This article covers the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) for WordPress sites. You will learn about the different areas of SEO, how to improve your site’s ranking in search results, and tips for using WordPress to its full potential for SEO. The main aim of WordPress SEO is to help you understand what people are searching for online, how they perform their searches, and finally how they will find the results they are looking for.
Searchers search for all kinds of things. Looking for something new to do? Check out this website for ideas on things to do, places to eat, and more. SEO is a process that allows you to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages. This, in turn, increases the amount of traffic your site receives from people who are searching for terms related to your business, products, or services.
Here’s a typical SEO-related WordPress question:
“How do I improve SEO on my WordPress site? Is there a plugin that can automate all the SEO work for me?
WordPress has impressive optimizations for SEO. To improve your WordPress site’s ranking in search engines, create high-quality content and follow some basic guidelines.
Getting The Most Out Of This Guide
This guide covers some of the basics of SEO as it relates to the WordPress ecosystem.
Backlinks are shown to be the most important ranking factor in SEO. Sites with low backlink profiles are facing more and more ranking troubles. Backlinks from other websites are the best kind of backlinks.
If you want to earn high quality links from good sites, you need to create good content. Links are essential for ranking highly in search engines.
This guide will help you understand how to create high quality content and address some of the technical SEO issues that a webmaster may face.
The first few chapters of this guide contain a lot of conceptual ideas. Feel free to grab a coffee and start there. or you can read the later chapters to find out what SEO steps you can take today to improve your website.
To make your experience more enjoyable, feel free to skip around, take notes, or dip in and out of this guide.
3 Key Concepts in SEO
3.1 Keyword Research
Keyword research is finding the best search queries to use for your content so it will rank higher. Use keywords that potential customers might search for when looking for a bike shop in your city.
Most SEO journeys begin with keyword research. Although choosing the right keywords is important, WordPress SEO is about much more than that.
Your work will involve creating content that is relevant and authoritative to the keywords you have selected. This is not as easy as it sounds.
Even though some people may not think it is important, keyword research is still a necessary part of the process.
When keeping this in mind, keyword research does not need to be difficult.
3.1.1 Picking a Keyword Tool
There are many SEO tools you can use to find keywords that will be beneficial for you to target. These tools can be either be free or paid for.
It is advisable that you search the web for a tool that works for you.
When looking for a tool, it is important to remember to keep an eye on keyword difficulty.
Different SEO tools measure keyword difficulty differently, but they all give you an estimate of the competition you would face in ranking for a given keyword.
Ranking for “mark twain” will be very difficult because many people want to rank for that keyword. A website like Wikipedia, which is popular and has a lot of backlinks, would be unlikely to be ranked lower than yours. It might be better to use a keyword like “best mark twain books” rather than a more general term.
3.1.2 Planning Out Your Content
Once you have a list of target keywords, it is best to sort them by difficulty and plan your content.
Some content planners might use a spreadsheet to keep track of a keyword and its various data in one place. You can choose whatever tool works best for you.
The most important thing is to have a single reliable source of information that you can use to plan how to best use your keywords in your content.
3.2 Searcher Intent
Searcher intent refers to the reasons why your ideal page visitors are searching for something on the internet. Your content should be focused on these queries in order to attract the right audience.
The goal is to do research on this topic and work what you learn into your content in a natural way.
3.2.1 What People Are Searching For
There are a variety of tools available that can help you determine what people are searching for on various search engines.
Some of these tools are free. Some of them cost hundreds of dollars a month.
One way to find out what people are searching for on Google is to start typing in a search query and look at the auto suggestions that come up. You’ll notice Google begins to auto-complete your query. That’s a hint.
Look at the top 3 or 4 results of your search and analyze those pages.
Take a look at:
- The words the page uses
- Any comments on the article
- How many headings are used?
- Is the keyword (search query) used in the title or level 2 headings?
3.3 Link Building
There are many strategies for building links to your site’s pages. Some are more organic than others.
The idea behind link building is to have more links on the web pointing to your site in order to improve your search engine rankings.
The initiative mentioned is all about link building, which can be achieved through proper keyword planning, searcher intent, and solid content. You would have a hard time getting any links if you didn’t have those things.
But larger link-building campaigns might involve some mix of the following:
- Reaching out to complimentary sites, asking if they might consider linking to you
- Guest posting content on other websites
- Contributing your knowledge in forums and niche communities
All of these outreach strategies require some amount of effort, mostly in the form of labor needed to make these connections.
The effort you put in can really pay off if you get a lot of links to your website.
The other great cost of link building is making sure your site earns high-quality links. You need to be careful about the types of sites you get links from so that you don’t end up with links from low-quality sites. This could actually hurt your rankings in search engines.
3.4 On-page vs technical vs outreach
Different people have different opinions about how to optimize a website for search engines. You may come across different articles, courses or videos that focus on different strategies and efforts.
But the majority of every day get-your-hands-dirty SEO comes down to a few basic tenets:
- Content
- User experience
- Technical issues
- Promotion
You need good content to be successful, but it is not the only thing you need. Mobile responsiveness is a factor in search engine rankings because it affects the user experience.
You may also have technical issues with your site, such as crawl errors and HTTP errors.
It will be difficult to increase the number and quality of links to your site without some kind of promotional effort. We will discuss these issues in more detail later on in the guide.
3.5 Schema Markup
If you have ever tried to find a recipe on Google, you may have noticed that the search engine not only provides links to websites, but also displays the recipe on a top-ranking page. If your website includes rich snippets, it is more likely to appear higher in search results.
Schema is a code (semantic vocabulary) that you can add to your website to help search engines better understand your site’s content. Adding schema markup to your website can help search engines display rich snippets—which can include things like customer ratings, prices, and images—for your site in search results. Schema markup can be placed either in your page templates or by using SEO plugins.
Top SEO Tips for WordPress
1) Optimizing Your URL Structure
If you use WordPress, you may have heard of the term “Permalink”. This is a fancy term for the URL structure. By default, WordPress uses a permalink structure that is not as aesthetically pleasing as it could be. For example, it might look something like this: example.com/?p=123. Wouldn’t it be better for both SEO and users if the URL was formatted as example.com/title-of-the-post/?
The good news is that there is an easy solution. Go to your WordPress Admin page and select Settings >> Permalinks. The URL structure can be changed here. In my opinion, I prefer the Postname setting, but you can also change it to a Custom Structure if you like.
When you change the Permalink Structure, all your existing links will change and google will no longer be able to find the correct post. This will result in a drop in organic traffic. The most effective way to handle this issue is to use 301 redirects to direct traffic from the old posts to the new ones. If your site has a limited number of posts, you can set up 301 redirects using the .htaccess file. If you have too many posts to redirect, you can use third-party plugins like Change Permalink Helper. I have had great success with it.
A tip for making your post more effective is to edit the permalink to remove unimportant words. This will make the title more direct and straightforward. To create a content post titled “The Most Common Misconceptions about the Mayan Apocalypse,” edit the permalink to read “common-misconceptions-mayan-apocalypse.” It is best to keep the text all in lowercase letters and to avoid using any special characters or spaces – usually WordPress will take care of this for you.
2) What SEO Plugins Should I Use with WordPress?
Yoast’s amazing WordPress SEO plugin has made it so we don’t need a lot of different plugins to do things like add Facebook OpenGraph, sitemaps, breadcrumbs, rel=”next” & rel=”prev” for paginated archives, and more. This all-in-one plugin takes care of it all.
Configuration is important, so take your time to do it right. There are many guides available on how to get started with using a content management system (CMS), such as this one by ManageWP. The News and Video module might also be something you want to add to your site if you offer that kind of content.
Kudos to Yoast for regularly releasing updates to fix common bugs with his plugin. It’s one of my favorite plugins on WordPress.
Adding internal links helps to strengthen your internal pages. The search utility that is set as the default option does not show results that would be relevant to what you are looking for. This plugin, called Better Internal Link Search, will make your life a lot easier.
How important is page speed? It’s important to Google and it’s important to site visitors. There are various tools you can use, like Pingdom or Yslow, to analyze how your WordPress site performs compared to others. A CDN, or content delivery network, could be a good option for you if you have the money to invest in it. CDNs deliver content to your visitors from different parts of the world, which could help improve your website’s load times. You can improve your website’s speed by using a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache. Caching stores pages as they are loaded so they can be served more quickly the next time they are accessed.
A plugin like Better WordPress Minify can help speed up your website by minifying your CSS and JavaScript files.
3) Schema.org microdata on WordPress
If you’ve been paying attention to your Google search results lately, you’ve probably noticed the Rich Snippet data that’s been appearing more and more often. If you want to improve your website’s appearance in search engine results pages, you can use the Schema Creator plugin by Raven to add rich snippet data to your posts. They support the following markup
- Person
- Product
- Even
- Organization
- Movie
- Book
- Review
- Recipe
Hopefully, more markup gets added in to that soon. If you want to add Schema.org markup to your WordPress site, this plugin is an easy way to do it. Unless, of course, you want to add it to your WordPress installation’s core theme.
4) Keep an Eye on Your Plugins and Theme
Although WordPress is stable and exceptional on its own, it is further augmented by the availability of a wide variety of themes and plugins. We can make a WordPress site for any requirement. I learned an important lesson a while ago: Plugins can break your site and make it very slow.
I was a little exaggerating, but listen to what I have to say. After updating your theme or plugins, it is a good idea to check if everything is working properly to avoid future issues.
I really enjoy Yoast’s SEO plugin, however a couple months ago when I tried using it on a site, the plugin kept spouting out 404 errors for categories and tags. I was lucky to get a notification from Google Webmasters Tools. After going through it, I was able to fix the issue. If you find yourself in a difficult situation, the best place to go is the WordPress community forum.
5) Webmasters Tools and Analytics
Google’s Analytics package is excellent and comes in the form of Google Analytics. Both Google and Bing offers feature packed Webmasters tools. I strongly suggest you implement these options on your website if you want to be able to track this data and don’t have any other way to do so. The Yoast Plugin should help you set up Webmaster tools. Yoast has a plugin for analytics that allows you to easily set up tracking on your site.
Here are some simple tips to help you set up your WordPress site to improve your ranking in search engine results pages. I’m new here at SEJ, and I hope you all find my first article useful. I would also recommend reading the article on SEOmoz by Dan from Evolvingseo for more great tips on WordPress SEO. I promise to try and answer any questions or comments you have about the article in the comments section below.
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