What is WordPress?
WordPress is an exceptional content management system, or CMS, that allows you to design, create and manage a website easily, with certain customizable features and templates that provide the backdrop for your own online platform! Website building used to be extremely hard, with technical aspects only being designed and created by those who understood every facet and feature of web programming. While there are still many who design and create websites using these technical properties, programmes like Word Press allow for the average person to be able to go ahead and create and manage their own website! WordPress uses plugin features that allow for you to set up a webpage using predestined templates and construct your page using these features, while still being able to customise enough to make the website your own! This platform is great for beginners and small business owners who do not yet have the capacity to be able to build their own websites, or the funding to be able to purchase one, as it allows for you to create, public and manage your own space easily.
What is WordPress SEO?
SEO on WordPress websites offer another way that the average person can gain traction without having to spend a ton of money and WordPress is considered to be one of the best content management systems for optimising your content. The WordPress platform makes it extremely easy to manage and add search engine optimisation elements within your content, ensuring that you have the best chance possible to rank highly and get more visitors to your website. Though search engines are not actually designed to monitor which CMS you are using, nor do they have a favourite that ranks higher than others, WordPress does allow for many different SEO elements to be included and the websites that are created from this platform are easily accessible to search engine crawlers who crawl and manage search engine results pages. SEO friendly themes and plugins are two elements that are considered to be extremely beneficial, and it is important that you use each and everyone effectively when designing and creating your webpage.
Is WordPress Free For Users?
Like many different platforms and content management systems, WordPress has both a free and a paid-for subscription offer that is available for users. When using WordPress, it is also important to note that you need to pay for hosting and for a domain in order to better customise your website, though even taking this all into account it is by far one of the most affordable content managements systems around! When it comes to creating and designing websites, it can be extremely challenging to find an affordable way to create and manage your website, which is why the few expenses that come from having to get a host and a domain pale in comparison to the price you would normally pay for a website!
Is WordPress Important for SEO?
WordPress is a CMS that works to ensure that your webpage uses SEO friendly tactics to draw the attention of search engine crawlers and increase rankings on search engine results pages. WordPress considers SEO to be extremely important, and many of the different features and plugins that have been designed by the platform have been specifically enhanced to ensure that a webpage is SEO friendly! There are many features apart from plugins and templates that enhance the SEO capability of WordPress webpages, things like site speed and even customizable metadata are all influential in increasing the search engine optimisation of a page.
What are The Basics of WordPress SEO?
The SEO setup for WordPress and the various SEO WordPress improvements that can be done as you are developing and creating your WordPress content all starts with a few basics. the following are the first things you should be thinking of when you are optimising your content and website to rank highly on search engines!
Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider
One of the purchases you will have to make when setting up your WordPress webpage is a hosting provider. These providers work behind the scenes and are repsponsible for things like page speed and even your security. A website provider is responsible for making sure that your page is uploaded to the world wide web and it is therefore extremely important that you make sure that you are using one that is reliable! Picking the host that offers the best deal or cheapest price may harm you in the future as technical and performance issues could cause your SEO and search engines results page rankings to drop significantly.
Install SEO Friendly WordPress Theme
One of the best ways to ensure that your webpage is optimised with SEO friendly features is to use a theme that contains only the plugins and features that you are hoping to choose. This ensures that your website is not bogged down with plugins that are never used, some of which you may not even know about! This CMS has thousands of different choices for users to choose from, and it can get overwhelming having to go through each one and decide on whether or not the theme is one that would work for you. Luckily, there are different kinds of tools that can be used to monitor the effectiveness of the theme and whether or not it would be SEO friendly for your website.
Install WordPress SEO Plugin
Though most of the work is done behind the scenes, you can further optimise your website by adding an additional SEO plugin to your webpage. These WordPress SEO plugins are tasked with monitoring and updating you on features that could impact the effectiveness of your SEO, with each different kind of plugin having different features and ways that they monitor your website. It is important to go through and have a look at each of the different types of plugins so that you find the one perfectly suited to what you are hoping to achieve.
Check Your Websites Visibility Settings
Many CMS platforms stop websites from being ranked while they are in development, this ensures that your webpage will not be crawled while you are still adding in your various elements. Once your webpage is completed, however, you are going to want to remove these settings so that your webpage can be crawled and indexed by search engine crawlers. You are able to manually change these settings by checking your search engine visibility in your settings, there is a checkbox that you can click on that will make your webpage visible to search engine crawlers, ensuring that your webpage is indexed and ranked accordingly.
Enable SEO Friendly Permalinks
Having your webpage be referred to as www.domain.com in no way tells users what your webpage is about nor will it help to attract search engine bots to rank your webpage highly. Permalinks ensure that even though your domain name may sound a bit arbitrary, users will be able to see your webpage name! you will want to choose the ‘post name’ setting as this offers the most simple version of your webpage name for users to see.
Verify Your Site in Google Search Console
Another great way to ensure that your webpage is SEO friendly is to make sure that you verify your website on the Google search console. This Google service allows website owners to track their indexing status and make adjustments according to their placements on search engine results pages. This ensures that as you are optimising and adjusting SEO features on your webpage, you are able to actively monitor whether they are helping you rank higher! Another great thing to make sure you do is to submit your sitemap to Google as this will also help ensure that you are making it as easy as possible for search engine crawlers to index your webpage.
What are The WordPress SEO Tips and Best Practices?
When it comes to WordPress SEO rank, it is important that you include a number of different elements to highlight your web page and attract the attention of search engine crawlers. the following WordPress SEO tips and tricks and WordPress SEO checklist can help you to make sure that your WordPress page is as efficient and as effective as possible!
Do Keyword Research
One of the best WordPress SEO tips to make sure that you use is that you should put time and effort into your keyword research. This WordPress on-page SEO feature is one of the top-ranking features that search engine crawlers will look for and the keywords and phrases you have used within the content on your page is incredibly important. There are tons of different SEO tools that specialise in helping you find the perfect keywords to suit your requirements, some are even capable of scouring your nearest competitors webpage to find keywords that they use that could help you!
Create Custom URLs for Pages and Posts
Custome permalinks are extremely useful and they offer users the chance to change the default page URLs, which may be long or not have anything to do with the topic, and customise them to create their own. This customisation helps not only the users who are looking for specific content to better read and understand what your webpage is about but it also allows for search engine crawlers to associate your page with better search engine results pages, ones that may be better suited to your webpage!
Optimize Headers
Search engines are all about structure, and web pages that have a well-defined structure, one that uses headings and title tags, is far easier to read and will therefore rank higher than pages that are just a jumble of content. Different headings stand for different things, and H1 and title tags can inform a search engine and the readers who make their way to your page, what the content is about without having to go and search for things like keywords and other on-page SEO elements. By optimising headings, you are ensuring that your content is clearly defined and will be easily found through searches!
Create Unique Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions are another SEO ranking factor that helps search engine crawlers to determine what your page is about and what searches to rank it for. Having unique and optimised title tags and descriptions will ensure that your page will be easy to find and that the searches that it is ranked for are good quality searches, ones that match what your content is about. Having broad and common title tags and meta descriptions can lead to your page being ranked for things that it does not match with, for example, if you are selling apples and your title tags and meta descriptions are about vegetables, you may be opening yourself up to be placed on pages where your content does not match the search results.
Use Internal Links
Another great thing about using WordPress is that it allows for you to create internal links, from one webpage to another. This creates relevancy between different pages and can help users to better navigate through your website, easily making their way from one page to another. Anything that ensures that a user is going to have an easy experience with your webpage will count in your favour, and search engines like Google appreciate when users are able to easily navigate through a webpage! This is therefore an important aspect to make sure you include, and with WordPress, it is extremely easy to add in WordPress seo internal links.
Add Alt Text to Images
Adding relevant images to your webpage is important and optimizing them to give context and their descriptions ensures that adding in these images will not go unnoticed by search engines. By adding alt text to your images, you are offering a way for search engine crawlers to better understand what the image is and how it is relevant to your content. This ensures that your image can add to your SEO and may even help to increase your rankings on search engine results pages! Another reason why adding alt text to images is such an important addition to make sure you include in your content is that it can help your visually impaired readers to understand what the image is. This text should therefore be straightforward and easy to understand!
What Are Advanced WordPress SEO Tips?
Install a Cache Plugin
Website speed is one of the top-ranking factors that search engine crawlers will look at and pages that are incredibly slow to load will not be ranked well. not only will they not be ranked highly, but if they are found by searchers, the slow load time often causes people to leave the page without even looking at the content! This can be detrimental to your webpage and will cause your rankings to drop even lower. By installing a cache plugin, you are able to increase the speed that your page loads and can positively influence how a user experiences your webpage! We have all been in a situation where a webpage is just not loading and we eventually get tired of waiting and just go find another source. Make sure that this is not what happens when visitors make their way to your page and install one of the many different cache plugins available!
Noindex Label Pages and Low-Value Content
There are many things that you include on your page that you may not want to be indexed, smaller parts of your page that may be useful within the content but do not necessarily need to contribute to your SEO. It is important that you make sure that this content cannot be indexed by search engine crawlers as it may impact your rankings and send lower quality traffic to your webpage. There are many SEO plugins that allow for users to apply non-index tags to the content that they do not want to be indexed by search engines, and this tag is located in Taxonomies.
Use Schema Formatting
Context is becoming an aspect of SEO that is more important than ever and there are now ways to enhance your content by including contextual information to better improve the organic traffic that makes its way to your web page. By using schema formatting, you are able to better present your information for search engine crawlers, who can then use the contextual information to send high-quality traffic to your webpage. There is an assortment of SEO plugins that can help to arrange this information and label your content accordingly.
Use Updated Data
Nowadays, it is simply not enough to release your content and consider your work to be done, you have to constantly update it with new and relevant information. If you show users the date the content was last updated on the search engine results page, not the publication date, you are able to give users confidence with regards to the timeliness and reliability of the information you have provided. This shows both users and search engine crawlers that the information on your webpage is completely reliable and not based on data that may not be relevant.
What are The Best SEO Plugins For WordPress?
Yoast SEO
One of the best SEO plugins for WordPress is Yoast SEO. This plugin contains an assortment of different features that can help improve your WordPress webpages efficacy, effectiveness and it can even help you to improve your content! This is one of the top suggested plugins from WordPress and it is available to users in either a free or paid for the package, the paid-for package offers exclusive features for users to use! Yoast SEO is able to help you structure your data in a way that is great for users making their way to your webpage and the search engine crawlers who crawl and index your webpage. With Yoast SEO to help you manage and create your WordPress webpage, you can be sure that you will rank highly and draw in tons of high-quality organic traffic.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO)
For those beginners who are hoping for an easy platform to use with their WordPress webpage, the All In One SEO plugin offers an easy to use interface with tons of features that can help improve the quality of your webpage. One very specific All In One feature is the All in One Schema Rich Snippets. This feature is one of the top to use for those who are hoping to improve their webpage through the use of schema formatting. This schema formatting tool is easy to implement and offers users the chance to implement many different schema types, from identifying certain products to even indicating reviews! For easy SEO plugins for WordPress, look no further than the AIOSEO!
SemRush Writing Assistant
A Semrush writing assistant is a fantastic tool that helps you to monitor the effectiveness of your content by scoring it according to certain criteria. this score can then be used to analyse and improve your content and help to make it more SEO friendly. this tool is extremely useful as it can ensure you make adjustments to content and fix certain mistakes before it is crawled by search engines and indexed, saving you a ton of time and ensuring that your website is gaining rankings as soon as it is published! This writing tool is one of the top features used on SemRush and it can really help you to improve on the validity, relevance and structure of the content on your webpage. Along with producing the writing assistant, the SemRush plugin has many other great features that can improve your web page SEO!
Google Search Console
If you are hoping to gain traction on Google, using the Google search console plugin tool can go a long way to helping you achieve your goals! With the automatic SEO WordPress features that can help you to manage and create content that is specifically optimised for Google search engine crawlers, the Google search console is slowly becom9ng a top plugin to use when creating a WordPress website. With tons of different features that can be used, its no wonder why Google search console is noted as one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress sites!
Ahrefs
One SEO WordPress booster that has been known to help many different WordPress sites gain traction is Ahrefs. This specific plugin has been designed to monitor backlinks and also audit your content. this can help website owners manage their technical SEO elements and gain feedback on whether or not they need to improve their backlinks and data. Ahrefs is a very popular SEO tool and it can help with many other features on your webpage, from the very beginning when you are designing it to when the page is already launched! Many consider this to be one of the top SEO tools to use!
Rank Math
For those who are a bit more experienced and are hoping to dig a bit deeper into the analytical features that make your WordPress page tick should consider using Rank Math. This SEO plugin tool is highly effective and can help marketers and webpage designers to better understand the behind the scenes elements that are important when it comes to optimisation. The different features and tools in this plugin can help you to determine issues and monitor your progress over time.
Schema Pro
One of the best SEO techniques for WordPress is schema formatting and the Schema Pro is one of the best tools to do this! By using schema Pro, you are able to better present your information for search engine crawlers, who can then use the contextual information to send high-quality traffic to your webpage. The schema pro works to analyse content and help you to better contextualise your data, ensuring that both search engines and users are able to better understand your content. This also works to bring high-quality organic traffic to your web page.
KeywordTool.io
Keywords in WordPress SEO are very important, and they are noted to be one of the top on-page SEO factors to consider when designing your content. The Keywordtool.io helps users to find the best keywords for their content while also managing the effectiveness of these words over time, informing you as they become more popular or if it is time to change them out. using this tool is an easy way to keep your content up to date with the latest trends and analyse whether or not your content is still relevant! This is an important SEO feature when it comes to WordPress and it is, therefore, a very valuable tool to have in your corner!
