How SEO Works in a WordPress Website – Best SEO Techniques for WordPress
WordPress is perhaps the most famous content management system of them all. It’s flexible, it’s fast, and it’s loved by big businesses and bloggers alike. What’s more, it’s fantastic for SEO. WordPress SEO is easy to manage, to alter, and to update. Even if you are a complete novice at optimisation, WordPress website SEO is famously familiar and easy to get to grips with. In this brief guide, we’ll take a look at some of the best techniques you can use for making your WordPress site SEO-ready.
Consider the Basics
When getting started with WordPress SEO, it’s a good idea to consider tweaking the visibility settings. You’re going to need to make sure your site is picked up on by everyone! That means allowing your pages and posts to be indexed by search engines – Google in particular. However, make sure to only tweak these settings once your site and its content are ready for publication.
You should also think about editing your URLs so that they are SEO-friendly. What do we mean by this? Your URL, just as much as your meta-tags and descriptions, should tell Google and visitors to your site what they are looking at. A good URL for SEO will be readable by humans, not just search engines. You can edit your URLs by heading to Settings and Permalinks in your dashboard.
Using SEO Plugins
Even the most experienced SEO enthusiasts rely on a plugin every now and again. Thankfully, WordPress has plenty of useful tools for you to add into your dashboard. Plugins such as the hugely popular Yoast, for example, will mark up your text and will let you know where your content needs SEO-friendly tweaking. You might also want to consider SEMrush or OutreachPlus, though Yoast is generally recommended as the best plugin to start with.
Plugins such as Yoast will give you access to XML sitemaps. These will help to map out and index your site for Google’s benefit. If you are going to have any chance of scaling the search rankings, you need to make things as easy on Google as you possibly can.
You can also add your site to Google Search Console in many cases. Search Console is invaluable to website owners as it offers you stacks of information about search data and your site. What’s more, it’s completely free. Again, Yoast will help you to integrate your WordPress site in this way, but do check out other plugins, too.
Quick WordPress SEO Practices
Let’s take a look at a few general, quick practices you can start putting into action once your content is ready to go live.
- Make sure your categories and tags are relevant. This is going to take some research if you’re offering a niche service, however, it’s worth doing. Again, it is all a matter of letting Google see exactly what you do, and making it easier for them to understand what you are doing.
- Start thinking about creating some serious link juice. By link juice, we mean editing your content to ensure you link internally across all pages. Linking from page to page will, again, help Google’s bots to see where to go. These critters will sniff around and find out how easy your site is to navigate for would-be visitors. If your site is pumped full of link juice, it’s likely Google will look favourably upon you.
- Think about optimising your comments. There are tools you can use to weed out the spambots and other nuisances likely to bog down your site. However, it’s also worth considering speeding up the comments process. To stop your site getting stuck in a sea of comments, limit the number that can be shown at any one time. Or, you could encourage registration for comments. You shouldn’t dissuade interaction by any means – but don’t let endless comment streams spoil the user experience.
Speeding Up Your Site
Let’s switch back to thinking about site speed and overall performance. WordPress site SEO strategies can help you to ensure your site loads quickly across all devices, browsers and platforms. What’s more, you can tweak the elements which are likely to slow or bog things down.
Optimising your speed may be as simple as loading a more lightweight or basic theme. You could also use caching plugins to help simplify the caching processes your website observes. This can seriously improve the overall loading speed of your site for all visitors.
Do also look at optimising images. Images can really bog down the loading time of some sites. Think about using images in strategic places, but don’t ever be tempted to go overboard. Google loves extra media, but first and foremost, it wants their searchers to find speedy, worthwhile experiences online. Your readers will thank you, and Google will likely give you a welcome boost.
Tighten Up Security
Finally, a crucial aspect of all WordPress SEO is, of course, site security. Thankfully, security measures are easy to alter, move and tweak in the dashboard. It’s easy for you to install and update your SSL certificates, for example, and there are several security plugins you can load on-board to help you.
Above all, you should be making a move to HTTPS. HTTPS is the encrypted standard for all websites. HTTP is now considered old hat as data shared through the protocol can be seen by outsiders. Google is going to look favourably on sites who make sure their security is up to date, and that their visitors are fully protected.
Getting Started with WordPress
WordPress is a fantastic CMS. It’s easy to build fully-fledged websites with incredible SEO strategies packed into the design. Here at Telsa Media, it’s just one of our many favoured platforms.
Interested in learning more about WordPress SEO? Need help getting your web content up and running, and to an SEO standard Google is likely to approve of? Let the Telsa Media team take a closer look for you. Get in touch with us today.
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