WordPress is one of the best content management system when it comes to SEO. Although WordPress sites have the highest possibility of getting ranked on search engines, it doesn’t mean that you will not optimize or spend time on your hosting and WordPress SEO.
If you are like the many users around the world believing that your default installation of WordPress without making any changes will get your site on the top of the search engine ranking, you believe the wrong thing.
Just like the other sites on the web you really need to do something to make it SEO-friendly. That’s being said it’s not that hard to make your WordPress site be SEO-friendly. With a lot of themes, plugins, tricks and conventions on the web, you can definitely do it in a small amount of time.
Whether you are a serious WordPress publisher with specific goal on the web or just planning to start a blog this article is for you. This article will be a guide on how you can build your WordPress SEO-friendly site.
I. SEO-Friendly WordPress Themes
How the site was built have a greater factor on the SEO. When choosing a WordPress theme for your site, selecting and using an SEO optimized WordPress theme is important.
But the how do you know if a Theme is SEO Friendly?
“SEO friendly” has been used as a sales term for a long time on the web however if you are not developer or SEO, it is difficult to determine which one is the real SEO friendly theme.
Since the SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) is the one who is responsible for checking the on and off-page SEO, it is really important to let them check the theme first before buying it. Of course it won’t be for free. However there are WordPress SEO publisher on the web who already reviewed some the best WordPress themes that are being sell on the web for free, in fact they also created a guideline for SEO-friendly theme. You can check SEO Yoast for more details.
Genesis Themes
According to Yoast, Genesis Themes are one of the best SEO-friendly themes that you pick from. Genesis WordPress theme framework is being used by some of the known pro bloggers today whose sites are ranking well on search engines. Genesis is coded carefully and follows all the schema markups which are essential part of SEO.
You can get the Genesis Framework for $59 or you can choose the Genesis Pro Plus Package for just $499.95 which includes more than 60 SEO-friendly WordPress themes. Check out their site for more information.
Some Tips in choosing an SEO Friendly WordPress theme.
1. Page Loading Speed – A lot of WordPress themes comes with a bunch of JavaScripts to make the theme attractive that result in a slow page loading speed. It’s important to check if the theme loads fast before purchasing it.
2. Responsive Design – Responsive designs have a greater factor of increasing traffics than the desktop only websites. It’s absolutely important in 2014 to use a Responsive WordPress themes.
3. User Experience and Site Architecture – Proper layout and placement of elements is also an important factor to consider. If you will not consider the user experience you might lost a lot of visitors especially now that Google is also checking the behavioural metrics on each site.
4. Social Compatibility – Using social media to connect on your site is also important. When articles are being share on social media there will be a big traffic that will come to your site in result.
5. Good structure of codes – A WordPress theme that is poorly coded will cause a lot of issues in the future as it will also open doorways for hackers to invade your site’s information. So it is best to ensure that your theme is properly coded with HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript’s and PHP.
II. Essential WordPress Plugins for SEO
When building WordPress sites, the default installation doesn’t comes with a complete set of features (SEO, Backup, Google Analytics etc).
That’s why WordPress Plugins come into place and gives you more power to do over your site. It will enable you to do more than just a “stock” features of the default WordPress installation.
Below I listed down 6 of the best WordPress Plugins that will help you optimize your site.
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
This WordPress SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization. It helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.
Key Features:
- Title tags and meta descriptions
- Sitemap Options
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Taxonomies
- Social media SEO options
2. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
When you have a website, you want to track how many visitors you have, where they come from, what they do on your site, measure your marketing and much, much more. This plugin can do it for you. Adding Google Analytics to your website is as easy as pie with this Google Analytics for WordPress plugin focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.
Key Features:
- SEO traffic sources (including keywords)
- Geographic data
- Measuring traffic sources
- Technical data
- Content Performance
- Search result pages and 404 pages tracking
3. Broken Link Checker
This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.
Key Features:
- Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional)
- Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects
- Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email
- Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional)
- You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on
- Highly configurable
4. W3 Total Cache
This plugin is designed to improve user experience and page speed. Easy Web Performance Optimization (WPO) using caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.
Key Features:
- Cache settings
- Option to minify code
- Content delivery network settings
- JavaScript grouping by template
- Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
5. Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
This plugin adds adds an option box to the edit section where you can specify the redirect location and type of redirect that you want, temporary, permanent, or meta.
Key Features:
- Works with new WordPress menus
- Works with new WordPress Custom Post Types (set option on settings page)
- Re-write the URL for the redirect so it takes the place of the default page URL (rewrite the href link)
- Redirect Location can be to another WordPress page/post or any other website with an external URL
- Import/Export of redirects for backup, or to bulk add redirects
6. Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.
Key Features:
- Create an XML sitemap
- Supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages
- Notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content
III. Ways to make your WordPress site SEO-Friendly
1. URL structure
Have you notice that default WordPress installation will generate url like this:
www.yoursite.com/?p="13059"
Truly, it will not make sense to you especially if you are not a developer neither to Web spiders of Search Engines. A URL is meaningful to search engine. And making it readable will make a lot of sense to humans and search engines. A lot of WordPress users forgot to change this on the backend. There is an option at the backend under Settings->Permalink.
2. Titles and descriptions
Titles are important factors of SEO. It tells readers what to expect on the rest of the content. Remember that the description is what search engine users will see once it come up on the Google, Bing or Yahoo. Make sure your title and description inspires users and is really the content of your page.
3. Header tags
It’s also worth mentioning that h1, h2, h3 tags are good to your site’s SEO. By default the title of your site will be wrapped in h1 tag. This will inform the search engine robots to its importance to the page. But don’t overdo it.
4. Leverage Internal Linking
Internal linking is necessary because it helps your user to check related articles/posts on your site thus increase more traffic on your pages. Anchor tags (links) helps google to determine what your other pages. A good example for this is Wikipedia.
5. Add Alt Text To All of Your Images
Search engines can’t see pictures. They utilize the alt content to evaluate what the picture is. This will become handy if you’ll add what is the picture is all about thus giving more indexes on your page and chance of getting more visitors will increase.
6. Get the proper keyword
Keywords are essential part of any SEO campaign in fact these are the words search engine users search for.
If you’ve been wondering how you can start finding good keyword, you definitely heard about Google AdWords Keyword Planner where you can search for keyword and ad group ideas, get historical statistics, see how a list of keywords might perform, and even create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together.
7. Integrate Social Media
As mentioned on the tips in finding an SEO-Friendly WordPress Theme, social media plays a big role on search engines. Google and Bing now gives more importance to the authority of your site on social media. So linking your site to different social media like Facebook, twitter and google+ will add more value to your site.
8. Write the proper content
“Content is King”
-Bill Gates
You might heard this lot of times already but it will always be true. Search engines loves good contents thus websites with good contents ranks good on search engines.
But how to write good contents and what are the factors?
Moz created a guide in 4 steps on how to create a good content that you can check on and might find helpful.
9. Maintain
SEO is not just a one time process but a continous process. As Google changes its algorithm continuously you must also learn some new things and update your keywords as well. Learning from others is the best way to adopt to the changes. You might wanna follow the people or visit their sites.
Verdict
WordPress SEO is not that hard however it is a continuous process. These WordPress information and tips are only scratch the surface. You might find a lot more plugins, themes and tips that can help your site rank well on search engine.
If you know some SEO tips you might have to offer to optimize WordPress, please feel free to share it with us on the comment section.
