{"id":3803,"date":"2019-01-07T13:41:13","date_gmt":"2019-01-07T13:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shortpixel.com/blog\/?p=3803"},"modified":"2019-01-07T13:44:52","modified_gmt":"2019-01-07T13:44:52","slug":"the-1-seo-win-you-can-get-right-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shortpixel.com\/blog\/the-1-seo-win-you-can-get-right-now\/","title":{"rendered":"The #1 SEO Win You Can Get Right Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>When it comes to SEO, things can get daunting pretty quickly. I mean, there is so much to it. Technical setup, on page SEO, links, anchor text, relevance, intent, LSI keywords – and that\u2019s just the beginning.<\/p>\n

So, if I were to appear as a guest on this blog, and try to give you one<\/u> thing you can implement right now on your site, to get an immediate lasting SEO boost, what would that be?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And who am I, anyway?<\/p>\n

My name is Alejandro Meyerhans and I manage over 20 money sites built mostly on organic traffic. I work for HumanProofDesigns.com<\/u><\/a>, a digital marketing agency specialized in affiliate marketing, that provides SEO services as well as building affiliate sites for other people<\/u><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

And there is one first thing we do for any new SEO client or when we buy a website or partner with someone. It\u2019s not analyzing the content to see if there\u2019s cannibalization<\/em>. It\u2019s not building links or publishing more content. It\u2019s much simpler than that and it matters a lot more. After this step we do everything else.<\/p>\n

We make their sites <\/b>fast<\/b><\/u>. <\/b><\/p>\n

I bet you know where I\u2019m going right now. The number one thing you can do to improve your performance on Google today is making your site fast.<\/p>\n

And as you continue to read, I\u2019m going to explain the easiest, most effective way to do this. I want to give you something that hopefully takes less than an hour of work, even if you barely understand WordPress. You can implement this as soon as you finish reading this material. Let\u2019s start with this 3-step process:<\/p>\n

1. Audit your plugins<\/h4>\n

I\u2019m always surprised when I log in for the first time on a new site, be it a partner\u2019s, a client\u2019s or an acquired website, and see it has dozens and dozens of plugins installed. Half of them inactive, the other half redundant.<\/p>\n

Plugins are nice, they give your site fancy functions. Social media sharing buttons, exit intent popups, heatmaps – whatever it is you want to do, there is a plugin you can use for it.<\/p>\n

But do you need all those features? Do you need two different plugins for analytics, two to insert custom header codes (when you can do that in many other ways), three plugins to \u201cOptimize speed\u201d that aren\u2019t properly configured, one plugin for YouTube? \u2013 seriously, it\u2019s not 2011, just embed the thing.<\/p>\n

Now, don\u2019t fret if that\u2019s you. There is a way you can sort through all of these.<\/p>\n

Make a list of every single plugin in your site (active or not) and write by its side what you do with it. Then do a bad cop exercise and ask each plugin the following questions:<\/p>\n

1. What do I use you for?
\n2. Is there a lighter plugin I can use for the same purpose?
\n3. Is there a more up-to-date plugin I can use for the same purpose?
\n4. Do I need your function for my site or am I using you because \u201cit looks nice\u201d?
\n5. Do you come with countless bells and whistles I\u2019m not actually using?<\/p>\n

Typical examples that will fail the above interrogation are Jetpack (has a million functions, most of them useless, it\u2019s super heavy, can be replaced in a million better ways), W3TC (it\u2019s super-outdated, hard to configure, and doesn\u2019t work nearly as good as other cache solutions. See step #3 to find out what I recommend instead) and most social share plugins<\/u> (like Sumo.me, which comes with a bajillion things people don\u2019t use).<\/p>\n

I only recommend three plugins for that:<\/p>\n

– Social warfare
\n– Sassy social share
\n– Monarch (paid)<\/p>\n

Now you can start cleaning up!<\/p>\n

2. Optimize your images<\/h4>\n

Once we\u2019ve gotten rid of all those extra plugins that slow us down and potentially crash each other, it\u2019s time to tackle the second heaviest contender of the day \u2013 images.<\/p>\n

And again, another field where I\u2019m surprised all the time. I see people uploading 2000x1400px PNG images for a two-column layout on WordPress and that stuff renders like a website from 2001.<\/p>\n