Whether you’re launching a new blog site or managing a complex business website, your success depends on traffic-a steady stream of visitors who engage with the content you offer. To achieve this, search engine optimization, or SEO, is crucial to attracting readers, customers, and clients to your site, but making a new WordPress site as searchable as possible can seem overwhelming, especially if you’re not familiar with website development and SEO strategies. With options ranging from the settings menu in your site’s admin dashboard to free and premium plugins that perform all the essential SEO functions, WordPress offers a number of user-friendly tools for improving a site’s searchability. Below are some of our favorite tips for improving your WordPress website’s SEO.
SEO is for every website
Leading search engines like Google and Bing work with a system of complex algorithms to determine what makes a website rank highly on search pages. These systems are constantly changing, but the core elements of search engine optimization remain the same: relevant keywords, quality links, and the amount of complex, useful content on the site. As the digital world turns, new criteria are also added. For example, Google now considers a site’s mobile responsiveness in its ranking criteria, and to promote high-quality content, longer articles and information-rich posts are ranked higher than shorter content.
Although it is not given to most website owners to know all aspects of search engine ranking systems, any WordPress site can be thoroughly optimized at any level to achieve maximum search visibility. Optimizing SEO on WordPress is really quite simple if you understand the basic principles of search engine optimization. From the title and permalinks of your site to the content of your posts, pages and media, it is possible to make any WordPress site more visible in organic searches with tools from WordPress itself, even if you are not an expert in SEO or web development.
WordPress settings support SEO
WordPress was designed as a platform for online publishing, and that means it’s inherently search-friendly, with an extensive set of built-in, basic SEO tools that anyone can use to improve a site’s searchability at any level. In the user-friendly settings section of the site’s admin dashboard, you can add elements that improve searchability and boost search engine rankings using the many customization options available.
Keyword-rich website titles and taglines
Every part of your website can play a role in boosting your search visibility, and it starts with the site name. When you install a new WordPress theme, the Appearance tab gives you the option to set the title and tagline, both of which are searchable. Adding keywords to these two lines whenever possible can make your site more search-friendly – especially if your domain name itself doesn’t include keywords or a description of your site.
Link Management
Each page and post on your site has its own unique URL, but the standard WordPress format is to simply assign a series of numbers to each piece of content. Adding keywords to these permalinks can help make individual pages searchable. From the Settings tab in your dashboard, select Permalinks and choose a structure from the available options that include elements of your post and page titles – which should also include keywords relevant to your niche.
Quality links help improve search rankings, and these include internal links as well as backlinks from external websites that point to your site and its content. For each post or page you create, add links within the content to other pages or posts on the site, such as archived posts or pages that add more information.
Optimize content with keywords
Every piece of content on your site, from bios and about pages to posts, pages and media, offers opportunities for SEO. Including keywords – especially “long tail” or keyword phrases – in all types of content as well as in titles, tags and descriptions can help increase visibility in organic searches in a natural way.
Media optimization
Images and media can also be optimized for SEO by adding keyword-rich titles, captions and “alt” text from your site’s media management tools. By adjusting these settings when adding an image or embedding video or audio into the site, further opportunities to increase the searchability of a site can be added.
SEO Plugins: a complete solution
WordPress itself offers many ways to optimize a site for search, but this can be a time-consuming process. A number of SEO plugins offer comprehensive, advanced SEO management for every part of your site, with free and premium versions of SEO plugin options, such as All in One SEO Pack, JetPack and Yoast, available from the WordPress plugin directory and third-party developers from around the world.
Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins with tools that allow you to make sure that every part of your website is SEO friendly. The free version of this SEO plugin can be installed from the WordPress plugin directory and adds customizable SEO settings to your WordPress dashboard for all content on your website.
Yoast SEO includes tools to set a keyword-rich meta description on posts and pages, and analyzes each piece of content for the keywords you list. Well-optimized content gets a green light, poor content turns red, and a yellow light means the piece needs improvement. Yoast and similar plugins also offer premium versions with more features that address specific needs, such as Yoast’s local SEO extension, which tracks your site’s visibility in local searches, and video SEO, which specifically optimizes video content. With such extensions, SEO plugins can save time and effort and ensure that all parts of your website are optimized.
WordPress makes up almost a third of the world’s websites, and it was designed to follow SEO best practices. From the tools available in each site’s dashboard to the many plugins that support site-wide search engine optimization, WordPress was designed with SEO in mind.
