WP Engine Cyber Weekend Special – Get 30% Off

It's that time of the year for awesome holiday specials! Here at WP Engine, we've got a great Cyber Weekend deal for you.

This holiday break, receive 30% off your first payment with WP Engine. That's five months of free hosting on any annual subscription! (The coupon is applied on top of the standard two months free discount when the annual plan is selected.)

The deal lasts from Thursday, November 24, 2016, through Monday, November 28, 2016. Apply the coupon code cyberwknd to receive the 30% off special.

Find the plan that fits your needs

Restrictions: Offer valid for new customers purchasing any Personal, Professional, or Business plan. Not valid for existing customers, upgrades, or any other product purchase.

The post WP Engine Cyber Weekend Special – Get 30% Off appeared first on WP Engine.

How I Built a Kick-Ass WordPress Theme With Upfront Builder (And Why I'm Freaking Out)

I am a photographer, a videographer, a designer, a writer, a marketer. I am not a developer… and I'm freaking out because I just finished building a WordPress theme from scratch – without writing a single line of code – with Upfront Builder.

Most people I know have no clue what it is that I actually do. They know it has something to do with websites, so I get asked to “develop” websites for family, friends, small businesses and nonprofit organizations all the time.

After about 15 minutes trying to explain that I am more of a WordPress implementor than a developer, I get nods that say “I have no clue what you're talking about” followed by “So you can build me a site, right? Great!”

So it goes without saying that I've used just about every WordPress page builder and WordPress theme framework out there to create websites for needy entrepreneurs and great organizations looking to spread a message about a worthy cause. For my latest creation, I found myself diving head-first into Upfront with Builder and I can honestly say Upfront Builder needs a whole new WordPress theme category of its own.

Check out my site! It looks pro, right? Upfront makes it easy to add videos, contact forms and other elements from the drag-and-drop front end visual editor.

Upfront Builder Is One-Of-A-Kind

I know what you're thinking: every time a WordPress page builder or WordPress theme framework gets an update it's “revolutionary,” “a game changer” and “WordPress will never be the same again!” In great anticipation, we install whatever new earth shattering innovation we've stumbled upon and to our dismay we discover it's just another take on front-end drag-and-drop customization for WordPress themes. Maybe a pretty new UI. Maybe a more intuitive user experience. But almost every WordPress theme framework lets you do some form of front-end customization now.

We could get into a spitting match over who did it first and best, but WYSIWYG customization is already here to stay and the competitive space is just making visual WordPress theme customizers faster, better and easier to use.

As for Upfront, we are thankful for the role it has played in driving WordPress front-end theming forward, but the truth is Upfront was never meant to be a WordPress theme customizer – it was built to be something completely different.

Top 20 Real Estate Themes to Build Your Business With

Are you running a real estate business? Would you like to make it more profitable? We know a simple solution to expand your product market. You need a quality, good-looking, user-friendly website to advertise your company on the Internet. In this post you'll find a showcase of amazing real estate themes you can easily build your online presentation on.

16 Tools to Create Better Images for Your Blog Posts

Do you want to create better images for your blog posts? Images create a huge impact on how users engage with your content. However, most users are not designers and are unable to create professional looking images for their blogs. In this article, we will show you some of the best tools to create better images for your blog posts.

Why Create Better Images for Blog Posts?

Images are highly engaging. They communicate ideas and invoke emotions.

They help you get more likes, shares, and traffic from social media. Users visiting your site spend more time and view more posts. Images can even help you get more comments on your posts.

Now the problem is that most bloggers are not graphic designers. They cannot create professional looking graphics for their websites.

Part of this problem can be solved by using public domain or CC0-Licensed images images. However, you may still need to edit those images.

Luckily, there are several online tools that allow you to edit and create beautiful images for different scenarios including blog posts, infographics, presentations, and even Facebook posts.

Let's take a look at some of the best tools to create better images for your blog posts.

1. Visage

Visage is one of the easiest and most powerful tools to manage visuals for your blog. It allows you to create and design professional looking graphics for your blog posts, Facebook pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

It comes with tons of professionally designed templates to start with.

You can also save your brand's logo and other assets and use them into your visuals. You can save, export, and share your graphics. Visage is great for individuals and teams.

2. Canva

Canva is another popular choice among bloggers. It allows you to create all kind of graphics with easy to use drag and drop tools.

It comes with professional looking templates that you can use as a starting point. You can also purchase stock images, icons, and other resources directly from the app.

3. Pablo by Buffer

Pablo by Buffer is a simple image editor. It comes with a beautiful interface that allows you to search for free stock images, choose a template, and then add your own text and icons to it.

4. Piktochart

Piktochart is an easy to use infographic maker for everyone. It comes with tons of professionally designed templates for infographics, presentations, posters, and reports.

You can add your own charts and graphs, maps, icons, photos, and even videos. There are plenty of free images, icons, illustrations that you can use into your project.

5. infogr.am

Infogr.am is an infographic and presentation maker for data driven projects. You can connect your Google Sheets, Dropbox files, or a JSON file to the live charts. Add your own site logo and create stunningly gorgeous presentations.

6. Ribbet

Ribbet is a very efficient photo editor for the web. It allows you to retouch your photos, adjust brightness, contrast, exposure, etc. You can also add text, stickers, borders, icons.

Ribbet also makes it easy to create collages from your photographs. You can save your work in Ribbet or download it. You can also export it to Google Drive, Flickr, and Facebook.

7. QuotesCover.com

A nice quote can brighten someone's day. QuotesCover helps you share beautiful quotes with gorgeous designs, beautiful typography and visual effects.

You can upload your own images, then use the app's built-in tool to adjust colors, contrast, effects, etc.

Also check out our guide on how to how to show random quotes in WordPress sidebar.

8. Pixlr

Pixlr is a photo editor app. It looks and acts like Photoshop and other image editing tools. However, it is much simpler and easier to use.

9. Pictaculous

Ever wondered what colors will look best with a particular image? Pictaculous helps you figure this out. Simply upload an image and Pictaculous will show you color suggestions. You can also download the colors as an Adobe swatch file.

Pictaculous can also help you choose a color scheme for your WordPress site.

10. Venngage

Venngage is a beautiful infographic maker for non-designers. It comes with templates, fonts, icons, maps, and an intuitive user interface. One downside is that their free plan includes Venngage branding into your infographics.

11. easel.ly

easl.ly is an another infographic maker for the web. It comes with a simple user interface with drag and drop builder to create your infographic. The basic free version is good enough for most common usage scenarios.

12. Fotor

Fotor is a powerful visuals and image editor for non-designers. It allows you to create beautiful collages, images for blog posts, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. It is extremely easy to use even for non-techy users.

13. PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a powerful image editing tool. It allows you to design and create graphics, retouch photos, edit images, etc. PicMonkey offers a 7-day free trial after which pricing starts from $3.33 per month billed annually.

14. Placeit

Placeit allows you to place screenshots of your website, app, or anything, into mockups of devices. You can place a screenshot in a photo of iPhone, some tablet, or a macbook. They have tonns of photos and mockups to choose from.

15. Snapseed

Google's Snapseed is a powerful photo editor currently available on mobile devices only. It allows you to edit photos on your mobile devices using an easy to use interface.

16. Awesome Screenshot

Awesome Screenshot is an app to capture and edit screenshots. You can install it into your browser and take screenshots of any webpage instantly.

The best part is that after capturing the screenshot you can edit it. Annotate your screenshot, add pointers and arrows, and save or share it directly from your browser.

We hope this article helped you find some great tools to create better images for your WordPress blog posts. You may also want to see our guide on how to fix common image issues in WordPress

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 16 Tools to Create Better Images for Your Blog Posts appeared first on WPBeginner.

9 Ways to Protect Your WordPress Blog's Images from Theft

When the original U.S. Copyright Act was established in 1790, it was the government's goal to protect authors' rights to their work. Fast forward to the present day, and it's no longer just writers, composers, and artists whose work needs protecting: so too does the work found on websites.

I could probably write whole chapters on this topic of intellectual property, copyright protection, and infringement, but today I want to focus on what you need to do to protect your blog's images.

A Short Primer on Website Image Copyright

Images are a particularly vulnerable part of your site. They're easy to copy and, consequently, steal through right-clicking, screenshotting, Google searching, and site scraping. While it would be great to know that no one is going to steal your images, it's more realistic to hope no one steals them but to expect it may happen anyway.

Before we begin, it's important to understand a few things about copyright protection as it pertains to your blog's images.

• For starters, the creator of the images owns the sole right to copy and use them. If someone else commissioned the creation of those images (typically, an employer), then they own the rights.


• Secondly, there are some cases where it is legally acceptable for others to use your images. This is known as Fair Use.


• And finally, you may actually want to encourage others to take and use your images. In this case, you still own the rights to them but are allowing others to license the rights to their use. (There are instructions on that below.)

Now, if you have image content of value on your website, you've got to be ready to deal with infringement. Image theft sometimes occurs because people are unaware of copyright law and don't understand that it's illegal and unethical to use someone else's photos without permission. Other times, there are people who intentionally scrape websites with the purpose of stealing someone else's photos.

Regardless of how or why your work has been infringed, it's up to you and only you to protect it.

Copyright Protecting Your Website's Images

Luckily for you, it's quite easy to equip your site with a number of notices, tools, and watermarks as a barrier against infringement. While these tricks are not 100% foolproof, they will at least help discourage some people from stealing your images.

1. Add a Copyright Notice

Copyright protection is inherent. Once you've created your images, the right to copy, use, and sell them is yours. That being said, it's still important to have a notice in place that establishes your ownership over the content found on the website (this encapsulates all content on the website and not just the images).

To create a copyright notice, you need three elements:

1. The copyright symbol ©.


2. The owner's name (that may be the company, the artist, or someone else).


3. The year that the work was created.

Then you can use the Footer Putter plugin to add the notice to the footer of your website so automatically it appears on every page.

Easily add a footer to your site that boosts your credibility with both search engines and your visitors.

2. Add a Terms of Use Statement

The Terms of Use page is where you can define a number of things:

• Your total ownership over the images (and other content) on the website.


• Your offering of licensing privileges to anyone who wants to use your images.


• Your rules for licensing, including attribution and pricing.

Rather than write a Terms of Use page on your own, use the Auto Terms of Service plugin to generate the page for you. You can define what you want the Creative Commons license to include as well (if you want to offer licensing privileges).

3. Disable Right-Clicking

There are a variety of ways people can get a copy of your site's images. Disabling the right-click functionality is a good place to start, and will also help protect all the other content from being copied and used elsewhere.

The WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click plugin is the one you'll want to use to disable this functionality.

Disable right-clicking on your site with the WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click plugin.

4. Disable Hotlinking

If you haven't heard of hotlinking before, it's the process by which someone displays your image on their website by linking to it (and not by grabbing a copy of the file). Because they're loading the image from your server and not storing it on their own, they're actually using your bandwidth. So not only is this illegal because of the copyright violation, it's also extremely unethical since it's costing you money to host that image for them.

The All In One WP Security & Firewall plugin will help you disable hotlinking on your website.

Moving a WordPress Site Into a Multisite Network – The Tricky But Thorough Way

In a recent post, I demonstrated the easy way to move a WordPress site into a Multisite network, using plugins. For many sites, this method works perfectly fine. But what if your site's settings are a bit more complex?

If you move your site using plugins, you'll be able to move two things: your content (posts, pages, custom post types, menus – all of your content) and widgets. But what it doesn't let you move is the settings for your site. If you've got some heavy plugins installed (like an e-commerce plugin) or you've made lots of tweaks to your site's settings, you;'ll then have to go into the admin screens for your new site and set those up manually, copying what you did for your old site.

This can be a pain. It takes time and it's not entirely reliable. What if you miss something important? If your site has a lot of settings, it's not easy to make sure you've caught everything.

So in this post, I'm going to show you a more thorough and reliable way to move your site into your Multisite network.

Moving Your Site Manually – an Overview

This involves 6 steps, many of which are the same as if you'd just used plugins:

1. Create the new (empty) site in your network.


2. Create a copy of your old site's wp_options database table and edit it.


3. Create a copy of your old site's themes and plugins and upload them to your network's wp-content directory.


4. Run an export and import of your content and users.


5. Import the database table you've edited to your new site.


6. Run an export of your old site's widget settings and import them to your new site.

That's quite a lot of steps, and it's not something you should undertake lightly. It requires being comfortable uploading files and database tables manually.

Note: If you're used to moving a single site from one place to another manually, you might think that this process is very long winded. That's because of the way Multisite stores user data. With a single site, we could simply copy all of the content and database tables from the one site and import them into the second site. But with Multisite the users are stored once for the entire network, not individually for each site. This means that if you want to import your users from your old site to the new one and assign the correct content to them, you'll need to use the importer tool.

What You'll Need

To follow along with this post you'll need these tools:.

• An FTP client such as FileZilla or a code editor with FTP built in, such as Coda.


• Access to your sites' databases via phpMyAdmin, a tool which your hosting provider should give you access to.

Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step)

Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website. Sadly most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started. If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices. In this guide, we will share the top WordPress SEO tips to help you improve your WordPress SEO and get more organic traffic.

You might have heard experts saying that WordPress is SEO friendly. This is actually why a lot of people choose WordPress to start a blog or website.

While WordPress makes sure that the code it generates follows the SEO best practices, there is a lot more you need to do if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.

We have a number of actionable steps that you need to take to properly optimize your WordPress SEO.

To make it easy, we have created a table of content to help you easily navigate through our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.

Table of Contents

Introduction

• What is SEO?


• Why SEO is important

The Basics of WordPress SEO

• Check your site's visibility settings


• Using SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress


• WWW vs non-WWW in URLs

The Best WordPress SEO Plugin

• Choosing the Best WordPress SEO plugin


• Add XML sitemaps in WordPress


• Add your site to Google Search Console


• Optimizing your blog posts for SEO

WordPress SEO Best Practices

• Properly using categories and tags in WordPress


• Make internal linking a habit


• Optimize WordPress comments


• NoFollow external links in WordPress


• Full posts vs summaries (excerpts)

Speed and Security for WordPress SEO

• Optimize your site's speed and performance


• Optimizing images in WordPress for SEO


• Security and safety of your WordPress site


• Start using SSL/HTTPS

Finally, see more SEO tools and resources to take your WordPress SEO even farther.

Introduction

We know the idea of optimizing for WordPress SEO can be intimidating for beginners, especially if you're not not a tech geek.

But don't worry - it doesn't have to be complicated. Start here to learn the basics, and then you can start applying them to your own website.

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a strategy used by website owners to get more traffic by ranking higher in search engines.

Search engine optimization isn't about tricking Google or gaming the system. It's simply about creating a website that has optimized code and formatting which makes it easy for search engines to find your website.

When people search the web for the topics you write about, your search-engine-optimized content will appear higher in the search results, and you'll get more people clicking through to your website.

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Why SEO is important

Search engines are often the biggest source of traffic for most websites.

Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to understand and rank pages appropriately in search results. But those algorithms aren't perfect - they still need your help to understand what your content is about.

If your content isn't optimized, then search engines won't know how to rank it. When people search for the topics you write about, your website won't appear in the search results, and you'll miss out on all that traffic.

It is really important for all business owners to make their website search engine friendly, so that they can maximize their search traffic.

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Basics of WordPress SEO

SEO can get technical, but it doesn't have to be. Just learning a few basic SEO tips to optimize your site can give you a noticeable boost in your website traffic.

You don't have to be a tech genius to use the techniques below. If you're already using WordPress, then you've got what it takes!

Let's get started optimizing your website.

Check Your Site's Visibility Settings

WordPress comes with a built-in option to hide your website from search engines. The purpose of this option is to give you time to work on your website before it's ready to go public.

However, sometimes this option can get checked accidentally and it makes your website unavailable to search engines.

If your website is not appearing in search results, then the first thing you need to do is to make sure that this option is unchecked.

Simply log in to the admin area of your WordPress site and visit Settings » Reading page.

You need to scroll down to the 'Search Engine Visibility' section and make sure that the box next to 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site' is unchecked.

Don't forget to click on the 'Save Changes' button to store your changes.

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Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress

SEO friendly URLs contain words that clearly explain the content of the page, and they're easy to read by both humans and search engines.

Some examples of SEO friendly URLs are:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/how-to-install-wordpress/

http://www.wpbeginner.com/common-wordpress-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/

Notice that these URLs are readable and a user can guess what they will see on the page just by looking at the URL text.

So what does a non-SEO friendly URL look like?

http://www.wpbeginner.com/?p=10467

http://example.com/archives/123

Notice that these URLs use numbers unrelated to the content, and a user cannot guess what they will find on the page by looking at the URL.

Using SEO friendly permalink structure improves your chances of getting better positions in search results.

Here is how you can check and update your WordPress site's permalink structure.

You need to visit the Settings » Permalinks page. Select the post name option and then click on the 'Save Changes' button to store your settings.

For more detailed instructions take a look at our guide on what is a SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress.

Note: If your website has been running for more than 6 months, then please don't change your permalink structure unless you're using the numbers option. If you're using Day and Name or Month and Name, continue using that.

By changing your permalink structure on an established site, you will lose all of your social media share count and run the risk of losing your existing SEO ranking.

If you must change your permalink structure, then hire a professional, so they can setup proper redirects. You'll still lose your social share counts on the pages.

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WWW vs non-WWW

If you are just starting out with your website, then you need to choose whether you want to use www (http://www.example.com) or non-www (http://example.com) in your site's URL.

Search engines consider these to be two different websites, so this means you need to choose one and stick to it.

You can set your preference by visiting the Settings » General page. Add your preferred URL in both the 'WordPress Address' and 'Site Address' fields.

Despite what someone else might say, from a SEO standpoint there's no advantage to using one or another.

For more detailed information on this topic, take a look at our guide on www vs non-www – which is better for WordPress SEO.

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The Best WordPress SEO plugin

One of the best part about WordPress is that there's a plugin for everything, and SEO is no exception. There are thousands of WordPress SEO plugins which makes it harder for beginners to choose the best WordPress SEO plugin.

Instead of installing separate plugins for individual SEO tasks, we will help you choose the best WordPress SEO plugin that does it all, and it's 100% free.

Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin

When it comes to choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will most likely narrow your choices down to the two most popular solutions: Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack.

They are both effective solutions, and we've done a pros and cons comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack.

At WPBeginner, we use Yoast SEO, so in this tutorial we'll be using Yoast SEO for screenshots and examples.

Regardless, we have a step by step guide on properly setting up each of these plugins:

• How to install and setup Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress


• Users guide for All in One SEO Pack

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Add XML Sitemaps in WordPress

An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted file that lists every single page on your website. This makes it easy for search engines to find all of your content.

While adding an XML sitemap does not boost your site's search rankings, it does help search engines find the pages quickly and start ranking them.

If you're using the Yoast SEO plugin, then it will automatically create an XML sitemap for you. To find your sitemap, just go to this URL (don't forget to replace example.com with your own domain name):

http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

We will show you how to submit your XML sitemap to Google in the next step.

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Add Your Site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console also known as Webmaster Tools is a set of tools offered by Google to give website owners a look at how their content is seen by the search engine.

It provides reports and data to help you understand how your pages appear in search results. You also get to see the actual search terms people are using to find your website, how each page appears in the search results, and how often your pages are clicked.

All this information helps you understand what's working on your site and what's not. You can then plan your content strategy accordingly.

Google Search Console also alerts you when there is something wrong with your website, like when search crawlers are unable to access it, find duplicate content, or restricted resources.

We have a step by step guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.

If you're using Yoast SEO, then follow step 11 in our Yoast SEO setup guide.

If you're not using Yoast SEO, then you can watch our video that shows an alternative way:

Once you have added your website to Google Search Console, click on the Crawl menu and then select Sitemaps.

After that you need to click on the Add Sitemap button.

Your main sitemap is sitemap_index.xml so go ahead and submit that.

Once you have successfully added your sitemap, it will appear as pending. It does take Google some time to crawl your website. After a few hours, you would be able to see some stats about your sitemap. It will show you the number of links it found in your sitemap, how many of them got indexed, a ratio of images and web pages, etc.

We recommend that you check your Search Console at least on a monthly basis for gathering insights and see your website's SEO progress.

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Optimizing Your Blog Posts for SEO

Often beginners make the mistake of thinking that installing and activating a WordPress SEO plugin is all what's needed. SEO is an ongoing process that you must keep up with if you want to see maximum results.

Yoast SEO allows you to add a title, description, and focus keyword to to every blog post and page. It also shows you a preview of what users will see when they Google your website.

We recommend that you optimize your title and description to get maximum clicks.

When writing your blog post, simply scroll down to the Yoast SEO section and take full advantage of it.

If you're wondering how to choose a focus keyword, what is a good title, or what is a good meta description, then we have covered it in details in our beginners guide to optimize your blog posts for SEO.

We highly recommend that you read it because on-page SEO is crucial for your success.

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WordPress SEO Best Practices

If you follow the basics of WordPress SEO and use the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will already be ahead of most websites.

However if you want even better results, then you need to follow the WordPress SEO best practices below.

These aren't too technical and most won't even require you to touch any code. But they will make a big difference if you follow them.

Properly Using Categories and Tags in WordPress

WordPress allows you to sort your blog posts into categories and tags. This makes it easy for you to manage your content by topics, and for your users to find the content they're looking for.

Categories and tags also help search engines understand your website structure and content.

Often beginners get confused on how to best use categories and tags. After explaining this to thousands of readers, here's how we approach categories and tags.

Categories are meant for broad grouping of your posts. If your blog was a book, then categories will be the table of content.

For example, on a personal blog you can have categories like music, food, travel, etc. Categories are hierarchical, so you can add child categories to them.

On the other hand, tags are more specific keywords that describe the contents of an individual post. For example, a blog post filed under food category can have tags like salad, breakfast, pancakes, etc. Think of these as indexes section in a text book.

For more on this topic, see our guide on categories vs tags and SEO best practices for sorting your content.

By using categories and tags properly, you make it easy for your users to browse your website. Since it's easy for users, it also makes it easier for search engines to browse your website.

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Make Internal Linking a Habit

Search engines assign each page on your website a score (page authority). The recipe of this score is kept secret so that people cannot game the results. However, the most common signals of authority are links.

This is why it's important that you link to your own content from your other blog posts and pages.

You should make it a habit to interlink your own posts whenever possible. If you have multiple authors, then create a pre-publish blog post checklist that requires them to interlink at least 3 other blog posts.

This will help you boost your pageviews, increases the time users spend on your site, and ultimately will improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.

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Optimize WordPress Comments

Comments can be a strong indication of user engagement on your website. Engaged users means more links back to your site, more traffic, and improved SEO.

But you need to make sure that your comments are real and not spam. Spammers submit comments with bad links which could affect and even ruin your search rankings.

This is why we recommend everyone to start using Akismet. It is one of the two plugins that come pre-installed with every WordPress site, and it helps you combat comment spam.

If Akismet alone is unable to handle comment spam, then see these tips and tools to combat comment spam in WordPress.

If your blog posts attract a lot of genuine, spam-free comments, then you should pat yourself on the shoulder for building such an engaging website!

However, too many comments on a post can make it load slower which also affects your search engine rankings. (Keep reading below to find out more about how speed affects SEO.)

To prepare your website so that it can handle the burden your comments put on your server and speed, you can split comments into multiple pages. See our tutorial on how to paginate comments in WordPress.

(If you'd like to get more comments on your site, check out these 11 ways to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts.)

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NoFollow External Links in WordPress

As mentioned above, links help search engines decide which pages are important. When you link to a website, you are passing some of your site's SEO score to that link. This SEO score is called “link juice.”

For good search rankings you need to make sure that you are getting more link juice from other websites than you are giving away.

Adding the “nofollow” attribute to external links (links to websites that you don't own) instructs search engines not to follow those links. This helps you save link juice.

A normal external link looks like this in HTML:

Example Website

An external link with the nofollow attribute looks like this:

rel="nofollow">Example Website

You can also add rel=”nofollow” checkbox to the insert link popup. This will allow you to easily add nofollow to external links.

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Full Posts vs Summaries or Excerpts

WordPress displays and links to your posts from a number of pages like home page, category archive, tags archive, date archive, author pages, etc.

By default, it shows the full article content on all these pages. This affects your site's SEO, as search engines may find it to be duplicate content. Full articles also make your archive pages load slower.

Showing full articles everywhere also affects your page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to read the full article in their feed reader without ever visiting your website.

The easiest way to solve this is by showing summaries or excerpts instead of full articles.

You can do this by going to Settings » Reading and select summary.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to customize WordPress excerpts without coding.

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Speed and Security for WordPress SEO

Even if you follow all the WordPress SEO tips and best practices above, if your site is slow or gets taken down by a hacker, your search engine rankings will take a big hit.

Here's how to prevent your site from losing search engine traffic due to slow performance or lax security.

Optimize Your Site's Speed and Performance

Research shows that in the internet age, the average human attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish.

Web usability experts believe that users decide whether they want to stay or leave within few seconds of visiting a website.

That means that as a website owner, you only have a few seconds to present your content and engage users. You don't want to waste this precious time making your visitor wait for your website to load. Search engines like Google admit that they rank faster websites higher than slow loading websites.

If you need to improve your site's speed, check out this expert advice on 18 useful tricks to speed up WordPress and boost performance.

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Optimizing Images in WordPress for SEO

Images are more engaging than text but they also take more time to load. If you are not careful with image sizes and quality, then they can slow down your website.

You need to make sure that you use images that are optimized to load faster. See our guide on how to speed up WordPress by optimizing images for the web.

Another trick you can use to optimize your images for search engines is to use descriptive title and alt tags. These tags help search engines understand what your image is about. They also help users with visual impairment as their screen readers can read the alt and title tags to them.

WordPress allows you to add title and alt tags when you upload an image.

If you are a photographer or add a lot of images to your WordPress site, then you need to use a gallery plugin.

We recommend using Envira Gallery. In our speed tests, we found it to be the fastest WordPress gallery plugin. It's also fully responsive and SEO friendly out of the box.

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Security and Safety of Your WordPress Site

Each week, Google blacklists around 20,000 websites for malware and around 50,000 for phishing. When a site is blacklisted, it doesn't show up in any search results at all.

This means that the security of your WordPress site is crucial for good rankings. You don't want all your hard work on SEO to go to waste if your site is compromised by a hacker.

The good news is that it's not that difficult to keep your WordPress site safe - see the step by step instructions in our ultimate WordPress security guide.

At WPBeginner, we use Sucuri to protect our website against attacks. To see why we recommend this service, check out our case study of how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months.

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Start Using SSL/HTTPS

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a technology that encrypts the connection between a user's browser and the server they are connecting to. This adds an additional security layer to your WordPress site.

Websites secured with SSL are indicated by a padlock sign in the browser's address bar. This makes your website more trustworthy, and it is required if you are running an online store with WordPress and processing sensitive payment information.

If you are using Bluehost, then you can purchase a SSL certificate. If you're going to purchase your SSL certificate through your web hosting company, see our guide on how to add SSL and HTTPS in WordPress.

You can also get free SSL with Let's Encrypt. Several WordPress hosting companies like Siteground, Dreamhost, and WPEngine have already started offering easy Let's Encrypt integrations.

For step by step instructions, see our guide on how to add free SSL in WordPress with Let's Encrypt.

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More SEO Tools and Resources

Once you get the hang of WordPress SEO best practices, you'll want to take your skills even further to get ahead of your competition.

We have compiled a list of best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that you should use to boost your SEO. If you're ready to try some more advanced techniques, you can also check out our archive of WordPress SEO articles.

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We hope this article helped you learn how to properly optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Go ahead and implement a few of these WordPress SEO tips, and you should see an increase in your traffic within a few months as the search engines process your changes.

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The post Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.