People ask me at times whether I talk about SEO ranking data with my clients and/or monitor it for them. In almost all cases I do monitor it, in some cases, we talk about them, in a lot of cases we don't, as it's just not that reliable of a metric. On the other hand, with Google hiding referral datamore and more, we'll need to track rankings to guesstimate some of our improvements. So let me show you what tools I use and how I use them.

Clicky (aff) has recently added what I call passive rank tracking to their already awesome analytics package. André wrote about stuff you can do with therank tracking in the Google referrer data over 2 years ago here on Yoast. About 2 years ago as well, I used this same referrer data to build a passive rank tracker, independent of Google Analytics, because I wanted to do things with that SEO ranking data that I couldn't do in Google.

The one metric I wanted most of all from that big blog of SEO ranking data is the average rank from referrers. You see, because of personalized search results, rankings are never the same and there's no "good" way of tracking the impact of personalized search. Now you have a semi decent average in Clicky though, so I like that.

Because Clicky has a pretty decent API too, you could use this to do all sorts of cool stuff. I use this kind of data in combination with Authority Labs and a new toolset in my arsenal, SEscout. Authority Labs shows me all sorts of info about universal search other tools don't give me, SEscout does hourly rankings when you have a paid account, which helps me track fluctuations in "the force" more easily.

SEO Ranking Data in Aggregate

Rankings for specific keywords are very often not that interesting for my clients, as outside of the clients for my website reviews, most of my SEO clients tend to think in tens or hundreds of thousands, if not millions of keywords, not one, two or ten. So for them I track rankings in aggregate, something you should probably do too if you track more than a couple of keywords. You can then answer questions like "how did we do on this keyword group", "how did we do on that keyword group". Authority Labs allows you to tag keywords which makes this kind of analysis even easier.

I then compare that aggregate number to the SearchMetrics data for their site and see how good that number is (usually they correlate very highly), after which I can see how well their competitors did using SearchMetrics as well.

The issue is with both Authority and SEscout: they don't give you the complete view because they don't do personalized search, which is good, because we want to know our "real" ranking, but it's also bad, because it might not always correlate well with our traffic. That's where the extra layer Clicky added comes in, which allows us to see just how much personalized search impacts those real rankings. For quite a few of my own keywords I can see that without personalized search, I'd get a lot less traffic, while for others it's completely the other way around.

Always correlate SEO ranking data with Analytics!

Of course, no ranking is worth anything if you can't correlate it to a decent amount of incoming traffic. Luckily, both the Google Analytics and Clicky API allow you to easily correlate the two and see where you have a chance of gaining more traffic.

One of my favorite ways of looking at sites SEO ranking data is looking at where they rank inbetween #5 and #10 that's already sending traffic. If a keyword you rank #8 for consistently sends you traffic, that's a keyword with enough traffic to optimize for and see if you can get into the top 5 or even the top 3.

And now, it's your turn! How and where do you use SEO ranking data? Share it in the comments!

Image credit: financial chart from Shutterstock.

And the long version:

All the sudden one evening the server that runs this site and one of my other sites, CSS-Tricks seemed to get very slow (I noticed while trying to save a draft of a post). I tried visiting the homepage and various other parts of the site and it either took a long time or just timed out completely. Always a heart-sinking time for me, as I know very little about servers and how to troubleshoot them.

When the server responded at all, serving up just the base document was by far the slowest thing:

These sites are hosted on a MediaTemple (dv) server¹. MediaTemple is known for responsive support and theoretically I’m on some kind of VIP program although I’m pretty sure I get the same level of support anybody else would. So of course I leaned on them for help. Even if the problem was outside of the scope of their support (likely since they don’t support the software you run, totally understandable) I thought if I pleaded hard enough they’d at least help me figure out the root cause.

I knew enough  to appear in Plesk (the server management tool that runs on my server) within the Virtuozzo part the place i can see "QoS alerts" (high quality of service). the biggest ordinary issue was "kmemsize" (server reminiscence), however pretty much everything was within the black.

In the end, it was ultimately me who figured it out, but Media Temple was quite helpful in that I got to speak with someone on the phone who was clearly quite knowledgeable and helped watch the server as I tried different things confirming what was working and what was not.

Diagnosing the problem

I made a quick HTML-only test page on the server and hit that. Assuming the server wasn’t in a completely dead state, that would come back fairly quickly. Then I made PHP page that just echo’d something out. That came back even faster. So it’s not just purely Apache, or server load, or PHP. Then I made PHP page that ran a fairly intense MySQL query. That came back fairly quickly as well. So it wasn’t MySQL being overloaded either. Then I made a WordPress template where all it did was get_header(). That page took forever to serve up. So I proved that the problem was related to WordPress (something particular to my WordPress setup).

The root of the problem

Turns out it was the permalink structure set up in WordPress for CSS-Tricks that was the problem. From day one, about four years now, it’s been /%postname%/. I really like how short and readable the URL’s are in that structure. A URL like http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/ is very clear about what that page is about, as well as great SEO for the search term “CSS Sprites”. But alas, having your post structure set up like that has serious performance implications.

I use W3 Total Cache for caching, and it’s worked great for a long time. One of the things that it does is database caching. It displays the results at the end of the page in HTML comments. With the permalink structure set to /%postname%/, the comment on the end of the page looked like this:

Twenty five hundred queries on one page? That ain’t right. If I changed the permalink structure to something else, like one of the default options like /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/, then flushed the cache and checked what W3 Total Cache was saying, it was this:

Even that turns out high but far more cheap.

So, database queries? WTF? Why (or even does) WordPress need the database involved with permalink structures? Andrew Nacin, a WordPress middle developer, was once super helpful in all this. He instructed me that queries aren't the issue and suggested me to make that transparent after publicly sharing these results. It really doesn’t make sense to me that the number of queries shoots way up under that permalink structure, but hey, I’m just reporting what I saw.

This is a very relevant part of The Codex:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that those are textual content fields, and the use of them in the beginning of your permalink structure it takes extra time for WordPress to differentiate your publish URLs from web page URLs (which always use the textual content "page slug" as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress shops a large number of additional information in its database (such a lot that websites with numerous web pages have skilled difficulties). So, it is best to have at least two path segments in your post’s permalink structure such as /%year%/%postname%/ or even /posts/%postname%/.

Emphasis mine.

So why the number of queries increased so dramatically? No idea. Does WordPress use the database to resolve URLs when you use just /%postname%/? Yes. And if you use one of their recommendations, does it remove the need to interact with the database at all? I also don’t know, but it’s certainly faster.

How did I even call to mind permalinks as a possible problem? i am not certain. I just wracked my brain trying to think about things it may be, and remembered that i've learn things here and there through the years that this has been an issue. a kind of articles used to be on "Otto on WordPress"which delves into this…

Starting with a text-based part instead of a number-based part, that’s the problem.

The problem comes in when you try to use a non-number for the beginning of your permalink string.

When WordPress is parsing the URL to figure out what to serve up, it truly wants to figure out if it's a put up or a web page. Pages at all times have the /%put upname%/ construction. you can't truly amendment that. So if you use any one of the crucial word-based permalink keywords (%category%, %tag%, %put upname%, or %creator%), which can theoretically be the rest, WordPress can't simply tell the difference between Posts and Pages.

Fairly obtrusive proper? Your posts structure is /%postname%/ and your pages structure is /%postname%/ %u2013 if you submit one in every of every and call them both "touch", how does it tell them apart? thankfully WordPress is sensible enough not to mean you can choose the same slug for both, but it still proves problematic for URL parsing.

So if you’ve chosen to begin your URL structure with one of the text-based options, WordPress triggers a flag called use_verbose_page_rules which literally creates a rulefor every single page that you have. So instead of a rather concise set of rewrite rules (maybe 10) now you have a very thick set of rewrite rules (10 + # of pages you have). I have 550 pages or so on CSS-Tricks, so this is clearly problematic. Andrew Nacin guesses performance issues seep in around 50-100 pages. Not only do these new rewrite rules need to be read through on every single page request, the need to be recreated every time you create new content. Both very slow processes.

If you use anything numeric to start your permalink structure (or even a static word like “/posts/”), the rewrite rules can remain compact, and verbose rules do not need to be used.

some might say, good day, simply use the yr or the yr and month! that is cool, go for it. i love that for probably the most section. some people feel tremendous strongly that having the date in the URL is vital since it provides people information about when the item was once revealed. I don't feel that strongly. i feel that data is vital however it's more necessary it's visible at the page itself. SEO professional (no longer kidding, he's the one) Joost De Valk told me dates in the URL’s can kill clickthrough rates on Search Engine Results Pages since the content can look old before they even see it.

Personally, I’ve opted to start my URL’s with /%post_id%/ then also use /%postname%/. It looks a little weird maybe, but I don’t overly mind it. Performance is more important to me.

What can WordPress (the project) do?

I’d vote that on the Settings page for permalinks, it should at least have a sentence like “It is not recommended that you begin your permalink structure with /%category%, %tag%, %postname%, or %author% for performance reasons.”

What about me?! I use /%postname%/. What should I do?

The factor to consider is what number of pages you have now, and what number of pages it's possible you'll ever have. in case you are pretty certain you'll be able to have only a few, like underneath 20 pages EVER. Then whatever, i believe you are probably wonderful with that structure. in the event you assume you'll have more than that, I think you ought to change now before it becomes a problem. Consider one of the date based structures or starting with the %post_id%.

What about SEO?

This one had me sweating. There are a lot of links out there to CSS-Tricks. I don’t want to lose traffic. That site is decent part of my income. Now all of those incoming links are wrong. That can’t be good for SEO!

Well because it seems, it's really not that massive of a deal. there's a plugin in the market that redirects all antique posts to the brand new posts. don't use that! You don't want it. WordPress automatically handles the 301 redirects from the antique structure to the brand new structure. 301 redirects are what Google needs to find out about your new structure and replace itself and keep your ranks. it's been five days due to the fact that my new transition, and even after a little snafu where I left it on a date-based construction while testing a little too long and Google picked it up, I’m right back where I was before and Google is showing my new structure just fine.

¹ Media Temple (dv) Dedicated-Virtual 3.5 – Extreme w/ additional 256MB memory upgrade.

WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview that helps you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

NOTE: this plugin is still in beta. While you can download it, there are absolutely no guarantees and you should back up before you use it.

There's a full feature list for the base plugin below. If you want, you can also read more about the add-on modules that are being developed for this plugin. Currently there's three of them: News SEO, Video SEO and Local SEO. The latter two are paid add-on modules, developed by Yoast with the help of subject matter experts. For a small amount you can boost your blog in the specific area's where you need it!

WordPress SEO Plugin feature list

Check out the feature list:

1. Post titles and meta descriptions
2. Robots Meta configuration
3. Canonical
4. Breadcrumbs
5. Permalink clean up
6. XML Sitemaps
7. RSS enhancements
8. Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
9. Clean up head section

Post titles and meta descriptions

WordPress SEO let's you set templates for titles and meta descriptions for all types of pages, so you could come up with a template and not have to think about it, or you could use the WordPress SEO meta box to completely optimize your post title and meta description, using the snippet preview functionality to see what it would look like in Google. Add to that the chance to enter a focus keyword, which is used to show you how it would bold in your search results, and you have the chance to control everything you want about your listing in Google:

WordPress SEO plugin meta box with snippet preview

As you can see, the plugin automatically tests the important area's of your content for usage of the focus keyword, so you can truly optimize your page for the term you need.

Robots Meta configuration

Whether you want to keep a single post or page out of the index, or you prefer to keep entire sections of your site unfindable: the WordPress SEO plugin has your back. Hidden by default under the "advanced" button is a meta robots settings block that allows you to choose any setting you want on a per page basis:

WordPress SEO plugin meta box - advanced tab

But you could also choose to noindex a certain category, tag or custom taxonomy (or give it a unique title and meta description):

Category noindex or Title and Meta Description

This works for all tags, categories and custom taxonomies. As you can see there are two other yet unexplained features there, canonical and breadcrumbs. Let's touch on those:

Canonical

When Google introduced the canonical link element, to distinguish the "original" page from derivative pages within your site carrying the same content, they reached out to me to develop a WordPress plugin for it, and I did. Later on, canonical link elements were added to core. They work fine, with one caveat: they only work for single posts and pages, not for categories and tags, not for the homepage. The WordPress SEO plugin fixes that, and sets the correct canonical on each of those pages.

Breadcrumbs

The Yoast Breadcrumbs code has been powering many (premium) themes breadcrumbs for ages. Using the same code, the WordPress SEO plugin now gives way more granular control over this breadcrumb. You get to determine, for each post type, which taxonomy to show. You get to determine for each post, page and taxonomy, what title to use for that specific entity in the breadcrumb paths it appears in. Full control, that's what this entire WordPress SEO plugin is about.

Permalink clean up

Don't you hate it when someone adds /2 to the end of a link towards you? Or links with all weird variables at the end of the URL? You have a solution now! Just checking one box will redirect all that stuff away, and make sure that your content is always found under the URL you want it to be found under. If you use a Google Custom search engine, checking another box will prevent that from breaking down while using this function.

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are an essential part of current day SEO, and can thus not be excluded from a complete WordPress SEO plugin. While there are other WordPress XML Sitemap Generators out there, they don't talk to your SEO plugin. Meaning that if you noindex a page, preventing it from showing up in Google, it might still be in your sitemap. They also don't allow you to keep certain taxonomies out of your sitemap. This plugin does. And, to boot, it makes your XML Sitemaps look good by using an XSLT stylesheet on them, so humans can read them too.

RSS enhancements

My RSS Footer plugin used to allow you to add a piece of content to the beginning or the end of posts in your RSS feed. The WordPress SEO plugin goes one step further and allows you to add content to both of them, allowing you to link back to your blog and the specific blog post, which is very helpful when you have a lot of people scraping your blog.

Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess

modifying your robots.txt and .htaccess files hasn't ever been this straightforward: you'll be able to edit them immediately from the files menu of the WordPress search engine optimization plugin, so you'll be able to easily test and or update those files and keep it all great and clean.

Clean up head section

With latest releases, WordPress has brought an increasing number of bloat to the component of WordPress installs. happily it additionally has strategies to remove the ones. Checking a couple of boxes within the backend will make certain your weblog does not provide out any of its secrets.

1. Create keyword rich post titles.

It's important to note that you don't just want to write posts for your regular readers because you want to attract many new readers as well. So to do this you want to write post titles that contain the keywords relating to the content that you have just written.

2. Create a strong permalink structure.

it's open to discuss which permalink construction is the most efficient for search engine optimization purposes, but whichever one you select you should use one which contains the identify of the post throughout the URL. it's no excellent creating key phrase wealthy identifys if they do not actually show up within the URL for that individual post, so this is an absolute should.

3. Install the All-In-One SEO plugin.

There are a few SEO plugins that all do pretty much the same thing but this is the one I personally use. It basically enables you to create fully optimized blog posts. You can list keywords and tags for each post and you can also arrange the title and meta descriptions for every one of your posts. Plus you can also 'nofollow' certain pages on your blog so overall it's a very useful plugin.

4. Install the Google Sitemaps plugin.

this is another plugin that i recommend the use of for your entire WordPress weblogs. It basically allows you to routinely submit your pages to Google each time you create new posts in your weblog. so you subsequently understand that Google will always be indexing your website.

5. Build lots of backlinks.

Finally you should of course create lots of backlinks to your site. This is arguably the most important point because you need lots of backlinks to compete for the more popular keywords. If you can combine both onpage and offpage SEO techniques then you should have a very popular blog on your hands.

If you need more information on having succes at SEO, I can recommend the SEO Business Startup Kit. It is a 217 page eBook on "how to" successfully perform SEO, including 80 ready made contract and document templates.

WordPress is, without question, the most powerful tool for achieving high levels of exposure, and top search rankings in Google's search results (the ultimate goal and purpose of SEO).

Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, has even stated that WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the technical SEO elements automatically!

That's a strong statement coming from Matt Cutts, and if he is willing to put his name, and Google's, on the line with a statement like that, then I'm willing to believe that WordPress is a powerful SEO tool.

More than just hearing people say that WordPress is a powerful tool, I've actually experienced it with many of my own, and my client's, WordPress blogs.

I've seen WordPress blogs get crawled, indexed, and up to a PageRank of 3 within 4 weeks, and I've seen new postings from WordPress blogs achieve #1 rankings in Google within hours!

Hey, why use a WordPress blog for SEO marketing anyway?

That's a great question! Let me give you 2 reasons why a blog, be it WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, or whatever, is your quickest path to top search engine rankings.

1) Blogs build page inventory in Google. Each blog posting is actually a new page that is crawled and indexed in Google search results. So, the cumulative effect of writing a lot of content is that you are continually building an inventory of pages that are accessible in Google for a wide range of keyword phrases.

2) Google loves freshly updated content. Google's set of rules is converting from the days of antique! It used to be the place it is advisable to just build a static html web site, stuff key phrases during the title, description, and keyword tags in the code, and you'd be capable to rank for those phrases.

Well things have changed!

Google has gotten so much smarter approximately how other people attribute authority to web pages, and approximately how black hat search engine optimization's try to game the algorithms.

So Google has turned to favoring sites that feed a continual flow of freshly udpated content - something that is impossible to achieve with a static html website (non-blog site).

If individuals are finding your content, bookmarking your website, subscribing in your RSS feed, and coming again for more, then that means folks may also be linking in your content. The more visitors, subscribers and links you could have, the more PageRank will probably be attributed in your website. The more PageRank your website has, the upper it's going to rank in Google, the more often your website will probably be crawled, an the deeper the ones crawls will probably be - all of which provides more PageRank in your blog.

To satisfy Google's insatiable hunger for fresh content material, you have to feed Google with freshly updated blog posts. In go back on your giving, Google will give again with PageRank and authority. it's if truth be told a super courting!

Why WordPress?

As I discussed earlier, simply having Matt Cutts advertise WordPress as the most productive search engine marketing instrument is sufficient for me! past that, WordPress is a really perfect clean CMS (content material control system), that WordPress SEO Tips Part I - Intro to WordPress SEO StrategiesGoogle finds simple to move slowly and who is coding is easily established.

Also, some other reasons why WordPress is such a powerful SEO tool, and I'll be covering these in more detail in later parts, is that:

1) WordPress allows super efficient keyword optimization of posts

2) SEO plugins help you optimize your overall blog

3) You can control / custom URL structures

4) Permalinks ensure keywords are present in URL

5) Customization of tags and categories

6) Eliminate / control duplicate content issues

These are just a few of the many SEO advantages that WordPress delivers.

If you need more information on having succes at SEO, I can recommend the SEO Business Startup Kit. It is a 217 page eBook on "how to" successfully perform SEO, including 80 ready made contract and document templates.

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