By improving your WordPress SEO you can quickly increase your website traffic and revenue. The default installation of WordPress has better SEO than other counterparts, but there is a lot you need to do to improve the SEO of WordPress.
However, one thing that you should know, there are rumors that WordPress has the best possible SEO options. But this is not entirely true!
Let Me Elaborate.
WordPress is not SEO Friendly.
At least, the default WordPress installation is not. If you, like many others, believe that your stock installation of WordPress will get you excellent, or even good rankings on search engines, you are misinformed. WordPress needs to be SEO optimized for search engine bots to understand your WordPress website and rank you appropriately. Luckily, making your WordPress blog SEO friendly is rather easy with the help of this guide and with combinations of WordPress SEO plugins. Here, I will outline some of the default settings of WordPress which are not SEO friendly, and what you should do to make it SEO friendly.
Basics of WordPress SEO
WordPress SEO can be categorized into 3 levels-
On Page WordPress SEO
On Site WordPress SEO
On Site WordPress SEO
On page SEO and On-site SEO, are something that you can easily take care of with the help of your content, plugins and a bit of discipline. Off-Site WordPress SEO consists of generating backlinks to your website. This can be achieved by outreach, broken link building or by utilizing other techniques.
Check WordPress visibility settings:
Login to your WordPress admin panel, and head over to settings > Readings, and ensure that “Search Engine Visibility” setting is unchecked. This is how it should look like:
A lot of times default WordPress installer keep this option checked, and this prevents search engine bots from crawling your website.
WWW Vs. non WWW:
Another important WordPress SEO question asked by a lot of users is, to use WWW (https://domain.com) or non-WWW (https://www.domain.com) at the time of WordPress installation. Search engine treats WWW and non-WWW as two different websites, so you need to pick one and stick to it. This could be configured at the time of setting up WordPress, by going to Settings > General.
As of 2020, there is no SEO benefit of choosing either of them. However, I recommend using the non-www version, as the shorter version of URLs is better for sharing on social media or elsewhere..
5 Ways To Boost WordPress site SEO
Add your WordPress Website to Search console
Google search console is a free SEO tool by Google that you should use from day one. Even if you don’t know how to use it, you should add your website to Google search console. This will help you to collect all important data and as you move forward with your WordPress SEO learnings, this data will help you in faster optimization of your WordPress website.
Implement WordPress Sitemap
Let’s start with Sitemap, which is an XML file containing an index of all important link (Posts, Pages, Tags, categories) of your WordPress website. This sitemap file will help search engine bots like Google bots to effectively find all the pages of your website. There are many WordPress Sitemap plugins out there, but I prefer using Yoast SEO Sitemap feature which is one of the oldest and reliable ones out there. All you need to do is install and activate the plugin and go to plugin settings and generate a sitemap for your blog. There are many WordPress Sitemap plugins out there, but I prefer using Yoast SEO Sitemap feature which is one of the oldest and reliable ones out there. All you need to do is install and activate the plugin and go to plugin settings and generate a sitemap for your blog. Now, go to Google search console and Bing Webmaster tool, submit and verify your site and submit a sitemap. This will help them to crawl and index all internal pages of your Blog.
Optimize blog post and pages for target Keyword:
This is a critical aspect of WordPress SEO, and if you do it right, you will be able to drive a significant amount of traffic in no time. In this, you first perform keyword research (See next point for this), and then optimize your homepage, posts or pages for the target keyword. This process is also popularly known as On page SEO.
Perform Keyword research for your WordPress Website
Keyword research is the process of finding profitable and strategic keywords for your WordPress website. SEO optimization of WordPress is useless without performing keyword research. There are keyword research tools that literally take less < 30 minutes to help you find 100+ profitable keywords. SEMrush is one of the top tools that let you quickly find keywords that are profitable for your business.
Regularly clean broken links:
Broken links are the dead end for search engine bots and add the negative score to your overall search engine optimization effort. Broken links can be easily taken care in WordPress using plugins like:
Broken link checker
WP Link Status
You should periodically scan your WordPress website for any broken links and fix it with new links. The above two plugins will help you do the same.
There are many WordPress Sitemap plugins out there, but I prefer using Yoast SEO Sitemap feature which is one of the oldest and reliable ones out there. All you need to do is install and activate the plugin and go to plugin settings and generate a sitemap for your blog. Now, go to Google search console and Bing Webmaster tool, submit and verify your site and submit a sitemap. This will help them to crawl and index all internal pages of your Blog.
There are keyword research tools that literally take less < 30 minutes to help you find 100+ profitable keywords. SEMrush is one of the top tools that let you quickly find keywords that are profitable for your business.