How To Begin With WordPress SEO?

WordPress has made it incredibly easy to build websites. As a leading CMS, WordPress allows marketers to create, manage, and publish SEO-friendly content. However, just having a WordPress website isn’t guaranteed to get page one results. Getting the best features, themes, and plugins alone won’t magically boost the website traffic and rankings. Therefore, WordPress websites are no exception and require a potent SEO strategy.

This blog will cover the suggested ways one should consider while building an SEO strategy for a WordPress website. After reading this blog, you’ll be confident in building a WordPress SEO strategy for your business.

WordPress SEO Strategies Everyone Should Know Of

Even with a WordPress website, there are some SEO strategies required. Some of the more common WordPress SEO strategies are discussed below:

1. SEO-Friendly WordPress Theme

A theme shouldn’t be about looking the prettiest but that’s what most individuals go for. However, it should be well noted that SEO friendly WordPress theme is what the business owners should go for. A perfect SEO theme can include:

• The theme should have a standard or a simple layout making it convenient for the users to navigate.
• A responsive WordPress theme enhances the overall user experience and therefore, it should be considered when choosing a WordPress theme.
• A clean code with fewer CSS and Javascript files will decrease the page loading times and fasten the crawling process of the search bots exponentially. Therefore, also look for this trait while choosing a WordPress theme.

 2. Choose Your Favored Domain

There are two ways a domain can get chosen, one is www and the second way is everything except www. WWW came standard while creating a website but that’s not the case anymore. In this regard, there’s no SEO benefit whether the website is www or non-www.

However, for a larger business, it’s preferred to have a www website. The reason for that is the traffic can be redirected with a www website for a failover.

3. Say Yes To Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are often found at the top of the website or under the navigation bar. With a Yoast SEO plugin, it should take less than 5 minutes to install breadcrumbs on a business website. Follow these steps to install breadcrumbs:

• Move to Yoast SEO and Search Appearance
• Go to Breadcrumbs and simply click on Enabled.

Breadcrumbs make any website rank higher as it increases the navigation of the website. For user-friendly navigation, breadcrumbs are essential. Hence, before exiting the page, breadcrumbs encourage users to visit more pages of the website, and thus they also reduce the bounce rate. That’s any day good for SEO.

4. Select SEO Friendly Plugins

A business doesn’t require a set or a dozen of plugins. However, the right ones are certainly needed. On a WordPress website, a bunch of overloaded plugins can come with their baggage. Several plugins can lead to code bloat, non-semantic code, and heavy markup that can drastically reduce the speed of the page, thus hampering user experience. This makes the website less user-friendly or less SEO friendly.

 So, a plugin for a WordPress website should be simple and one that serves the purpose. Its job should be to make a website more user-friendly and enhance the overall SEO performance of the website.

5. Remove Pages Using Your Robots.txt Files

A messed-up robots.txt file can wreak havoc on the technical aspects of the website. Many marketers don’t understand the basics of the robots.txt file.

Robots.txt should make it simpler for the search engines to index your website. The disallow sections of the website should also be carefully chosen while creating a robots.txt file. However, as per experts, the robots.txt file should not be chosen to indicate to the bots how to crawl the website. There are some of the pages that should be carefully considered in the robots.txt file:

• Thank you pages
• Login pages or any page having admin access.
• Categories
• Archive
• Tags

6. Fasten The Website

Site speed is one of the most vital technical ranking factors of Google. Whether local, national, or E-commerce SEO, site speed plays a crucial role in any website’s SEO. A website’s site speed can be increased by:

1. Compress Bigger Images

Large images tend to slow down a website and can take the loading times to the next age. Web software or even plugins can be added to compress the images on the website.

2. A Caching Plugin To Reduce Server Load

To create HTML versions of dynamic pages, caching plugins can be used. They significantly reduce page loading times. Several free and paid options are available in the market

3. Get Rid Of Outdated Page Elements

Getting rid of outdated page elements such as avoidable database calls should be deleted as quickly as possible. Also, get rid of old themes as hackers might try to exploit them and attack your website.

7. Secure The Website With HTTPS

Google gives preference to websites with HTTPS. The security of the website is one of the major SEO ranking factors of Google. Not just from an SEO point of view, but exposing hackers to sensitive data can do some serious damage to any business.

To secure your website, simply enable HTTPS. A secure website is HTTPS whereas a non-secured website is HTTP. HTTPS websites are ranked higher because the search engines want to display those websites in the search results that are secure. Various tools and WordPress plugins can aid the user in converting a website from HTTP to HTTPS.

8. Optimize Website Content

Content of a website plays a vital role, be it WordPress or a non WordPress website. Content is what brings readers to the website. So, certainly, it helps businesses generate leads or traffic.

Not only this but the content is a vital SEO factor and search engines value high quality content. Writing valuable content for the audience and resolving user intent is the key. From blog posts to infographics, cover the pain points of your audience, and resolve their queries or doubts.

However, after writing the content the next task is always to optimize the On-page parameters. Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress makes the On-page process convenient for marketers such as optimizing page images, headings, meta tags, etc. It simply colors codes areas for improvement and areas that require no changes.

Conclusion

To sum up, WordPress websites are no exception and require SEO measures just like any other website. The steps that are explained in this blog should be carefully executed and if done well, can render positive results for any business’s WordPress website. Add these measures and more to your WordPress website SEO and you will see a positive outcome in some time.