How to make WordPress SEO friendly
WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platform, this is because of the easiness of use. You must be thinking that WordPress being so popular must be SEO friendly, I’ve heard this many times from bloggers say that WordPress is SEO friendly, this is not true WordPress by default is not SEO friendly.
Where WordPress stands out from other blogging platforms is that there are many options to make WordPress SEO friendly. By default stock version of WordPress is not so SEO friendly, this is a great misconception for those who thinks that I have a WordPress blog and I don’t have to optimize it, its SEO friendly. If you are one of those guys then I hate to break it to you but you my friend is wrong.
But there are few things you can do to make it SEO friendly, I’m here to tell you all about it. There will be few tweaks which you can make your WordPress blog optimized for search engines. I’ll be showing you some of the option which you can perform with changing some settings where as for some you have to use some plugins for optimizing WordPress blog for search engines.
Permalink structure
First thing to make your WordPress website SEO friendly is changing the permalink structure of a blog. Permalinks is the URL structure of which you see on the address bar of a browser, you must have seen that successful blogs have a permalink structure which can be easily read and understand.
While choosing a permalink structure you should make it relevant to the topic which you are writing the article about. URLs with keywords in it has and edge in terms of SEO of the post, Even search engines like the permalink structure which are more understandable. No one like a permalink structure which is confusing neither users or search engines.
In WordPress you have a great option to change the Permalink structure, this is so important that there is a special place for permalinks under settings in WordPress dashboard. Under permalinks you have some option that you can choose the URL structure you like. I generally prefer the date structure for news blogs and a simple post name for evergreen content.
To know all about the permalink structure you must visit the link below.
Here’s a tip:- while creating a URL you must keep in check the URL length with right keywords in it.
Update your Ping List
This is one of the ways to make your posts index faster on the search engines, Ping services helps in informing the search engines about the changes in the blog. After all this search engine bots crawl the blog to index the changes which can be in form of new post too.
There are a lot of websites who provide ping services for the blog all you have to do is inform then, in WordPress you have the option to list the ping service websites at one place so that when you make an update then information about it will be sent to these websites automatically.
To update the ping list you have to go to your Dashboard»settings»writing in this you have the update box where you can place the website which provide ping services.
After updating your ping list all the process of informing websites is automatic, WordPress takes this job and do that in background so it’s all hassle free.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps is one of the best SEO practice you can’t avoid for your blog. Even webmaster tools also have a special section for sitemap. You have to provide a link of your sitemap so that indexing of new posts can be done. Sitemaps also shows the update time of a post.
This update time is very important as the older blog posts have less value in this continuously changing world. By updated time search engines know that the post have been updated with the latest information about the topic.
With WordPress you have great options for generating sitemaps for your blog with the help of plugins. There many options available for the creation of sitemaps for free.
Tip:- Most of the plugins for creation of sitemaps have different settings you should choose the things you like to include in sitemap carefully.
SEO Plugins
As I said earlier that WordPress is not SEO friendly by default Just for this reason you have to use SEO plugins which can add various features you your WordPress blog.
With the use of SEO plugins you can add Various fields like Meta description, Keywords, SEO title, etc to your blog, SEO holds great importance to make you content rank higher in search engines.
The better SEO is better it makes the ranking of a post, better the ranking of a post gets more traffic comes to your blog. SO if you ignoring the use of SEO plugins till now then you must install one now.
To help you choose the right one we have a list of Best free SEO plugins for WordPress.
Tip:- Even if you want a premium one you can still try a free one just to get use to the usage of SEO boxes.
Speed up your website
The page load is one of those things which can give you SEO a boost in terms of Ranking, Search engines love a fast loading website. The page load is so important that there are websites dedicated to check the page load time of your website, these websites also gives you an idea that which factor is causing the increase in page load time.
A fast website is not only good for SEO but this also gives users a great experience, now a days no one like to wait and if your website is slow than the user have to wait for content to load this could result in users leaving the website. Studies shows that if someone leaves the website with bad experience then its very hard for them to return to that website.
There are quite a few ways by which you can reduce your page load time and make your website lightning fast. In order to know the details about how to make your website faster than you must read.
In this list there are all the plugins you need to make your website lightning fast.
Image SEO
Images are a crucial part of a website, without images a post looks dull and boring, there are some website that are totally dependent on images for the creation of a post, To make them more search engine friendly you need to optimize them.
When we talk about image SEO the most of the new comers of the blogging world thinks that how they can make images SEO optimized. To make your images Search engine friendly you need to add some data which describes the image. Every image have few things in it like what is the image about, description etc.
When you have the image you want to upload to you blog then first thing you must check is the tittle of image, the tittle should be related to image, I’ve seen many images with numbers as tittle which can be considered as bad SEO practice, An image must have an alt tag attached to it, this is one of the most important thing for image SEO, Search engines reads these ALT tags to know about the image, Try to add keywords in the ALT tag of the image, try to make ALT tag small and relevant. After this you should add a description about the image, If you like you can even add a caption these will also add a bit of weight to the SEO of image.
Tip:- try to reduce the size of image to fit the required size, Bigger images have heavy and takes more time to load you can even use smush.it to reduce the weight of the image.
Conclusion
These are the ways by which you can make your WordPress blog SEO friendly. Bu doing this thing your blog will excel to new heights in terms of ranking, driving more traffic towards your blog. If you have monetized your blog then you have the chances to earn even more money for the additional traffic.
Further Read:
