Improving your WordPress SEO is critical to getting more visits to your site. Sadly, most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started. If you really want to increase site traffic, you need to pay attention to WordPress SEO best practices.
In this guide, we will share the most important WordPress SEO tips to help you improve WordPress SEO and get more natural traffic.
You may have heard experts say that WordPress is friendly to SEO. This is actually why many people choose WordPress to create blogs or websites.
While WordPress ensures that the code it generates follows SEO best practices, you still have a lot to do if you want to maximize the effectiveness of SEO.
We have many actionable steps that you need to take to optimize your WordPress SEO correctly.
For convenience, we have created a directory to help you easily navigate our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.
Introduction
We know that the idea of optimizing for WordPress SEO can be daunting for beginners, especially if you’re not a technical geek.
But don’t worry-it doesn’t have to be complicated. Learn the basics from here, and then you can start applying them to your own website.
What is search engine optimization?
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. This is a strategy for website owners to get more traffic by ranking higher in search engines.
SEO is not about deceiving Google or playing with the system. It’s just about creating a website with optimized code and format so that search engines can easily find your site.
When people search the web for topics you write, your SEO content will appear higher in the search results, and you will attract more people to click on your site.
Why search engine optimization is important
Search engines are usually the largest source of traffic for most websites.
Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to understand pages and rank them appropriately in search results. However, these algorithms are not perfect-they still need your help to understand your content.
If your content is not optimized, search engines will not know how to rank it. When people search for topics you write, your site will not appear on the search results page, and you will miss out on all that traffic.
It is very important for all business owners to make their websites search engine friendly so that they can maximize their search traffic.
Basic knowledge of WordPress SEO
SEO has access to technology, but not necessarily. You only need to learn some basic SEO skills to optimize your site and you can significantly increase your site traffic.
You don’t have to be a technical genius to use the following technologies. If you are already using WordPress, you already have everything it needs!
Let’s start optimizing your website.
Check your site’s visibility settings
WordPress comes with a built-in option to hide your site from search engines. The purpose of this option is to give you time to process your site before it is ready for public use.
However, sometimes this option is accidentally selected, which makes your site inaccessible to search engines.
If your site does not appear in the search results, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that this option is not selected.
Simply log in to the administrative area of your WordPress site and visit the Settings »reading page.
You need to scroll down to the search engine visibility section and make sure that the box next to prevent search engines from indexing this site is not checked.
Don’t forget to click the Save changes button to save your changes.
Using SEO-friendly URL structures in WordPress
SEO-friendly URL contains words that clearly explain the content of the page, and they are easy to read by humans and search engines.
Some examples of SEO-friendly URL are:
https://www.example.com/how-to-install-wordpress/
https://www.example.com/common-wordpress-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/
Note that these URL are readable, and users can guess what they will see on the page by looking at the URL text.
So what is a non-SEO-friendly URL like?
https://www.example.com/?p=10467
http://example.com/archives/123
Note that these URL use numbers that have nothing to do with content, and users cannot guess what they will find on the page by looking at the URL.
Using a SEO-friendly permanent link structure can improve your chances of getting a better ranking in search results.
Here are some ways to check and update the permanent link structure of a WordPress site.
You need to access the Settings »permanent links page. Select the post name option, and then click the Save changes button to store your settings.
For more detailed instructions, check out our guide to what the SEO-friendly URL structure in WordPress is.
Note: if your site has been running for more than 6 months, do not change your permanent link structure unless you use the number option. If you are using a date and name or a month and name, continue to use it.
By changing the permanent link structure on an established site, you will lose all social media share counts and risk losing your existing SEO rankings.
If you must change the permanent link structure, hire professionals so that they can set the correct redirection. You will still lose the number of social shares on the page.
WWW and non-WWW
If you are just starting to create your site, you need to choose whether you want to use www (http://www.example.com) or non-www (http://example.com)) in the URL of your site.
Search engines think these are two different sites, so it means you need to choose one and stick to it.
You can set your preferences by visiting the Settings »general page. Add your preferred URL in the WordPress address and site address fields.
No matter what others say, there is no advantage in using one or the other from a SEO point of view.
For more details on this topic, check out our www and non-www guidelines– this is better for WordPress SEO.
The best WordPress SEO plug-in
One of the best parts of WordPress is that it has a plug-in for all content, and SEO is no exception. There are thousands of WordPress SEO plug-ins, which makes it more difficult for beginners to choose the best WordPress SEO plug-ins.
We will help you choose the best WordPress SEO plug-in instead of installing a separate plug-in for individual SEO tasks, and it is 100% free.
Choose the best WordPress SEO plug-in
When choosing the best WordPress SEO plug-in, you are likely to narrow your choice to the two most popular solutions: All in One SEO (AIOSEO) or Yoast SEO.
AIOSEO is the original WordPress SEO plug-in used on more than 3 million websites.
It has powerful functions, such as TruSEO page analysis, rich fragment architecture tags, social media integration, breadcrumb navigation, advanced e-commerce SEO support for WooCommerce, local SEO, internal link assistant, and so on.
In short, AIOSEO handles all the technical SEO optimizations of your WordPress site.
In this tutorial, we will use AIOSEO for screenshots and examples.
For more details, you can check out our complete guide on how to set up an all-in-one SEO for WordPress.
We used to use Yoast SEO, but we switched to All in One SEO because it innovates faster and is more powerful. For more information, see our 9 reasons for switching from Yoast to AIOSEO.
Add a XML site map to WordPress
A XML site map is a specially formatted file that lists every page on your site. This makes it easy for search engines to find all your content.
While adding a XML sitemap won’t improve your site’s search rankings, it does help search engines find pages quickly and start ranking them.
If you are using the AIOSEO plug-in, it automatically creates a XML site map for you. To find your site map, simply go to this URL (don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name):
http://example.com/sitemap.xml
We will show you how to submit the XML site map to Google in the next step.
Add your website to Google Search Console
Google Search Console, also known as the webmaster tool, is a set of tools provided by Google that let website owners know how search engines view their content.
It provides reports and data to help you understand how your web page is displayed in search results. You can also view the actual search terms that people use to find your site, how each page is displayed in search results, and how often your page is clicked.
All of this information can help you understand what is valid and what is not on your site. You can then plan your content strategy accordingly.
Google Search Console also alerts you when there is a problem with your site, such as when the search crawler cannot access it, finds duplicate content, or has limited resources.
We provide step-by-step instructions on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.
If you are using AIOSEO, you can follow this guide to learn how to add Google Search Console.
If you do not use AIOSEO, you can watch our video, which shows another way:
After adding the site to Google Search Console, click the site map in the left menu, and then paste the last part of the site map URL.
Click the submit button to save your changes.
Google Search Console will now check your site map and use it to improve the crawling of your site.
After you successfully add the site map, it will be displayed as pending. Google does need some time to crawl your site. In a few hours, you will be able to see some statistics about the site map. It shows the number of links it finds in the site map, how many of them are indexed, the ratio of images to pages, and so on.
We recommend that you check Search Console at least once a month to gather insights and check the SEO progress of your website.
Update: the AIOSEO team has launched a new Google search console integration that allows you to have a complete search statistics dashboard within the WordPress site.
In addition to Google Search Console, we also recommend that you submit your website to other popular search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.
In addition to various search consoles, you should also use MonsterInsights to analyze your natural traffic. MonsterInsights allows you to easily view insights from Google Analytics directly from the WordPress dashboard.
Follow this tutorial to learn how to install Google Analytics in WordPress using MonsterInsights.
Optimize your blog posts for SEO
Beginners often mistakenly believe that installing and activating the WordPress SEO plug-in is sufficient. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process, and if you want to see the biggest results, you have to keep up.
All top-level SEO plug-ins allow you to add SEO titles, meta-descriptions, and focus keywords to each blog post and page. It also shows you a preview of what users will see when they search your site using Google.
We recommend that you optimize the title and description to get the maximum number of clicks in search engine results.
When writing a blog post, simply scroll down to the SEO section and make the most of it.
If you want to know how to select focus keywords or focus keywords, what is a good title, or what is a good meta-description, we have described it in detail in our SEO blog article optimization beginner’s guide.
We strongly recommend that you read it, because page search engine optimization is critical to the success of your search engine optimization strategy.
Do keyword research for your website
Many beginners use their best guesses to figure out what topics people are looking for and what they should add to their blogs and websites.
It’s like shooting an arrow in the dark. You don’t need to do this when you can use real data to find out what people are looking for.
Keyword research is a research technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It can help you find the words that users enter into search engines to find content, products, and services in your industry.
You can then use these words and phrases on your site to get more search traffic.
You can use a large number of keyword research tools (free and paid). We recommend using SEMRush, which can help you find keywords and even find out the keywords ranked by competitors.
For more details, see our beginner’s guide to learn how to do keyword research for your WordPress site.
WordPress SEO best practices
If you follow the basics of WordPress SEO and use the best WordPress SEO plug-ins, you will already be ahead of most sites.
However, if you want better results, you need to follow the following WordPress SEO best practices.
None of these are too technical, and most of them don’t even require you to come into contact with any code. However, if you follow them, they will make a big difference.
Correct use of categories and tags in WordPress
WordPress allows you to categorize and tag your blog posts. This makes it easy for you to manage your content by topic and let your users find what they are looking for.
Categories and tags also help search engines understand the structure and content of your site.
Beginners are often confused about how best to use categories and tags. After explaining this to thousands of readers, here’s how we deal with categories and tags.
Categories are used to extensively group your posts. If your blog is a book, then the category is the catalog.
For example, on your personal blog, you can have music, food, travel and other categories. Categories are hierarchical, so you can add subcategories to them.
Tags, on the other hand, are more specific keywords that describe the content of a single post. For example, blog posts submitted under the food category can contain tags such as salads, breakfasts, pancakes, etc. Think of these as the index parts of the textbook.
For more information on this topic, see our categories and tags guide and SEO best practices for content sorting.
By using categories and tags correctly, you can make it easy for users to browse your site. Because it is easy for users, it also makes it easier for search engines to browse your site.
Make internal links a habit
The search engine assigns a score (page permissions) to each page on your site. The formula for this score is kept secret so that people can’t play with the results. However, the most common authoritative signal is the link.
This is why it is important to link to your own content from other blog posts and pages.
You should get into the habit of linking to your own posts whenever possible. If you have multiple authors, create a pre-release list of blog posts and ask them to link to at least 3 other blog posts.
This will help you increase overall page views, increase the amount of time users spend on your site, and ultimately improve the SEO scores of your personal blog posts and pages.
To make internal links easier, All in One SEO plugin’s team created a feature called WordPress Link Assistant.
Link Assistant will automatically grab links on your WordPress site and provide you with relevant internal link suggestions, which you can add to your content with one click.
In short, it automates the process of adding internal links in bulk, saving a lot of time.
You can learn more in our list of WordPress Best Internal Link plug-ins.
Architecture tags and rich web page summaries (FAQ architecture, comments, etc.)
Have you ever wondered why some website lists are more prominent in Google search results? Maybe there are stars next to them, or they are bigger, and there are frequently asked questions below?
This is done through the use of schema tags, which can help you get rich summaries in Google and other search engines. A custom architecture helps your site stand out, so you can get a better click-through rate (CTR), which ultimately helps your WordPress site rank higher in SEO.
Now you might want to know exactly how pattern tags work?
In simple English, a pattern tag is a special type of HTML code that you can add to your WordPress site to tell search engines more about your content.
For example, you can tell search engines that a specific page is a blog article, recipe, FAQ, news article, or product page in an online store. Search engines can then use this data to display rich results.
The good news now is that most site owners don’t actually add code to add schema tags.
Powerful WordPress SEO plug-ins such as AIOSEO have done this for you by adding these settings to your posts and page editors. You can further customize the schema tags for each post. We have more details on how to do this in the beginner’s guide on how to use rich web page summaries.
For example, if you want to add the FAQ schema to WordPress, all you need to do is select the FAQ schema template and add questions to it. AIOSEO will add the JSON+LD schema markup code to your site in the background (no technical work is required).
Once added, the list of your sites will become more prominent in Google like this.
You can also use similar techniques to add recipe architecture, product architecture, and other types of architectural tags.
We always recommend that our users use the custom mode tagging tool in AIOSEO to make your site stand out and improve your SEO ranking.
Optimize WordPress comments
Comments can strongly indicate users’ participation in your site. Participating users mean more links back to your site, more traffic, and improved SEO.
However, you need to make sure that your comments are authentic and not spam. Spammers submit comments with bad links, which may affect or even damage your search ranking.
This is why we recommend that you start using Akismet. It is one of two plug-ins pre-installed on every WordPress site, and it can help you combat spam comments.
If Akismet alone cannot handle spam comments, please refer to these tips and tools to combat spam comments in WordPress.
If your blog post attracts a lot of real, spam-free comments, then you should pat yourself on the shoulder to build such a fascinating site!
However, too many comments on the post will slow it down, which will also affect your search engine ranking. Continue to read below to learn more about how speed affects SEO. )
To prepare your site so that it can handle the review burden and speed it brings to your server, you can split the comments into multiple pages. Please refer to our tutorial to learn how to page comments in WordPress.
If you want to get more comments on your website, please see these 11 ways to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts.
External links in NoFollow WordPress
As mentioned above, links help search engines decide which pages are important. When you link to a website, you pass some SEO scores from your site to the link. This SEO score is called “link juice”.
To get a good search ranking, you need to make sure that you get more links from other sites than you provide.
Adding the “nofollow” attribute to external links (links to sites you do not own) instructs the search engine not to track those links. This can help you save link juice.
A normal external link looks like this in HTML:
& lt;a href= "http://example.com"> sample website & lt;/a>
The external links with the nofollow attribute are as follows:
& lt;a href= "http://example.com" & gt; sample website & lt;/a>
By default, WordPress does not provide the option to make a link nofollow. However, if you are using the AIOSEO plug-in, this is easy for you.
When adding a link, simply click the add “nofollow” to the link option.
For more details and alternatives, see our guide on how to add nofollow links to WordPress.
Full text and abstract or excerpt
WordPress displays and links to your posts from multiple pages such as home page, category archive, tag archive, date archive, author page, etc.
By default, it displays the full article content on all of these pages. This will affect the search engine optimization of your site, because the search engine may find that it is duplicate content. A full article will also slow down the loading of your archive pages.
Displaying full articles everywhere can also affect your page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to read the entire article in their feed reader without having to visit your site.
The easiest way to solve this problem is to display an abstract or excerpt instead of a complete article.
You can do this by going to Settings »and selecting the excerpt.
For more information, see our guide on how to customize WordPress excerpts without coding.
Speed and security of WordPress SEO
Even if you follow all the WordPress SEO techniques and best practices mentioned above, your search engine rankings will be severely damaged if your site is slow or hacked.
Here is how to prevent your site from losing search engine traffic due to poor performance or lax security.
Optimize the speed and performance of your website
Research shows that in the Internet age, the average attention span of humans is shorter than that of goldfish.
Web usability experts believe that users decide whether they want to stay or leave within seconds of visiting the site.
This means that as a site owner, you only have a few seconds to display your content and attract users. You don’t want to waste valuable time letting visitors wait for your site to load.
Because user experience is so important, search engines like Google give priority to faster sites in their results. In other words, faster sites rank higher on Google.
To speed up your site, you must have a fast WordPress hosting service provider, such as SiteGround or Bluehost.
After that, you need to install a caching plug-in and follow our ultimate guide to speed up WordPress (there are 24 proven tips).
Optimize images in WordPress for SEO
Pictures are more attractive than words, but they also take more time to load. If you don’t pay attention to the size and quality of images, they may slow down your site.
You need to make sure that you use images that are optimized to speed up loading. Please refer to our guide to learn how to speed up WordPress by optimizing network images.
Another technique you can use to optimize images for search engines is to use descriptive headings and alt tags. These tags can help search engines understand the meaning of your image. They can also help visually impaired users because their screen readers can read alternative text to them.
WordPress allows you to easily add title and alt tags when uploading pictures.
If you are a photographer or add a large number of images to your WordPress site, you need to use the gallery plug-in.
We recommend using Envira Gallery with AIOSEO. In our speed tests, we found that it is the fastest WordPress library plug-in. It is also fully responsive and SEO-friendly right out of the box.
For more tips, see our complete image SEO beginner’s guide.
The security of your WordPress website
Every week, Google blacklists about 20000 malware sites and about 50000 phishing sites. When a site is blacklisted, it doesn’t appear in any search results at all.
This means that the security of your WordPress site is critical to good rankings. If your website is hacked, you certainly don’t want all your efforts on SEO to come to nothing.
The good news is that keeping your WordPress site secure is not difficult-see the step-by-step instructions in our ultimate WordPress security guide.
We use Sucuri to protect our website from attacks. To find out why we recommend this service, check out our case study to see how Sucuri can help us stop 450000 WordPress attacks in 3 months.
Start using SSL/HTTPS
SSL (secure Sockets layer) is a technology that encrypts the connection between a user’s browser and the server to which they are connected. This adds an extra layer of security to your WordPress site.
Web sites protected with SSL are indicated by a padlock flag in the browser’s address bar. This makes your website more trustworthy, which you need to do if you use WordPress to run an online store and handle sensitive payment information.
All top WordPress hosting companies offer free SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt. For more details, see our guide to how to obtain a free SSL certificate for your website.
If you want an advanced wildcard SSL certificate or just a normal certificate with a security guarantee, we recommend using Domain.com.
Their SSL certificate comes with a minimum security guarantee of $10000 and a security guarantee of up to $1.75 million. You can also get a TrustLogo site seal that can be displayed on your site to increase credibility.
More SEO tools and resources
Once you have mastered WordPress SEO best practices, you will want to further improve your skills to stand out from the competition.
We have compiled a list of the best WordPress SEO plug-ins and tools that you should use to improve your SEO.
Our top 3 recommendations for the best WordPress SEO plug-ins and tools are:
- AIOSEO-also known as All in One SEO is the best WordPress SEO plug-in used by more than 3 million websites. A free version of AIOSEO lite is also available.
- Semrush– our pick of the best keyword research and competitor analysis tools. Although it is expensive, it is indeed very powerful and is the first choice for professionals.
- MonsterInsights-this is the best Google analytics plug-in that helps you view all the important statistics in one place. Keep in mind that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. More than 3 million websites use MonsterInsights. A free stripped-down version of MonsterInsights is also available.
If you are ready to try some more advanced techniques, you can also check out our WordPress SEO article archive. Here are some selected guides that you may find useful:
- How to add IndexNow to WordPress to speed up SEO results
- The problem of WordPress SEO crawl budget and its solution
- How to get Google additional links for your WordPress website
- How to create directories in WordPress to improve SEO rankings
- How to add multiple location schemas for local business in WordPress
- How to add RSS site map to WordPress to improve SEO ranking
- How to submit your WordPress website to Google News
- How to perform site-wide redirection in WordPress
- How to set up Video SEO correctly in WordPress
- 14 points WordPress technology SEO framework
- 11:00 WordPress SEO checklist will improve your ranking
We hope this article will help you understand how to properly optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Continue to implement some of these WordPress SEO techniques, and you should see an increase in traffic within a few months as the search engine processes your changes.
