Mill Services Marketing Blog

Anyone who has been using WordPress extensively for a few years will be very familiar with so-called ‘SEO plugins’. And in particular one of the most popular with over 5 Million active installs – ‘Yoast SEO’.

The problem with Yoast SEO however is that it’s gradually become more and more bloated with features. There are so many tabs and options now that it’s just become mind bendingly confusing for a lot of people.

Then there are all the adverts, promotions, popups and nags. And worse (particularly for those providing website support) the endless relentless upgrades! This wouldn’t be so bad except many upgrades are followed up rapidly by bug fixes, and fixes to things the upgrade just broke. Continue reading “Best Alternative To Yoast SEO?”

Featured images are a really useful part of WordPress. But how effective they are depends greatly on how your chosen theme and plugins handle them.

They can be used automatically in lots of really useful places, such as:-

at the top of the post, or as a header image
as a smaller image to illustrate the post on category, tag and author pages
in visual navigation areas such as ‘image sliders’ often used on blog homepages
in ‘related posts’ sections created by plugins such as YARPP.

So they not only make your blog a lot more attractive, they can make your blog a lot more ‘sticky’ too. That is, your readers stay on your site for longer because they see more interesting things to click on. We’re visual creatures so images tend to catch our eye a lot more than text. Continue reading “Why WordPress Featured Images Are Important”