SEO Step by Step Lab

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/wordpress/wordpress-comment-section-doesnt-get-focused

WordPress Comment Section Doesn't get Focused

My WordPress comment section was working for a few days. If I click on the comment box, it doesn’t get focused. I can use the Tab key to get it focused.

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/seo-basics/mobile-first-indexing

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/wordpress/how-to-create-effective-topic-clusters-for-top-seo-ranking

How To Create Effective Topic Clusters For Top SEO Ranking

The structured search engine:

semantic search engine

understanding search engine

Knowlege Graph

Knowledge Graph (aka semantic network) is all about entities and their relationships. Three main components:

nodes

edges

labels

The term was popularized by the Google’s Knowledge Graph in 2012.

semantic search: search with meaning

lexical search (string-based search): literal matches of the query words or variants of them

By understanding the meaning of the search queries, Google is transforming from an information search engine to a knowlege search engine.

Freebase was one of the main source for Google’s knowledge graph.

Knowledge Panel

knowledge panel (infobox)

The Semantic Web

Web 3.0

semantic web

decentrialization

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

  How to Implement Semantic SEO?

schema markup: make your website more meaningful to search engines.

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/seo-basics/full-list-of-google-ranking-algorithm-update

Full List of Google Ranking Algorithm Update

1 Caffeine 2009

faster and more accurate indexing

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation

2 Panda Update

Target: content farms (wisegeek, ehow, ezine articles, about.com, etc)

What should you do: write quality content instead of writing more content.

3 Hummingbird

Hummingbird is a brand new engine, though it continues to use some of the same parts of the old, like Penguin and Panda.

In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-hummingbird

FAQ: All About The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm

4 Knowledge Graph

5 Medic Update

6 Page Layout Update (January 2012)

AKA: Top Heavy

affected websites: websites with lots of ads in above-the-fold area, or make it difficult for users to find the actual content.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/page-layout-algorithm-detail/355182/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/page-layout/

7 Penguin Update

8 Payday Loan Update (2013)

affected: very spammy queries and spammy sites mostly associated with shady industries like super high-interest loans and payday loans, porn, and other heavily spammed queries.

What is payday loan: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/payday-loans.asp

As of 2016, on the AdWords side, Google is now banning Payday Loan and other risky loan ads.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/payday-loan-update/

What is a spammy query:

9: Mobilegeddon (April 2015)

requirement: mobile-friendly, responsive web design.

Affects only search rankings on mobile devices.

Affects search results in all languages globally.

Applies to individual pages, not entire websites.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/mobile-friendly-update/

10: Mobile-First Index

  11: Rankbrain

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/web-performance-optimization/cloudflare-pro-plan-is-it-worth-it

Cloudflare Pro Plan, is it worthy?

Cloudflare Pro Plan

Polish

What does Polish do?

Polish reduces image file size by removing metadata (date and time, camera manufacturer and model, etc.), and by compressing images when possible. Smaller file sizes mean faster load times for images and web pages.

What Polish setting should I use?

Off: Polish is disabled

Lossless: Reduce the size of image files without impacting visual quality

Remove metadata: PNG, GIF, JPEG

Lossless compression: GIF, PNG

Lossy: In addition to the features included in the Basic level, the file size of JPEG images is reduced using lossy compression, which may reduce visual quality

Lossy compression: JPEG

Serve WebP images: When the client requesting the image supports the WebP image codec, Cloudflare will serve a WebP version of the image when WebP offers a performance advantage over the original image format.

Lossy compression: JPEG

Lossless compression: GIF, PNG Note: Large JPEG images are converted to progressive images. Visitors will see an increasingly detailed image as the file is downloaded.

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000607372-Using-Cloudflare-Polish-to-compress-images

https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-very-webp-new-year-from-cloudflare/

Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress

Static HTML cache

In addition, to caching dynamic content, APO caches third-party scripts to further reduce the need to make requests that leave Cloudflare’s edge network.

for logged-in or admin users, we will bypass the cache ensuring that private content is not cached and served to other visitors.

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360049822312

https://blog.cloudflare.com/automatic-platform-optimizations-starting-with-wordpress/

Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritization

TCP Turbo

Reduce latency and throughput with custom-tuned TCP optimizations.

Mirage

Improve load time for pages that include images on mobile devices with slow network connections.

Web Traffic Analytics

Get metrics on the usage of your website—without sacrificing the privacy of your visitors.

Health Checks

Monitor the health of your origin by creating a Health Check.

Load Balancing Analytics

Understand where your Load Balancing traffic is going, why, and minimize your time to resolution.

Firewall Managed Rules

Easily configure and deploy rules built by Cloudflare backed by the experience of securing millions of applications.

Leverage pre-built rules for many CMSs including WordPress, Joomla and Drupal

  Argo

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/web-performance-optimization/wordpress-webp-express

WordPress WebP Express

converting existing images

Convert on upload

Alter HTML: takes care of delivering webp to webp enabled browsers while still delivering the original jpeg/png to browsers not supporting webp

Operation Mode:

Varied image responses: WebP Express creates redirection rules for images, such that a request for a jpeg will result in a webp – but only if the request comes from a webp-enabled browser.

CDN friendly: a jpeg is always served as a jpeg. Instead of varying the image response, WebP Express alters the HTML for webp usage

use WebP Express on Nginx

  Use WebP Express with Cloudflare CDN

enable CDN friendly mode

enable Alter HTML to use <picture> tag syntax for pointing to webp versions or point directly to webps. Pro picture tag syntax: The browser selects the webp if it supports it. Pro image urls: Also works on inline styles

Destination Folder: Mingled

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/web-performance-optimization/google-pagespeed-100-score

Google PageSpeed 100 Score

If you want to see the DOM size of a web page, just write the following code into the browser console.

document.getElementsByTagName("*").length

  How to improve the speed of your website and provide a better user experience:

– Switch to a fast DNS provider

– Start with caching files

– Optimize CSS files

– Set up JS files loading

– Optimize the media files

– Set up preloading priority

-​ Use CDN

-​ Optimize your images, use next-gen image format like webp

– Get Nitropack if on WP. Game changer.

WebP Image Format

Image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption. Most major browsers now support webp.

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/seo-basics/5-steps-in-keyword-research

5 Steps in Keyword Research

1 Find keyword in Google Keyword Planner

2 Determine if it’s a seasonal keyword with Google Trends. (seasonal, stable and consistent, going upwards, going downwards).

3 Determine the search intent. Very important. Some searchers are ready to buy products, while others are just looking for information. The Google search results already give you a hint about the searcher’s intent.

4 Take Keyword Difficulty with a grain of salt.

5 Choose Keywords that have a high CPC rate because PPC marketers know these keywords can make more money.

6 include common or related questions asked by users into your article. (SEMrush, Google Search Console which keywords your pages are ranking for). Focus on topic, not just keywords.

  Keyword research tools, are they accurate?

ubersuggest

Google Keyword Planner (run ad to get full stats)

wordtracker

ahrefs

SEMRush

Finding Low-Competition Keywords with Ahrefs (affiliate marketing dude)

    Keyword Clustering (Keyword Grouping)

One web page can rank for multiple keywords

tools: keywordinsights.io

The Trigger Word Method For Finding Non-Competitive

  Competitor Keyword Jacking

      On-Page Optimizations

be the first the rank something new (the site will stick in the top position despite not being highly authoritative), with Google Trends.

Improve Click-Through rate (Check CTR in Google Search Console and change your title and qualifiers) Good CTR 5-10%

topic clusters are the most powerful SEO weapon.

Site Speed (Core Web Vitals)

page experience (Include videos in your article)

Structured data (schema markup)

mobile-first indexing (Your page is not mobile-friendly: email blacklist removal).

internal linking

  Click through rate

start-rating

social media share stats

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/seo-basics/5-best-keyword-research-tools

5 Best Keyword Research Tools

1 Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner

Cons:

Accurate monthly volume is only available for Google Ads customers.

2 SEO PowerSuite

Pros:

free tier available

7 day free trial of the enterprise edition.

can show you expected visits to your site for specific keywords.

3 UberSuggest

UberSuggest

Pros:

7-day free trial

Allows you to see how many people click on SEO results and PPC results.

4 MOZ

https://moz.com/checkout/freetrial

Pros:

30-day free trial

5 Ahrefs

  6 WordTracker

7 KeywordInsights

The smartest and most cost-effective way to group keywords and establish search intent at scale.

Pros

Build your topics and clusters easily

Find the true search intent/Context

Optimise your site architecture

Quickly optimise your PPC account: The clustering report can be used to improve or build your Google/Bing keyword groups. Find additional keywords you could be targeting in each adgroup and quickly avoid the age old issue of having the same keyword in two different ad groups.

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/wordpress/solved-wordpress-comment-needs-ftp-access

[Solved]: WordPress Comment Needs FTP Access

If you see the following error when trying to post a comment on your WordPress site.

To perform the requested action, WordPress needs to access your web server. Please enter your FTP credentials to proceed. If you do not remember your credentials, you should contact your web host.

Web server log

PHP message: PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function submit_button() in /usr/share/nginx/linuxbabe.com/wp-admin/includes/file.php

Solution:

Restart Nginx MariaDB PHP-FPM

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/wordpress/how-to-change-the-scroll-speed-in-wordpress-optimizer-theme

How to Change the Scroll Speed in WordPress Optimizer Theme

This default scroll speed is too fast if a Google Chrome user visits a WordPress site running with the Optimizer theme. This tutorial is going to show you how to change the scroll speed.

Find The SmoothScroll Code in Your Theme

Go to the theme directory.

cd /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes/optimizer/

Then find the SmoothScroll code.

grep -rnw . -e "SmoothScroll"

It turns out the SmoothScroll code is stored in the other.js file.

sudo nano /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes/optimizer//assets/js/other.js

Change

stepSize: 100

To

stepSize: 39

Save and close the file. Then clear your WordPress cache. If you use Cloudflare CDN cache, then also clear it.

How to Change the Code in Child Theme

If you use a child theme, then your changes will be lost when a new version of your theme is installed.

The other.js file is enqueue with the following code in /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes/optimizer/lib/functions/enqueue.php file.

wp_enqueue_script('optimizer_otherjs',get_template_directory_uri().'/assets/js/other.js', array('jquery'), true);

Add the following code in the functions.php file in your child theme.

function mychildtheme_enqueue_scripts() wp_dequeue_script( 'optimizer_otherjs'); wp_deregister_script( 'optimizer_otherjs'); wp_enqueue_script( 'optimizer_child_otherjs', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/assets/js/other.js', array('jquery'), true ); add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'mychildtheme_enqueue_scripts', 20 );

Save and close the file.

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/web-performance-optimization/uninstall-the-bloated-jetpack-plugin-to-improve-web-performance

Uninstall the Bloated Jetpack Plugin to Improve Web Performance

Why do I uninstall the Jetpack plugin from my WordPress site? Well:

Jetpack plugin is bloated.

I don’t need the many functions in Jetpack plugin, or I can implement the same functions with the underlying Linux operating system.

Every plugin has potential vulnerability. I prefer to use as less plugins as possible.

Bloated

The Jetpack plugin is known as a bloated plugin. I use the ncdu command to analyze the size of each plugin of this site and the result is as follows. As you can see, Jetpack plugin is 25.3 MiB in size, much lager than other plugins.

A big plugin means that there will be many database queries on the underlying MySQL or MariaDB database, slowing down your website.

Do you need the site stats feature?

The site stats feature in Jetpack plugin is very limited. The standard way to collect web analytics data is use Google Analytics, which is far more advanced. In fact, some ad networks require you to submit your Google analytics report in order for them to consider adding your site to their network.

Security Scaning?

Jetpack can scan your site to find out if there’s vulnerabilities, but this feature is for pro users only. You can use the free WP Scan tool instead.

Automatic Backup

Again, this feature is for pro users only. I prefer to use the mysqldump and rsync utility on my Linux server to automatically back up my site.

Akimet Spam Proection

This is also paid feature. I’m using the free and lightweight WP Spam Fighter plugin, which is very effective for stopping comment spam.

Plugin Updates

This feature is superfluous. Users can simply update plugins with the builtin WordPress plugin manager, or use WP CLI to automatically update plugins.

Protect From Malicious Sign in

I can use Nginx to add an IP address whitelist to restrict access to the wp-login.php page.

Downtime Monitoring

There are many free downtime monitoring services, like uptimerobot, that doesn’t require you to install plugin on your website.

Image Performance?

The image performance feature in Jetpack can cache your images in WordPress.com CDN to speed up page loading. However, Cloudflare can also do that and it doesn’t require you to install plugin.

Jetpack Search

A paid feature that I don’t need.

Lazy Load Images?

Cloudflare can do that.

Popular Posts Widget

Jetpack comes with a popular posts widget, but I found that the image quality in the widget is very poor, which makes your website look unprofessional. The images are hosted on external domains:

i0.wp.com

i1.wp.com

i2.wp.com

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/web-performance-optimization/wordpress-database-performance-tuning-on-linux-vps

WordPress Database Performance Tuning on Linux VPS

As your WordPress site grows, there are more and more posts and comments in your WordPress database, which will become the bottleneck of WordPress site performance. It’s important that you optimize the underlying MySQL/MariaDB database server as much as possible. In this article, I’m going to share with you how I improve the performance of WordPress database.

Prerequites

This article assumes that you have installed WordPress a Linux VPS (Virtual Private Server) or you have root access to the underlying OS. If you use shared hosting, it’s likely that your hosting provider have already done performance optimizations on MySQL/MariaDB database server.

Step 1: Delete Unused Plugins

Plugins will slow down your database and they can have vulnerabilities. You should remove those plugins that you don’t use.

Step 2: Delete Garbage Tables in your WordPress Database

Many plugins will create their own tables in the database when you install them on your WordPress site. However, the table can still reside in the database when you delete the plugin. Deleting garbage tables is helpful to keep a fast database.

You can install the Plugins Garbage Collector plugin to scan garbage tables.

Once it’s installed, go to Tools -> Plugins Garbage Collector to scan the database. Garbage tables are colored in red, which you can delete.

If a garbage table can’t be deleted from the WordPress admin panel (possibly because it uses uppercase), you can log into your MySQL/MariaDB console and enter SQL command to delete that table.

drop table table_name;

If you are not certain if a table belongs to a deleted plugin, you can use the following SQL command to check the content of that table.

describe table_name;

Step 3: Delete Garbage Metadata

There are 4 basic tables for storing metadata in WordPress:

wp_postmeta: metadata for posts

wp_commentmeta: metadata for comments

wp_usermeta:metadata for users

wp_termmeta: metadata for categories and tags

If you have enabled multisite functionality, then there is the wp_sitemeta table. Over time, your database will accumulate orphaned metadata. For example, when you delete a post, a comment, a user, a category or a tag, the metadata is still in the wp_postmeta table, but you don’t need them any more. So you can delete them manually.

You can use the following SQL query to find out if there are orphaned post metadata.

SELECT COUNT(pm.meta_id) as row_count FROM wp_postmeta pm LEFT JOIN wp_posts wp ON wp.ID = pm.post_id WHERE wp.ID IS NULL;

To delete orphaned post metadata,

DELETE pm FROM wp_postmeta pm LEFT JOIN wp_posts wp ON wp.ID = pm.post_id WHERE wp.ID IS NULL;

Query the number of orphaned comment metadata.

SELECT COUNT(*) as row_count FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE comment_id NOT IN (SELECT comment_id FROM wp_comments);

Delete orphaned comment metadata.

DELETE FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE comment_id NOT IN (SELECT comment_id FROM wp_comments);

If you allow user registration on your WordPress site, then it’s likely that there are many spam users. After you delete spam users, the metadata is still there. You can delete them with:

DELETE FROM wp_usermeta WHERE NOT EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE wp_usermeta.user_id = wp_users.ID );

Step 4: Clean Up wp_options Table

Many plugins or themes adds options in the wp_options table. However, when you delete a plugin or theme, their options can still be in the wp_options table. For example, I uninstalled the Disqus comment plugin and switched back to the WordPress native comment system. But there are still Disqus related options in the table, which you can find out with teh following SQL query.

select * from wp_options where option_name like '%disqus%';

To delete these options, run

delete from wp_options where option_name like '%disqus%';

You can use the free plugin named Clean Options to find out all possibly orphaned options. Even though this plugin hasn’t updated for 9 years, I find it very useful. Once you install and activate this plugin, go to Tools -> CleanOptions and scan the wp_options table.

Please keep in mind that this plugin isn’t 100% accurate in detecting orphan options. So you should do a Google search about the option name to be certain.

Sometimes, the option value can give you a clue which plugin or theme this option belongs to. You can use the following SQL query. Replace option_name with the real option name.

select * from wp_options where option_name like 'option_name';

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/wordpress/how-to-restrict-access-to-wp-login-php-in-nginx

How To Restrict Access to wp-login.php in Nginx (IP Address Whitelist)

The default login page of a WordPress website is like this:

example.com/wp-login.php

When you type in

example.com/wp-admin

WordPress will redirect you to the login page if you are not logged in. To protect WordPress from brute-force attack, a WordPress site admin can enable two factor authentication with a WordPress plugin, but I found that inconvenient, because I don’t like to open my phone and enter a six-digit every time I need to login. Instead, you can restrict access to the login page to your own IP address. Here’s how to do it with Nginx web server.

Edit the Nginx virtual host file, such as

sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/example.com.conf

Add the following lines in the server ... context.

location = /wp-login.php try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; fastcgi_pass_header Set-Cookie; fastcgi_pass_header Cookie; include fastcgi_params; proxy_buffers 16 16k; proxy_buffer_size 16k; allow 12.34.56.78; allow 12.34.56.79; deny all;

Replace 12.34.56.78 and 12.34.56.79 with your own IP addresses. Note that I’m using PHP7.3 on my server, you may need to change the fastcgi_pass directive according to your PHP-FPM configuration.

Save and close the file. Then test Nginx configurations.

sudo nginx -t

If the test is successful, reload Nginx.

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Now an attacker would see the 403 forbidden message when trying to access the wp-login.php page.

You can also hide the Nginx server signature. First, you need to install the HttpHeadersMore module.

sudo apt install libnginx-mod-http-headers-more-filter

Then add the following two lines in http context in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file.

more_set_headers "Server: example.com"; server_tokens off;

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/wordpress/hide-wordpress-username-author-url

How to Hide WordPress Username in Author URL

This tutorial will be showing you how to hide your WordPress username. It is common to see the author’s nickname in a WordPress post. When we click the author nickname, WordPress will show us all articles published by that author. But this will also leak the username of that author in the URL.

example.com/author/username

To protect your WordPress site as much as possible, you should not let others know your username in WordPress database. We can accomplish that by changing the author URL. Instead of showing the username in author URL, we can make WordPress show the nickname instead.

Log into your WordPress database, and check user information with the following MySQL query.

select * from wp_users;

We can see the username (user_login) and nickname (user_nicename). By default, the username and nickname are the same. We can change the nickname with the following MySQL statement.

update wp_users set user_nicename ='your_preferred_nickname';

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/wordpress/disable-wordpress-revisions-delete-old-revisions

How to Disable WordPress Revisions and Delete Old Revisions

This quick tutorial is going to show you how to disable WordPress revisions and delete old revisions. Revisions can take unnecessary space in your WordPress database and in the long run your WordPress database will become slow because there are lots of revisions.

Completely Disable WordPress Revisions

Edit the wp-config.php file under the WordPress root directory and add the following lines above the require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php'); line.

/** disable post revision. needs to be above require_once **/ define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Save the file and you are done.

Delete Old Revisions

Your old revisions still exists and they are taking up space in your WordPress database. To delete all old revisions, run the following MySQL query.

DELETE FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_type` = "revision" AND `post_name` LIKE "%revision%";

On one of my WordPress databases, the above command reduced the database size from 108MB to 30MB.

Wrapping Up

New Post has been published on https://seostepbysteplab.com/wordpress/create-child-theme

How to Create Child Theme in WordPress

This quick tutorial will be showing you how to create child theme in WordPress. When a WordPress theme gets updated, all your customizations are lost, if you don’t create a child theme.

Step 1: Create the Child Theme Folder

Go to the main WordPress theme folder (wp-content/themes), where you will find all your installed WordPress themes. Then create the child theme folder for your current active theme. For example, if you current active theme is twentynineteen, you can name the child theme twentynineteen-child.

Step 2: Create the Stylesheet File

Under the child theme folder, create a styleshee file (style.css). Put the following lines into the file. Replace the name as necessary.

/* Theme Name: Twenty Nineteen Child Template: twentynineteen */

Step 3: Enqueue Parent and Child Theme Stylesheet

Create a functions.php file in the child theme folder. Put the following lines into the file.

<?php add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'my_theme_enqueue_styles' ); function my_theme_enqueue_styles() wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-style', get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css' ); ?>

Step 4: Activate Child Theme

Go to your WordPress dashboard -> Appearance -> Themes and activate the child theme.

Step 5: Customize Your Theme

Now whenever you want to customize your theme, for example, you need to change something in the footer.php file, you need to copy the footer.php to the child theme folder and make changes there.

Conclusion