These days content creators, business people, writers, and bloggers use WordPress to make their websites. WordPress provides them with templates and themes for their websites. It keeps a track of website traffic for them. But to get that traffic to your website, you will need to understand how WordPress SEO works. 

Users who are new to WordPress find it hard to get traffic to their website because they do not fully understand the SEO guidelines that WordPress has. As a result, their website does not rank on the first page of the search engine. They might post relatable and practical content consistently. They may use all the engagement strategies. Despite all of that, if the website does not follow the SEO guidelines, not many people will be able to see it. Therefore, these content creators or business people would not see growth on their WordPress websites. 

If you post your content by following the SEO criteria of both WordPress and Google, your website will eventually have increased traffic. From there you will have to keep the consistency, create a unique experience for yourself and your audience. 

In this article, we have summarized the ways you can make your WordPress website SEO friendly. These practices ensure that your readers do not have to a hundred places to find your website link. When you use SEO friendly practices, the chances of increasing your audience is better. 

What is WordPress SEO? 

If you are a frequent internet user, then you must be aware of the name – WordPress. WordPress has become a household name. Many people have tried their hand at blogging through it. More than that, many people are now creating their websites on it. It is the most basic and simple content management system through which you can make a website about your business. 

This platform is favoured by many people because they can put their services or content out in the world of the internet without learning any of the coding languages. 

WordPress provides you with a platform that can cater to your many needs. You can choose themes, colours, backgrounds, fonts, website pages, and so on. Unfortunately, its system does not help in ranking your website on Google. To rank your website in the top searches on the Google search page, you should know WordPress SEO. 

Now, you may ask, “What is SEO?” It stands for Search Engine Optimization; and, to understand it in the simplest terms, you can consider it to be the way your website would appear in search results of any search engine. 

WordPress SEO does not require any technical knowledge on your part. But you still need to put your efforts in and not leave everything up to WordPress. Your website should have great content, useful posts, backlinks, and a unique story to it. You should know the popular keywords and where it ranks. You should also ensure that there are no technical issues that your website is facing. 

SEO in WordPress

There are many people on the internet who have given their insights on how to excel at WordPress SEO. What might have worked for them, would not necessarily work for you. It might be because of what your content is about and how many people are searching for that content. If your content is good, then all you will need is to would methodologically use SEO on WordPress to increase your website’s Search Engine Results Page ranking. 

Here is what you need to pay attention to for having an SEO Friendly WordPress Website.

• Use specific categories and tags: If you think that using as many tags and categories will boost your website’s ranking, then you are thinking wrong. Using too many tags on your post is not a good practice. Websites that use too many categories and tags are banned from the reader topics page on WordPress. 

• Know keyword analytics: Many content creators think that putting the keyword in every line would put their site at the top of search results. But that is not how the Google algorithm works. Putting too many keywords in a post does not help the website in ranking. At worse, your website could get banned by Google for stuffing keywords. 

• Use a few links: Just like you should know where and when keywords can be applied, you should know where to put the links. Be it the internal links or the external links, they should be included in your posts in a natural and organic manner. 

• You don’t need an expert: Small business websites and bloggers do not need to have an SEO expert to handle the website rankings. Only big business corporations require professional experts because they have bigger targets to achieve. 

WordPress SEO Tips and Best Practices 

Keep in mind the following WordPress SEO tips for better rankings:

• Choose an SEO friendly theme: A theme might look good for the content you are posting, but that doesn’t mean it will help the Google algorithm. To find SEO friendly themes, you will have to see how the website performs with them. If the website does not slow down with the selected theme, then you are good to go. 

• Change visibility settings: Changing the visibility settings will allow Google to index your website pages. In the settings menus, under the readability tag, you should tick mark the visibility setting option. This would enable the site to get a rank on the Google search page. 

• Think about the title: A good title is what will make the audience click on your posts. The title should not be clickbait-y. It should make people a little curious to find what information the whole article or blog post would provide them. 

• Use the heading formats: Headings will give the page a decent format. It will make the page look clean, and it will allow the readers to know the important points. From the different types of headings, people use H1, H2, and H3 the most. H1 tag is used for the text that is the highlight of the post. Whereas the other two headings are used for the subheadings.

• Use internal links: Internal links are used to keep the audience on your website. These links when clicked will take the reader to another post that is posted on your website only. 

• Use alt text for images: This enables Google to know what the image is about, and it boosts the ranking of the page. When you use this, the image does not break either. Therefore, the overall page looks well structured. 

How to Optimize WordPress SEO 

You should not let your efforts mean go to waste. When you have paid attention to the details of keywords, tags, links, and themes, there are certain technicalities you should use for a better ranking on search engines. As mentioned earlier, these are not too hard to conceptualize. 

• Choose a domain: The domain name may not affect SEO much. But, Google thinks differently. The Google algorithm looks at domains differently. Naturally, when a website is created, its domain follows the “www” format. The owner can choose to use a “non – www” domain format. The difference isn’t much. Both formats can work together. However, WordPress can divert the traffic to the domain that has a better online presence. 

• Set a permalink: Permalink allows the user to change the URL of website pages. The URLs that mention the page content in the links happen to be SEO-friendly. Another bonus is that they are easy to read. For example – www.colourofyellow/45tghysp00002 is hard to read, but www.colourofyellow/beach-trip is easier. 

• Check the comments manually: Comments on website pages affects SEO at great length. Comments are not something you want to avoid thinking too much about. But ignoring comments can be bad for rankings. Comments with grammatical or spelling errors impact the page rankings. Therefore, you should always choose to manually resolve the comments. This way you can also remove offensive comments that are not critical but plainly hurtful. 

• Select a plugin: This is where you need to be extremely careful. Many website owners have a bad habit of installing too many plugins on their website pages. This behaviour, again, harms the SERP rankings. Therefore, when you want to set plugins, select from ones that are best for SEO. For instance, you can choose from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, Broken LinkA link is a connection that let you jump from a webpage to another. It can be attached to pieces of text, images or HTML elements and it's actually a..., CheckerWP, or Super Cache.

In Conclusion

Your content needs an audience. And the audience needs to see your content. One of the ways they will be able to see the content is when you know the basics of SEO. 

When you launch a website on the platform of WordPress, you see how easy it is to do everything. From making drafts, adding photos, picking colours and themes, to organizing your content. But while you celebrate all these beneficial things that WordPress provides you with, you forget about one thing. WordPress SEO is not as easy as the other functions of the platform. 

Search Engine Optimization on WordPress requires the website owner to recognize what works for them. SEO improves the SERP ranking of a website. 

Good SEO practices that work well with WordPress and Google allows a website page to rank on Google without too much trouble. 

Although SEO on WordPress has to be looked over by the website owner, they do not have to master the technology behind it. 

But that also does not mean they should go overboard with everything. Google algorithm favour unique content that is not filled with excess input on the website. 

Moreover, as a WordPress site owner, your job is not to sit in front of the computer and code. 

That has already been done for you. But nothing is wrong with tweaking a few details. Your website domain, the permalink, and plugins need your attention.  

To be good at SEO, you as the website owner do not need to consult or hire an expert. As a blogger, a small business person, or a content creator, you just need to understand a few basics of WordPress SEO. These are mostly common points that would not take much time to practice and shine at.