By now, I am sure you are aware of the sheer power of WordPress as a content management system. Although there are a number of platforms that website owners and bloggers can use, WordPress have been the one that most end up using particularly for SEO. For those serious WordPress publishers with precise or explicit online business goals in mind, there is no more vital aspect of their website’s long-term value than its search engine rankings. That being said, spending time on your WordPress SEO is of critical importance.
Now, the primary reason why WordPress has great SEO potentials is its straightforward, uncomplicated, understandable, and user-friendly features or plugins. However, you need to remember that getting to the number 1 position on Google’s search result pages is only possible unless you fully employ the maximum potential of WordPress. It is not enough that you use the features or plugins of WordPress but use it in their fullest potential.
For any WordPress user, it is of extreme significance to make it a priority to use every WordPress feature or plugin correctly to maximize their SEO capabilities.
In this article, I will briefly discuss some practices on how to properly use WordPress for SEO. With these best practices, you will easily improve your search engine rankings, increase your subscribers, and enhance the performance of your website in general.
Basic WordPress SEO: Best Practices For Higher Rankings
In order to release the full strength of WordPress for SEO, you must follow the following practices.
WordPress is already a technically good platform for SEO. It is a well-optimized system which allows every single page to be indexed (compared to other content management system out there). However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything to develop it further. Let us take a look at the basics so you can work with WordPress better and easier.
- URLs. Let’s start with taking a look at your permalink. You must change your permalink structure. Aside from the default permalink ( ?p=<postid> ), you can also opt to use /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. If you want to include the category, you can also opt for “Custom Structure.” If you are currently having the default setting or have changed from /%postname%/ to /%category%/%postname%/, WordPress will do the redirects for you.
You also need to take a look at what you want your website to show up (whether you like it as www.site.com or site.com). Go to General under SETTINGS. You need to make sure the version you want to show up is correctly reflected. Additionally, you need to set your preferred domain by using Google Webmaster Tools (go to SETTTINGS ® Preferred Domain).
Lastly, you need to remove “stop words” from your permalinks. Stop words are words such as “a”, “and”, “the”, etc. There is a specific WordPress plugin which will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post. This will get rid of those long URLs especially when you do sentence style post titles. However, if your post has already gone live, you should not try to change its permalink especially when people have already linked to it. Yet, if you have to change the permalink, you need to make sure that the post is correctly redirected.
- Optimizing Your Titles. Your content pages’ title tag is one of the most significant components for you to rank better in search engine results. The title tag is not only the exact title of the tab or browser window, but it is also the fist line web users notice in search results which is followed by the URL and the snippet (meta description plus the date of the post).
In most blog platforms, title blog posts are Blog Title Þ Blog Archive Þ Keyword rich post title or Blog Title Þ Keyword rich post title. However, in WordPress, it is the other way around for the blog to achieve the online traffic it deserves. This is done since search engines put more value on the early words. Thus, if your keywords are close to the start of the page title, it is likely to rank well. Moreover, people who use search engines will notice the early words first, thereby more likely to be clicked since your keywords are at the beginning of the listing of your page.
- Optimizing Your Descriptions. As you have known, your meta descriptions are used by search engines to show in the snippet in search results. Typically, the meta description is only used when it contains the keyword the searcher was searching for. Now, there are several plugins which make use of “automated descriptions.” These plugins take the first sentence of the post to fill the meta description by default. Of course, this is not a wise thing since the first sentence might not have anything to do with the search.
So, this means that the best meta description is that which is hand written. If you are opting to use the auto-generating meta description plugin, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine do the work for you. If you don’t make use of the meta description, the search engine will look for the keyword searched for in your post/article and automatically select a string around the keyword.
It is best to make use of the meta description field of your WordPress SEO plugin. Write your meta description. Make sure that it attracts people to click it and ascertain that it contains the target keyword of your post or page at least once.
- Optimizing Your Images. Images are often overlooked in WordPress SEO. Writing good alt tags for your images and naming your files appropriately can give you the extra online traffic from various image search engines. In addition, you are helping your users or readers who check your website in a screen reader. However, if you don’t have the time to make good titles and alt tags for your images, there are certain helpful plugins to do that for you.
Other WordPress SEO Practices
Now that we have covered some of the most fundamentals of properly using WordPress for SEO, let’s get to know other components that are important for your WordPress site to score high in search engines.
- Breadcrumbs. You need to add breadcrumbs on your posts and pages. Breadcrumbs will allow your users to easily navigate your website and let search engines to determine your site structure more easily. These breadcrumbs are the links typically seen above the title post. It should link back to your homepage and the category it is in.
- Headings. You need to make sure your post title is an <H1>. While your blog’s name should only be an <H1> your front page, it should be no more than an >H3> on single, post, and category pages. Don’t cram your sidebar with <H2> and <H3> headings.
- Clean Templates. Your template files might have all that javascript and CSS. You need to move them to external CSS and Javascript files. You have to clean your templates since these files are not doing anything good for your SEO. You just have to make sure that search engines don’t need to download them most of the time and your users must be able to cache those files on first load.
- The Need for Speed. The amount of pages a search engine can spider or crawl on your blog depends on how fast your blog loads. So, the name of the game is speed. You can boost the speed of your WordPress by optimizing your template to do as small an amount of database calls as needed. You can also increase your blog’s speed by installing a caching plugin.
- Revamp Your Sidebar. Search engines, especially Google, are profoundly overlooking websites with wide links. If you are linking to so many on your blogroll site, you are actually allowing your web users or visitors to get out of your site rather than actually enticing them to browse around a bit. Therefore, if you think that some links aren’t necessary related or relevant to you topic, get rid of them as they are not helping you at all.
- HTML Sitemaps. For certain websites, an HTML sitemap doesn’t prove to be useful especially if your site is a blog. However, for commercial or business websites with a number of web pages, an HTML sitemap is beneficial not only for the sites’ users, but also for search engines.
- Noindexing. You need to make sure that you avert indexing of archive pages which don’t apply for your website. There are WordPress plugins which allow you to do that.
- Disable superfluous archives. If you are not using your author archives or date-based archives, you should disable them. If not, users might link to them, thereby breaking your WordPress SEO.
- Mind Your Pagination. It’s important that search engine spiders or bots can crawl your site and its pages. You need to make sure that a bot can go to a category page and reach all the underlying pages easily. if you have several posts in a category, the bot will likely go back several pages before actually finding the link to one of your earlier posts.
- Stop Linking To Unnecessary Links. You need to stop linking to your login, registration pages, RSS feeds, “subscribe by e-mail” link, etc. from every page of your blog.
- Link to Related Posts. In order for search engines to get to your older content easier, you should use a related posts plugins which search through your post database to look for posts with the same subject and add link to these posts. By doing this, you will improve your WordPress SEO capabilities.
- Avoid Overuse of Tags. You need to remember that a tag in and of itself will not improve your SEO. The only means to enhance your SEO is to relate a piece of content to another (more particularly a relating group of posts to one another). There are tools or plugins which can help you to delete or redirect/merge tags.
- Get Readers To Subscribe. In order for readers to link to your blog, they have to actually read it. You need to get people to link to your blog whether they are first time visitors or have been regularly visiting your site. This is where conversion optimization plays a vital role. You must learn to test your call to action on your blog so that more and more people will subscribe to it.(whether by e-mail or RSS).
- Engagement. You need to get your readers to be involved. The simplest way to engage your readers is to ask them to comment. You need to make sure your posts/articles are written in an engaging and appealing style. Ask your readers for their opinions, ideas, reactions, etc. Don’t forget to thank your readers for their comment (but not all the time because it can get annoying).
The tips and practices mentioned above are just some of the most important stuff you can do on your WordPress towards getting that bigger chance to be successful in search engines and in the blogging world. If you desire to rank high on competitive terms, you need to do most of all recommended SEO tips for WordPress and (of course) create great content in the process.
