contain my keyword.

Place H1 and H2 tags containing the keyword.

Ensure I write my article in a way that I can repeat my keyword multiple times without it impacting the reader experience.

Have inbound links to my relevant articles and outbound links to related websites.

I have NOT done this to all my articles just the latest ones to see if it would have an impact on ranking, and so far the new articles don’t rank any better than my old ones.

I notice other website in my niche that don’t do any of this, website layout is not as good neither is the content and the rank much better than me. Before you mentioned website AGE, some of these websites are newer than mine.

Is there anything I can do to optimize my articles, so that they rank better?

For the record page speed is such a small metric when ranking webpages it's almost irrelevant to SEO.

Obviously you don't want pages that take all day to load but don't dwell on the subject (page speed). You don't need to use any tool to measure common sense (page speed).

Hi,

Optimize your site with increasing the speed of your site and loading of images must be fast it will help your site

Took a look at the OP's site (he PM'd the URL).

No reason why you shouldn't post your URL here so others can give advice.

First thing I noticed there's 39,000 pages indexed in Google (check Google Webmaster Tools for an accurate figure). Checked some articles out and wasn't sure they are unique, is some of your content scraped (copied) from other sites? That's a lot of content for one year.

If so that could be a major cause of poor rankings. Google does not like sites that copy content.

A lot of the indexed pages are image attachments, so not sure of how many articles you've posted. Could be using a lot of internal link benefit linking to image attachment URLs which don't generate traffic.

Home page you have internal nofollow links (the "Continue Reading" links) that wastes link benefit.

Your home page title isn't very good. Note you are number one in Google for both parts of your title (brand name | keyphrase), the first part is your brand name which is unique, search for it in Google and see how Google shows this:

Showing results for Keyword Word Magazine
Search instead for KeywordWord Magazine

That's because your brand name isn't a keyphrase, but an important keyword to your site with another word added directly to it. Google can't parse Keyword from KeywordWord, you are optimized for KeywordWord which has no traffic.

Add the space to your brand name and you benefit from the keyword. Don't change anything about what you offer etc... just add a space wherever you use your brand name as text. No users will notice the difference, but Google will.

Search for your posts title tags in Google and the long ones I checked tended to see you ranking top 10. Didn't check many, but your article titles aren't very targeted at SERPs with traffic. If you generate a lot of content and don't optimize for at least one SERP each you are highly unlikely to generate traffic to a new post. Basically if you give a post a title and no one searches for main phrases in the title, it can't generate traffic.

Use tools like the Adwords keyword planner tool to target new articles at SERPs, if you are generating thousands of posts a year I suggest choosing one long tail SERP per post. Even a 100 posts each targeting one SERP each with just 30 searches a month each could be a significant share of 30,000 visitors a month. Right now looks like most of your articles will generate no traffic.

Go through your PageSpeed Insights issues and fix as many as you can. A lot are a combination of the WordPress theme you use and adding large images to articles. If you limit images to 500px wide (as shown on the webpage, you can still link to large versions) you'll remove the Optimize Images issues. If you haven't ready done so use a plugin like EWWW Image Optimizer to optimize your images.

The above won't be a main cause of poor rankings, but won't help.

If your site is around a year old any links you've added recently won't be passing full SEO benefit. Takes a long time for links to pass significant SEO benefit, it's why new sites tend not to rank for at least 6 months and most don't rank for anything competitive in their first year.

Keep building quality backlinks and be patient. IME take 9-12 months for a new link to pass most of it's SEO benefit, so if you've been regularly acquiring new links, because the site is new it won't have benefited from most of the links yet.

Knew I should have checked the domain age. The domain was registered Feb 2012, so if you started work on the site from day one it's 2 1/2 years old. WayBack Machine was playing up, so couldn't check when you started building the site. PR1 home page, so December 2013 (when PR was last updated) suggests you hadn't built much in the way of quality links by 12 months ago.

David

Hi, you should use the light weight images with proper details i.e. you must give alt, desc, caption to all of the images you are using in your Wordpress site. This will be adding values towards search engine crawling process.

Dave,

The page speed nonsense is starting to get annoying.

You post that link on most of your comments.

Let it go...

Thanks for the replies thus far, I learnt more here in 2 days than in the weeks of reading articles on-line…

So I changed the rel=nofollow for “continue reading” and I have also changed the title name.

The title name was a good call btw, evident and I miss that one!

My next question, backlinks…

What is a good strategy to build good backlinks? I asked this question, but it got lost in the rough.

Link exchange with website in my niche of higher traffic, is that a good backlink?

Use a service like AHREFS to create backlink reports for all your competitors. Find out where all your competitors are getting backlinks from and try to replicate as many as possible.

If you replicate backlinks from 10 different competitors, you should come out in front.

Also, if you are doing video marketing I suggest that you take those videos you post to YouTube, and re-post them to various other video hosting sites (Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc) and use keyword variations of your title on each one.

Additionally, you can then rip the audio from your videos and upload them to audio sharing websites using different variations of the title text again, as described above.

Our website is broken down 50/50. 50% original content and 50% press releases. I have no choice but to share the information in the press releases as our partners/sponsors/advertiser expect us to do so, no real choice in the matter.

Also, they do generate traffic to an extent. I noticed that if I am first in my niche to post them, I will rank above others and they will generate hits.

My big problem as you can image is there is lots of competition in my niche and we all share the same keywords and very similar page titles, there lies the problem!

All in one seo plug in is better than yoast..

All The SEO Experts are replying and i am like

Starting to get a clearer picture, I think, maybe, well sort of. Fortunate for me is that my website is fairly well organized separating unique content from press releases via different categories. Also I don’t mix up the 2, example will not link an industry news article to an original content article. However I do use similar keyword structure, no choice in that.

I am also starting to understand the importance of inter linking original content, if of course its relevant, something I do not do a the moment.

However here is my question. A press release comes out, everyone in my niche jumps on the bandwagon to post it on there website. They know that since its hot industry news in my niche, readers of this product will be flocking to there website to read up on this new model. (thus generating more traffic )

So doesn’t this content (press releases) play an important factor for my website and although it’s a copied page using your terminology, shouldn’t this page be considered important?

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1. Try doing something crazy....NO plugins. WP out of the box works fine. (If you want to add a plugin, simply do a security plugin to keep hackers out.)

2. Build solid posts (or pages as another guy suggested) daily and interlink everything.

3. Find like-minded websites in and around your niche, shoot them an email asking for a link.

4. There is a bonus option of creating your own PBN, but that's "badass" territory and not to be entered into lightly lest you get burned.

Well if you have images with alt text with keywords it will benefit you to have them indexed.

Make sure you optimize your images and create a sitemap for them.