Finding a good wordpress web developer for SEO fixes
-
I have gotten a good audit done of my site now it is time to get the fixes done.
I have a developer I worked with for a long time that is good at coding and fixes on my site. However I am not confident in his abilities to execute some of the seo changes that need to be done.
Their are some common stuff he can tackle but when it comes to GWT and proper handling of 404's and 301's and other seo tasks I am not sure if he is the right choice.Maybe due to a lack of experience of dealing with the issues I have or is just not his specialty or web devs just don't know seo...lol....
Is obvious a lot of SEO's don't make the changes themselves but leave it up to the devs to handle it their suggestions and fixes. But from my experience devs are not so well versed in seo and you have a hard time knowing if they are doing it correct or can even do it.(of course they will say they can they want your cash and i understand that ). In particular a good amount of wordpress devs claim to know seo but i find that far from the truth.Even when guided to issues some of them will often leave you disappointed.
Sorry for my rant!
Now to my question , obviously not many SEO's make the actual code changes themselves (how i wish i knew a one that did) are their ones out their that do?
If not how do i find a good wordpress dev that can make proper seo changes and knows his stuff....example i need someone who can trouble shoot and track down some serious GWT I have and deal with some hardcore 404 & 301 issues . A lot claim to know but when push comes to shove I have been left disappointed.
Thanks in advance for your help and suggestions or recommendations.
-
Hi Chris
I don't know who did the audit obviously, but just speaking from how I do it when I do an audit. I think the SEO should be willing to do a quick follow up review to see everything has been done correctly OR at least answer a few questions the dev might have.
You're right, most developers aren't going to understand everything as in depth, so that's why SEOs and Devs need to work together to get things done!
So I'd ask the SEO if they'd be able to help see it's done correctly. I would expect of course to pay for that short amount of time if it wasn't agreed upon before
-Dan
-
Thanks for the reply kyle
I use all in one seo currently but would like to try yoast, I will have to put it on my todo list for sure.
404 redirected is a great tool but we have a extensive 404 issue and requires a more investigating to solve the issue than 404 redirected can solve, how ever we will be using that plugin for future issues.
-
Hi Chris,
Wordpress is a terrific platform for making SEO changes even if you're not code savvy. Instead of interfacing with the source code, Wordpress has several plugins that you can install which provide a clean interface for you to edit your material with and make those SEO changes.
For an all-in-one SEO solution in Wordpress I'd highly recommend installing Yoast's SEO plugin. You can change anything from the breadcrumb markup to meta descriptions to XML sitemaps and more within this one plugin.
You mentioned that you have some redirect issues as well. For this I am currently using 404 Redirected. 404 Redirected will alert you about any new problems and allow you to set up and manage your redirects really easily.
I hope that helps,
K
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Has anyone transferred a site from WordPress to Webflow?
We're thinking about making the move, but I'm (mildly) concerned about SEO implications.
Web Design | | lauraballer0 -
Ability to Transition Completed Wordpress Website to New Coder/Developer
We have worked with the same Wordpress developer since 2012. They recently redesigned our Wordpress site. We purchased a real estate theme and they performed major modifications to it. The project took 8 months. There are many customized widgets and multiple plugins. We hired a new SEO. The SEO is very comfortable coding. The SEO performed certain modifications and the code broke. The original developer stepped in and and helped restore the code. The SEO stated that the site should not be so delicate; that too many plugins and widgets are used making it inherently unstable. The original developer is claiming that the SEO did not follow best practices (they did not use a dev server to test). For a non technical business owner this is very disturbing. We finally agreed that the new SEO would make changes on a dev server and the original developer will check these changes to ensure they do not break the code. My question is, shouldn't a Wordpress site be simple enough to hand over to a decent coder with little risk of breaking the code? Are there any standards regarding the hand over of a site? I am comfortable with my developers, but what if they change professions or close their company? How would I transition the site? There must be standards and protocols that allow a third party, such as an SEO to change code without causing havoc. Any one have some insight?
Web Design | | Kingalan11 -
Migration from HTML to Wordpress - SEO Implications?
I am in the process of having a wordpress site developed to replace my current HTML site. (I currently have my website in html and a blog in wordpress in a sub directory). I am doing this in phases to try and preserve as much of my good rankings as possible. My first phase is to replicate my site with the exact same pages, meta data, and site structure. I'm hoping that google will see this as not much change and not change my rankings for the worse. I also made it a goal that my site speed tests be at least equal to what they are now. We will have to 301 all of the URLs however since it will be going from /example.html to /example. I believe my blog will also need to move into the root directory as well, so I need to 301 all of those pages. I plan to wait a couple months for Phase 2. Phase 2 involves replacing old content (photo galleries), and introducing new content (virtual tours, videos, new pages, etc.) One of my reasons for moving to wordpress is to keep up with current trends a little easier since I have very little time. (I am owner, website maintainer, SEO - all on my own). My question here is three parts. 1. Do you think this strategy will work to preserve my current rankings? 2. Do you have any lessons learned or advice to share with me to make this as smooth as possible? 3. Do I really need to wait to add new content? I might get antsy and want to do it sooner! 🙂 Thank you in advance!
Web Design | | CalicoKitty20001 -
Should our Wordpress blog have the same theme as Magento store?
We installed the Magento 'Aheadworks' extension for our blog but it's quite limited as to what blogging capabilities it has. We are now considering integrating Wordpress for our new blog, but keeping both on the same domain to increase the domain authority. My question is, should we keep the same theme throughout? The blog should be informative and not sales based, so we was thinking of ditching the whole theme for the blog and not having our category navigation bar. Yes we can still have internal linking which may drive traffic from the blog to the web store. We have been recommended the Wordpress Integration by Fishpig but I understand this carries through the Magento theme so I'm not sure exactly how it works. Could Wordpress plugins cause issues with our Magento store or shouldn't we be worried about this?
Web Design | | Jseddon920 -
/index.php/ What is its purpose and does it hurt SEO?
Hello Moz Forum, I am still in the process of cleaning up the lack of attention to detail and betrayal set by our soon to be ex-SEO company. You can see a previous question I ask regarding betrayal SEO. I am analyzing every page on our website and i am noticing this /index.php/ in most of our URLs. We want to leave our expression engine cms and convert to wordpress. I have been reading about index.php but most of it is over my head for now. What does concern me is the "layman's" findings i am seeing through analytics. Our main domain has two URLs. one that ends in .com and the other ends in .com/index.php/ The one that ends in .com has a higher page rank than the ladder. And there are other internal pages with the same two variations. Can someone please explain to me what is /index.php/ ? what are the benefits of it? what are the cons? What will happen to my site once we move to wordpress? As always, your comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | CamiloSC0 -
Does Using Magento With Multi Sites Affect SEO
We have a client who has 3 separate websites targeting the US, Australia, and the UK. Each of them has relevant ccTLD's such as: .com .com.au and .co.uk. Our client wants to use the Magento multi-site function so it combines all the stores (which are the exact same products) and merge it into one through Magento. These sites are all hosted in the US and had nothing to do with me haha! I understand Rand has mentioned on a video it would be best having the websites with ccTLD's hosted in that country (if budget permits), however in this case the budget doesn't permit us to go down that road. Has anyone any advice on this matter, has anyone did this before and had a lot of success with the SEO? At present there doesn't seem to be a lot of information about it and opinions are varied and sometimes divided. Any help would be very much appreciated guys Thanks, Matt
Web Design | | HigherthanSEO0 -
Is my company's privacy policy diluting our SEO efforts?
Good morning! I'm new to the SEOmoz community. This morning, I spot checked a couple pages using the Term Extractor. When looking at the results, I noticed that we're ranking for many of the terms contained in our privacy policy. Our privacy policy is set up in the footer of our page templates and appears as a light box that pops up over the page you're viewing, so it looks like every page (from a search engines perspective) contains every word of our 900-word privacy policy. Since several of our legal terms are showing up as "targeted terms" within the tool, would it benefit me to change the privacy policy link from a light box to something else? Perhaps a link to a static page that contains our privacy policy instead? Are the search engines smart enough to see the repeating text and ignore it from page to page, or am I just diluting all of my SEO efforts here? I'm after big wins here, and don't want to be too nitpicky, but concerned this could be a big SEO no-no that I might want to correct. Thanks in advance for your expertise! Ben Culbert
Web Design | | SheriGolla0 -
Ecommerce web site with too many internal links
Hi, We're using Magento CE 1.4.0.1 for our ecommerce web site with a fairly flat navigation system i.e. 9 major categories display across the top menu that when you roll over display 2-20 sub categories (which take you to a groups of similar products) and then individual product pages. The categories and sub categories are available to click on as part of a dynamic Html menu system on each page. Each page also shows a small number of related products. This linking structure seems fairly standard and yet Seomoz throws up the error message, "Too Many On-page links" for most pages on our site. Do I need to really worry about this? Is there much can be done to improve this on an ecommerce web site with a large catalogue of products? I've looked at the Knowledge Base but I don't feel the existing responses adequately address the issue for ecommerce sites.
Web Design | | languedoc0