How difficult is it to optimize WordPress for search engines? Having your business appear on the first page of Google may sound like a dream for many and some will even state that this is impossible.
We are here to inform you that things are different. You can stand out from your competitors on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
We will explain what SEO is in this post, how it is done, and describe what’s involved in jump-starting your WordPress SEO. We will then demonstrate how to increase the number of search results for your site by optimizing content, images, hierarchy, speed, and more.
Your website will receive more traffic if you follow WordPress SEO best practices. It is our goal to provide you with the best WordPress SEO tips at the beginning of this guide to allow you to optimize your website’s organic search engine optimization and increase organic traffic.
WordPress is considered to be an SEO-friendly platform by a number of experts. The ease of use of WordPress is the main reason many people choose it for the creation of a blog or website. WordPress follows SEO best practices when it generates its code, but if you wish to achieve maximum SEO results, you should take additional steps.
To fully optimize your WordPress SEO, you are required to follow a number of actionable steps. Our ultimate WordPress SEO guide has been divided into sections for your convenience so that you will easily be able to navigate.
What you will learn in the WordPress SEO: Guide
- How Does SEO Work?
- The significance of SEO
- The Fundamentals of SEO for WordPress
- Check the Visibility Settings on your Site
- SEO-friendly URLs for WordPress
- Comparing the WWW and non-WWW
WordPress SEO Plugins.
- How to select the best WordPress SEO plugin
- Adding XML sitemaps to your WordPress Site
- Register Your Site with the Google Search Console
- SEO-Optimized Blog Posts
- Finding Keywords For Your Website
Best Practices for SEO in WordPress
- WordPress Categories and Tags: How to Use Them Properly
- Create a Habit of Internal Linking
- Comment Optimization for WordPress
- The NoFollow Feature in WordPress
- Full Posts vs. Summaries or Excerpts
Keeping WordPress SEO Speedy and Secure
- Performance and Speed Optimization for Your Website
- SEO Image Optimization in WordPress
- Your WordPress Site Must be Secure and Safe
- HTTPS and SSL Should be Used
More SEO resources and tools
How Does SEO Work?
SEO (Search engine optimization) is a process that involves improving your ranking and visibility on search engines such as Google in order to increase traffic to your website for free. You will see your content near the top of search results when it is optimized for specific queries.
Let us discuss what search engine optimization is in order to understand why it is so significant.
Google is not meant to be deceived by search engine optimization. Shortly, your website should be composed of HTML code and structured in such a way that search engines will be able to locate it.
The search engines will display your search-engine-optimized content when people perform searches related to the topics you write about, and if it appears higher in the search results, the more likely they are to click through to your website.
The Significance of SEO
Most websites receive a significant amount of traffic from organic search results.
In order to determine how web pages appear in search results, Google and many other search engines rely on algorithms. In spite of their shortcomings, these algorithms need your assistance to understand what your content is about.
If your content is not optimized, search engines will not be able to rank it. It is likely that your website will not appear in search engine results when people conduct searches for topics similar to what you write about. As a result, traffic to your website will decline.
Making a website search engine friendly is an important step for any business owner seeking to maximize their search traffic.
The Fundamentals of SEO for WordPress
There are a number of technical aspects to SEO, but they do not have to be complicated. You can drastically increase the amount of traffic to your website by learning a few basic SEO techniques.
These techniques require no technical expertise on your part. As a WordPress user, you certainly possess the necessary skills.
Let’s begin by optimizing your website.
Check the Visibility Settings on your Site
A built-in feature of WordPress is the capability to hide your site from search engines. Choosing this option allows you to make necessary revisions to your website before it becomes available to the public.
It is, however, possible to accidentally check this option, causing your website to be inaccessible to search engines.
You should first check that this option is not selected when your website does not appear in search results. You can access the Settings » Reading page by simply logging into your WordPress account.
The checkbox next to ‘Reduce search engine indexation of this site’ should not be checked under the section entitled ‘Search Engine Visibility.
In order to ensure that your changes are saved, you should click the “Save Changes” button.
SEO-Friendly URLs for WordPress
URLs that are optimized for search engines and humans are easy to read and include words that help clarify the page’s content.
An example of a search engine-friendly URL is as follows:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/how-to-install-wordpress/
https://www.wpbeginner.com/common-wordpress-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/
We emphasize that these URLs can be read, meaning that a user can determine what the page will offer simply by reading the URL text.
Here is a URL that does not possess any SEO-friendly characteristics.
https://www.wpbeginner.com/?p=10467
http://example.com/archives/123
Several numbers are used in these URLs which have no relation to the content on the page; therefore, users cannot deduce what will be found by simply looking at the URL.
By making your permalinks SEO-friendly, you can appear higher in search results.
You can check your WordPress site’s permalink structure and update it using the steps provided below.
To change the permalink, you need to go to Settings » Permalinks. By clicking the “Save Changes” button, you will be able to store your new settings.
You may find more detailed instructions in our article describing how to structure URLs in WordPress so that they are search engine friendly.
It is recommended that you do not change the permalink structure of your site unless you have been using the numbers option for more than six months. Users have the option of continuing to use Day and Name or Month and Name.
On an established website, changing the permalink structure may result in a loss of all social media shares and a risk losing your current search engine ranking.
Hire a professional to help you set up the proper redirects if you need to change your permalink structure. Social shares will still be lost, however.
Comparing the WWW and non-WWW
As a new owner of a website, you should determine whether or not you wish to use www in the URL (http://www.example.com) or non-www (http://example.com).
There is a difference between these two websites in the eyes of search engines, therefore you should choose one and keep it updated.
Selecting Settings » General will allow you to set your preferences. You can enter the WordPress installation’s address in both the WordPress address and the site address.
The reasons to use one or the other are the same from an SEO standpoint, regardless of what someone else says.
WordPress SEO Plugins
As one of the best aspects of WordPress, there is a plugin for just about everything, such as SEO. Beginners have a hard time choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin that fits their needs since there are thousands of them.
In place of installing multiple plugins for different parts of SEO, we will suggest the most effective WordPress SEO plugin which handles all these tasks and is absolutely free.
How to select the best WordPress SEO plugin
There are two best WordPress SEO plugins you have to choose from: All in One SEO (AIO SEO) and Yoast SEO.
Over 3 million websites use the AIO SEO plugin for WordPress SEO. Our examples and screenshots in this tutorial will be from AIOseo.
Adding XML sitemaps to your WordPress Site
The XML Sitemap enumerates all the pages of your website in a specially formatted file. Through this, your entire website can be found by search engines.
Besides increasing your site’s search engine rankings, an XML sitemap can assist search engines in finding the site’s pages more quickly and adjusting their ranking as a result.
By using the AIOSEO plugin, you will automatically be able to create an XML sitemap. If you click on the following link, you will be able to access your sitemap (make sure to replace example.com with your own domain):
http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
Next, we’ll demonstrate how a sitemap can be submitted to Google in XML format.
Register Your Site with the Google Search Console
Using this tool, you will be able to include your pages in search results. Also included in the report will be the search terms users used to locate your website, how often your web pages were clicked, and the order in which they appeared in search results.
These statistics can be used to pinpoint what parts of your website are working well and what parts are not. You can then tailor your content strategy accordingly.
Furthermore, Google Search Console will notify you when your website is experiencing problems, such as when it cannot be accessed by search crawlers or when there is duplicate content on it.
Click on Sitemap on the left to add a sitemap, then paste the end of the URL.
Save your changes by clicking on the submit button.
Your sitemap will now be reviewed by Google Search Console and used to improve the crawling of your website.
The sitemap will appear as “pending” once it has been successfully added. This process may take several days. The stats about your sitemap will be available after a few hours. This will include information regarding how many links were found in your sitemap, how many of those links were indexed, the percentage of pages that have images, etc.
Checking your Search Console on a monthly basis is a good way to gather insights and see how your website is performing in terms of SEO.
SEO-Optimized Blog Posts
Beginners often assume that a WordPress SEO plugin can be installed and activated with no further effort. To achieve maximum results, SEO must be a continuous process that you must maintain.
With every WordPress SEO plugin, you can add titles, descriptions, and focus keywords to your blog posts and pages. Also, you’ll get a preview of how your page will look when someone types your URL into Google.
In order to increase the number of clicks, we recommend optimizing your title and description.
Make sure you utilize the SEO section to the fullest extent possible during the writing process.
Finding Keywords for Your Website
Those who are new to blogging use their best guesses to determine which topics are most appealing to the general public and which topics should be included in their blogs and websites.
It is as if you have shot an arrow into the darkness. When we have access to public data, we no longer have to do this as we can obtain real information about what people are looking for.
Content writers and search engine optimization specialists use keyword research to enhance their content. With this tool, you can discover the keywords people search on search engines in order to locate content, products, and services related to your industry.
By using these search terms and phrases, you can increase traffic to your website.
It is possible to conduct keyword research with a number of free and paid tools. It is recommended that you use SEMRush, which will help you discover and evaluate keywords, in addition to finding out which keywords your competitors are ranking for.
Best Practices for SEO in WordPress
You can utilize the basic principles of WordPress SEO effectively by using the best WordPress SEO plugin.
While following the WordPress SEO best practices listed below are recommended if you want to achieve even higher rankings.
They are not particularly complicated, and you will not have to touch any code for most of them. Nonetheless, following them will have an impact on your business.
WordPress Categories and Tags: How to Use Them Properly
WordPress allows categories and tags to be applied to blog posts. Your users will be able to easily access the content they are seeking, and you will be able to efficiently organize your content by topic.
Additionally, tags & categories aid search engines in understanding the structure and content of your website.
Beginners often have difficulty understanding how to utilize categories and tags effectively. Here is how we approach categories and tags, as we have explained this to thousands of readers.
Your posts are grouped into categories for easy access. The categories in your blog are like the table of contents in a book.
For instance, you can create categories such as music, food, travel, etc. on a personal blog. In terms of hierarchy, categories can have children.
Specifically, tags describe an individual post’s contents more specifically than terms used in the search. For example, a blog post filed under the food category can be tagged with tags such as salad, breakfast, pancakes, etc. They are comparable to indexes in textbooks.
Your website users will be able to browse easily if you use categories and tags appropriately. Because it’s user-friendly, search engines are also able to browse your website more easily.
Create a Habit of Internal Linking
A score (page authority) is assigned to each page on your website by search engines. There is a secret ingredient to this score, in order to prevent people from gaming it. The most reliable signal of authority is the number of links.
Thus, it is important for your other blog posts or web pages to link to your own content. It is advisable to interlink your own content wherever possible. An author should link to at least three other blog posts as a part of a pre-publish checklist for blog posts. Consequently, a higher SEO score for your individual posts and pages will be achieved as a result of increasing the number of time users spend on your website.
Comment Optimization for WordPress
The level of engagement of your website’s visitors can be determined by the number of comments. Engaged users will lead to greater traffic, more backlinks, and an improvement in search engine optimization.
Please ensure that the comments you leave are authentic and not spam. In spam comments, spammers may include links that may negatively affect and even ruin your search engine ranking.
We, therefore, recommend that everyone use Akismet. The comment spam plugin is one of two plugins included with every WordPress site, and it is designed to assist you in combating the problem of spam comments.
In the event that Akismet alone cannot handle comment spam, then refer to the following tips and tools for fighting comment spam on WordPress.
Having built an engaging website, you deserve to pat yourself on the back for receiving so many genuine, spam-free comments on your blog posts.
On the contrary, too many comments can cause your site to load more slowly, which may negatively affect your search engine rankings. See below for more information about how speed impacts search engine optimization.
In order to ensure your website can cope with the load that comments place on the server and its speed, you may wish to separate your comments into separate pages.
NoFollow Feature in WordPress
A link is an integral component of assisting search engines in determining the importance of a page. Your site’s SEO score is passed on to the linked website when you link to another site. Link juice refers to the exchange of information between two sites.
In order to obtain a high ranking in search engine results, one must ensure that the links you receive from other sites outweigh the ones you give away.
An external link (link to a website you do not own) with the “no follow” attribute is not followed by search engines. This helps you preserve the value of your links.
Normally, an external link appears as follows in HTML:
<a href=”http://example.com”>Example Website</a>
A nofollow attribute applied to an external link looks like this:
<a href=”http://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Example Website</a>
The default setting for nofollow links in WordPress is not enabled. As an alternative, if you use the AIO SEO plugin, it will simplify the process for you.
If you wish to add a no-follow attribute to a link, click the Add “nofollow” button.
Full Posts vs Summaries or Excerpts
Your posts are displayed on many different pages in WordPress, including the home page, an archive of categories, archives of tags, archives of date, and author pages.
It is the standard behavior of these pages to display the entire article content by default. Your website’s search engine optimization may be negatively affected by search engines considering this duplicate content. Archive pages that contain full articles load more slowly as well.
Displaying full articles in all places also affects your page views. Subscribing to an RSS feed, for example, allows subscribers to view your complete article within their feed readers without ever visiting your website.
In order to resolve this problem, excerpts or summaries of the articles could be displayed instead of the complete articles.
By selecting Summary under Settings » Reading, you can do this.
Keeping WordPress SEO Speedy and Secure
If your website is slow, or if it is hacked, your ranking will be affected regardless of what WordPress SEO tips you follow.
We Describe how to prevent your website from being penalized by search engines due to slow performance or lax security.
Performance and Speed Optimization for Your Website
Human attention spans are shorter than the attention spans of goldfish due to the internet era.
Most users decide whether to stay on a website for the first few seconds after visiting it.
As a result, you have a limited amount of time to make your website engaging and interesting. Do not waste your visitors’ time by making them wait while your website loads.
Google prioritizes speedy websites because they are important to the user experience. As a result, websites with faster loading times appear higher in search results.
Having a fast WordPress hosting provider such as SiteGround or Bluehost is essential to improving your website’s performance.
SEO Image Optimization in WordPress
However, images are slower to load than text and are more engaging than text. Using images that are too large or of poor quality can affect the speed of your website.
If you wish your website to load faster, you should ensure that your images are optimized. In addition to descriptive titles and alt tags, you may also use these tools in order to optimize your images for search engines. Images with descriptions and alt tags are more likely to be found by search engines. They can also assist users with visual impairments by reading the alt text for them, as their screen readers are able to perform this task.
The title and alt tags can be easily specified for a WordPress image when the image is uploaded.
The use of a gallery plugin is essential for photographers or those who regularly upload images to their WordPress sites.
You should make use of the Envira Gallery. According to our tests, it is one of the fastest plugins for WordPress galleries. Moreover, it is fully responsive and is SEO compatible out of the box.
WordPress Site Must be secure and safe
As a result of Google’s weekly malware and phishing scans, about 20,000 websites are blacklisted each week. Blacklisted websites are not indexed by search engines.
Therefore, good rankings are largely dependent on the security of your WordPress website. In the event that your website is compromised by a hacker, all your hard work on SEO could be unnecessarily lost.
The good news is that maintaining security for your WordPress site is not very difficult. Our website is protected against attacks using Sucuri at WPBeginner.
HTTPS and SSL Should be Used
It is commonly referred to as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) which uses encryption to protect the connection between the user’s browser and the server to which the user wishes to connect. You can enhance the security of your WordPress website by using SSL encryption.
If a website is secured by SSL, a padlock will appear in the address bar of the browser. If you run a WordPress-powered online store and process sensitive financial information, these security measures will increase your website’s credibility and make it more trustworthy.
Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates are offered by all top WordPress hosting providers. Domain.com offers both wildcard and regular SSL certificates with security warranties.
SSL certificates supplied by them include a minimum-security warranty of $10,000 and a maximum security warranty of $1.75 million. Also included is a TrustLogo site seal that can be displayed on your website to add credibility.
SEO resources and tools
In order to be able to compete effectively, you will need to become familiar with the best practices of WordPress SEO.
We have assembled a list of the most important SEO plugins and tools available for WordPress in order to assist you in improving your organic search engine rankings. We have compiled an archive of articles on WordPress SEO if you are interested in learning more advanced SEO techniques.
This article contains information that can help you optimize your WordPress site for search engine optimization. You’ll see an increase in traffic within a few months after implementing some of these WordPress SEO tips.