The Marketing team promotes WordPress to current and future users and contributors. We create and amplify campaigns to support the growth of the WordPress project.
Our work is tracked on the Marketing Tasks Board on the WordPress organization’s GitHub. If you are planning a Marketing Table at a Contributor Event, please let us know in the Slack channel.
You can be part of the #marketing channel on Slack. Join our next Weekly Marketing Chat at: Tuesday 15:00 UTC.
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The Marketing Team’s recommended SEO Standards for internal WordPress posts and pages factors in key criteria to optimize results for Google SERPs and Facebook’s Open Graph data. This standard is for on page, off page, and best practices for both content marketing and findability.
All pages and posts should have a unique featured imageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. that is sized for Open Graph best practices (1200 x 628). In addition, the site should have a set image as its default.
To comply with web accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) guidelines and SEO best practices, all images should make use of an appropriate alt tag. The alt tag should describe what is in the image for screen readers.
Each post or page should have a minimum word count of 300. If possible, and to maintain consistent tone and messaging, longer word counts are preferred. The opening paragraph should contain the primary keyword, though other related keywords and keyword phrases can and should be used throughout the copy.
Primary keyword should be included in the first half of the page title and the title length should be under 60 characters. Titles over 60 characters can be subject to rewrite by search engines and/or truncated.
The page should aim for a 5th – 8th grade readability score and should be persuasive not passive. Please avoid excessive jargon and repeated phrasing, but the use of industry terms to maintain consistency in messaging is acceptable. Yoast SEO and Hemingwayapp.com have readability tools for reference.
Most search engines consider the HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. heading tag (h1) as the main heading of the web page. SEO best practices recommend that there should be only 1 h1 tag on each web page as using more than one h1 TagTag Tag is one of the pre-defined taxonomies in WordPress. Users can add tags to their WordPress posts along with categories. However, while a category may cover a broad range of topics, tags are smaller in scope and focused to specific topics. Think of them as keywords used for topics discussed in a particular post. can confuse search engine crawlers.
The h1 tag must be correlated to the Title of that page and use the primary keyword. The h1 tag should focus on the intent of why the user should access the page. H1 tags should only be used for the Title and should never be used in the body of the copy. Secondary keywords and phrases may be added as well, provided they flow naturally.
H1 tag length should be from 20-70 characters (about one sentence).
Include h2-h6 subheads in copy and verify that title is h1. H2-h6 tags should utilize primary and secondary keywords, as appropriate. They shouldn’t be used to enlarge text, rather to provide a logical outline to the body copy.
As of December 2017, Google confirmed that they are now showing the first 320 characters of a metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. description in search engine result pages (SERPs). It’s still recommended to use a length of 155 characters in a meta description as Open Graph data is shown on social networks as the shorter length.
Meta descriptions should be under 155 characters, be descriptive enough to engage users, and include a CTA (call to action).
Linking to additional pages within the site will help create a path (think behavior flow) throughout the web property and it is important to ensure the anchor text for the link is descriptive and on-topic.
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