WordPress stands out as a content management system, especially when it concerns SEO. However, there’s a lot for you to do even still to boost your performance even though you’re using a system that gets it right in anyways. There are tactics and best practices that you can adapt to optimize your website, improve your search engine ranking, increase your sales, gain more subscribers, etc. In this article, we’ll share the ultimate WordPress SEO guide for beginners step by step.
You must ingrain SEO in different aspects of your online PR and marketing, which is why you need an SEO guide as a WordPress user to help you maximize this platform.
WordPress SEO Settings
There are SEO settings on WordPress that can be used to improve website ranking instantly. Three of such basic SEO settings to configure are:
Site settings
WordPress comes with a built-in option to allow users to discourage search engine spiders from crawling their site. You must make sure that this setting isn’t switched on so that your website can appear in search results.
Set correct URL structure
All the blog posts and pages on your website have a permalink. These permalinks are critical to the SEO success of your WordPress website with SEO beginners guide. This is because the search engine uses the words in the permalink to understand the page content.
It’s a good idea to add target keywords to the permalinks to help search engines better understand what the page stands for. The default setting in WordPress, however, doesn’t allow the use of custom permalinks structure. So you have to change this manually.
You can correct the permalink structure under Settings > Permalinks. Many WordPress users also use the “Post name.” This is a built-in capacity of the WordPress tool to automatically suggest an appropriate permalink for a page based on the page’s content. It filters unnecessary words so that the permalinks are shorter without having to make semantic changes.
Check website health: WordPress SEO beginners guide
Version 5.2 of WordPress introduced a feature known as Site Health, and the 5.4 version came with the widget for site health status.
This feature allows users to monitor their website’s health, and it notifies the user if there’s a need for changes or improvements to be made.
This feature is also essential for SEO because it points out some fixes and updates to the issues that may jeopardize the website’s search engine ranking. For instance, a security fix will ensure that hackers can’t exploit the website’s vulnerabilities, leading to penalties from search engines. In addition, this tool can discover several problems, including missing SSL certificates and important WordPress updates.
Best practices to optimize WordPress website
After applying the basic settings, the next step is to optimize your WordPress website. So, here are some of the best practices to apply on your website.
1. Optimize and organize your website content
The categories and tags on WordPress are two significant features to help users organize their website content better. They add some logic to the arrangement of the website.
Have different categories for several topics that your website content addresses. Then place posts under a topic in the same category. With tags, you can organize the content by subtopics. Tags describe the details in your posts. While tags are optional, every WordPress post has a category. WordPress will assign your post to the “Uncategorized” category if you don’t assign the post to a category by yourself.
You can use categories to create SEO-friendly and meaningful permalinks, which make them essential. Organizing your content well sends strong SEO signals to search engines. As a result, you will have your visitors spend more time on your website due to the ease of navigation, and you will rank higher on search engines.
2. Have a good website structure: WordPress SEO beginners guide
Your website structure is vital to the functionality and usability of the website. Here’s why you need to have a good structure for your WordPress SEO beginners guide:
With a good website structure, it’s easier to navigate the website maze and start working on it as it grows rapidly. Navigation will also be easy and smooth for website visitors. Lastly, search engine crawlers will find it easy crawling your website pages to discover your content and include your permalinks to search engine results.
A good WordPress website structure will contain the following elements:
- Header Navigation menu
- Sidebar navigation
- Footer navigation
- Pages
- Finally, Blog categories
3. Create high-quality content
Setting your WordPress appropriately is essential for your website to rank high, but that’s only one thing. The second half of it is to create high-quality content keeping in mind SEO requirements. This means you have to do some keyword research to find the best keywords to reach your target audience. Then you create a good content strategy with these keywords using the WordPress SEO guide for beginners.
In writing quality content, make sure that you are not sacrificing the content’s value for publishing frequency and content quantity. As you use the target keyword, ensure that your content is engaging, well-researched, and unique.
If you don’t write content by yourself, make sure you get the best writers that are experts in this field. You can hire writing companies that also provide essay and dissertation writing services online as they have qualified experts for any task.
4. Ensure mobile-friendliness
There are billions of active internet users, and more than 60 percent of Google searches are done from mobile devices. This is why mobile devices are considered very important, and search engines have made a website’s responsiveness to mobile phones a good SEO signal. WordPress allows you to add a mobile-friendly theme, and you’re good to go.
Conclusion
As a beginner in WordPress, you must know how to use this tool to improve your website SEO. Some of the tips and best practices that you need are discussed in this article.
