How to Make Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly: As a WordPress site owner, you want your blog to be SEO-friendly so that it ranks higher in search engines. Higher rankings on Google and other major search engines will increase the visibility of your blog and bring you more organic traffic.
We’re not talking about light traffic here. According to Search Engine Journal, the first Google search results page receives 91.5% of the traffic for a keyword or phrase. The first result receives 32.5% of all traffic.
While there is no magic trick to gaming Google’s algorithm, you can take steps to optimize your blog’s code, formatting, and content so that search engines can easily find and index it. Let’s go over those steps in more detail below.
WordPress, widely regarded as one of the most SEO-friendly platforms, includes out-of-the-box features that can assist you in optimizing your blog for search engines. We’ll go over how to use these built-in features, as well as other services and tools, to boost your ranking chances.
WordPress Blog SEO Friendly | How to Make Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly
1. Choose a Managed Hosting Service
Even before you install WordPress, you should choose a hosting service that will help protect and speed up your site. While security and speed may not have a direct impact on your ranking, a compromised or slow site will result in poor user experiences and traffic loss. This has an effect on the SEO of your website.
Managed hosting is an excellent option for optimizing your site among the four types of services. In essence, managed hosting means that you share some of the responsibilities of running a blog with your hosting company. Among other things, the company will cache your site on a regular basis, run malware scans and daily backups, close security gaps, and update your WordPress plugins and themes. In other words, a managed hosting provider assists you in running a dependable, fast, and secure website.
Because site speed, page load times, and security all have an impact on SEO, managed hosting can help you streamline the process. Once you’ve decided on a hosting service, you’ll want to go with a dependable and high-performing provider. Blue Host and HostGator are two well-known WordPress hosting providers.
Did you know that this year, mobile devices accounted for 60% of organic search engine visits? And, for the vast majority of search queries, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly results. To optimize your site for both desktop and mobile devices, you’ll need a responsive theme.
When choosing a theme, you should also consider its code and design. A poorly coded or feature-rich theme can cause your site to load slowly, affecting your visitors’ experience and search ranking.
Brando is one example of an SEO-friendly theme. It’s fully responsive, coded with HTML5 and CSS3, and built with Twitter Bootstrap to be lightweight and SEO friendly.
3. Update Your Permalink Settings
A permalink on your WordPress site is a permanent URL or link to a specific post or page. WordPress uses a plain permalink structure by default, which means that your URLs will be randomly assigned a series of numbers and question marks to distinguish one from the other. This default setting is adequate, but it does not assist search engine crawlers or readers in understanding the content or value of your posts.
With a single click, you can modify your permalink structure to include keywords from your post. Search engines can then read your URLs and determine whether your site has answers to specific search queries. Simply go to Settings > Permalink and select the “Post Name” option.
WordPress Blog SEO Friendly | How to Make Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly
4. Create XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps are files that list every page on your website in order for search engines to easily find, crawl, and index your content. A sitemap can be created manually, but it will require some coding. Otherwise, there are numerous sitemap plugins available that will do the work for you.
You will place your sitemap on your web server after creating it and submitting it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster. Unless you’re using HubSpot or another platform that automatically updates your sitemap, you’ll need to update and resubmit it whenever your site undergoes a significant change. This ensures that search engines continue to understand how your site is built, allowing them to evaluate and rank it.
5. Optimize Your Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
Page titles and meta descriptions are two crucial SEO factors. They tell readers what they can expect to learn by clicking on your post or page in search engine results pages, along with your URLs (SERPs). They also assist search engine crawlers in determining the relevance of your content and matching it with relevant search queries.
You must include the keywords you want to rank for in your titles and meta descriptions, as well as meet the length requirement. Keep titles to 60 characters and meta descriptions to 160 characters. If your title is longer, make sure your keywords are at the top. This way, even if the title is cut off in SERPs near the end, your post will still be considered relevant to searchers.
The ranking keyword “on-page SEO” is placed at the very beginning of the lengthy title in the example below, so the snippet is still optimized for search engines and readers.
6. Optimize Your Images
Optimizing your images is a two-step process. To begin, ensure that they are properly sized and compressed in order to maintain your site’s speed and performance. You can do this manually or with an image optimization plugin like Imsanity. Next, make sure they have alt text.
Alt text informs both search engines about the images, allowing them to rank them higher in image results pages. It can also help your SERP ranking because Google now prioritises image results over text-based results for certain keywords. In the example below, Google’s first SERP for the search term “email newsletter design” includes a significant number of clickable images before any organic text results.
Alt text also makes your content more accessible to readers who have visual impairments or who use low-bandwidth devices.
7. Provide Links to Related Content
Internal links are critical for on-page SEO. By linking to related content, you help search engines find all of the content you own on a specific topic. This increases your chances of ranking for the keywords associated with that topic. By linking to other useful posts and pages, you will also provide your visitors with better experiences and persuade them to stay on your site longer.
WordPress Blog SEO Friendly | How to Make Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly
You can manually link your pages whenever you make a new post. You can also use a plugin to automate the process of creating internal links. Link Whisperer is a premium WordPress plugin that uses artificial intelligence to provide automatic link suggestions as you begin writing in WordPress.
8. Organize Your Content with Categories and Tags
Using categories and tags to organize your content is another way to help both search engines and readers understand your site structure. You can use categories to organize your pages and posts into broad categories. Tags allow you to become more specific. Using these taxonomies will also help visitors find the content they’re looking for more quickly and will assist search engines in understanding the structure of your site.
Go to Settings > Writing in your WordPress dashboard to create a category. Click Posts > Tags to add a new tag or manage existing ones.
91Smarttech
Plugins to Make Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly
Search engine optimization for your blog is a continuous process. Fortunately, WordPress plugins can help by automating some of the preceding steps. The plugins listed below provide a variety of features to assist you in creating XML sitemaps, implementing tags and categories, and creating relevant titles and meta descriptions for your blog to optimize it for search engines and readers.
WordPress Blog SEO Friendly | How to Make Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly
All-in-One SEO
All-in-One SEO (AIOSEO) is a popular SEO plugin with over 2,000,000 users. Even complete beginners can optimize their site for SEO in less than 10 minutes with this plugin.
The SEO setup wizard will guide you through the process of selecting the best SEO settings for your industry. The SEO audit checklist will check your entire site for errors and provide you with an actionable checklist to optimize your posts and pages.
Furthermore, you can use this plugin to automatically generate a WordPress XML sitemap and notify all search engines of any updates.
AIOSEO also includes a redirection manager, rich snippets schema, social media integration, WooCommerce SEO, and other useful features.
Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast SEO is a powerful WordPress plugin that adds SEO features and tools to your dashboard. Its internal linking tool, for example, counts the internal links in a post so you can see at a glance if it could benefit from more links. It also includes a Snippet Preview feature, which allows you to easily change and preview how your content will appear on SERPs and search engine results pages.
You can also enter your target keyword in the “focus key” box, and it will analyze your content to see if it appears in the post or page’s title, introductory paragraph, heading, URL, body, meta description, and image alt tags. Finally, Yoast SEO eliminates the need to install a separate sitemap plugin. Simply enable XML sitemaps in the plugin’s settings, and the plugin will ping search engines whenever you publish new content.
Elementor Page Builder Plugin
Elementor is an all-in-one solution that gives you complete control over your website’s design. You can quickly and easily optimize your blog for search engines using this platform.
WordPress Blog SEO Friendly | How to Make Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly
Use the lightweight theme Hello from Elementor and drag and drop anything you want onto it using the theme builder. It will not include any conflicting or redundant code that would slow down your site’s load time. You can also use the Elementor editor panel’s Responsive Mode to see if your post is tablet and mobile-responsive. Optimizing your blog for all types of devices will not only ensure that all visitors have a consistent experience but will also help you rank higher in search engines.
Finally, if you use Elementor, you won’t need to install a separate internal linking plugin. Simply select the text to link in the text editor, and Elementor will suggest relevant content to link to.
You can make your WordPress blog SEO-friendly by utilizing WordPress’s built-in features or the plugins mentioned above. This increases your chances of ranking higher in search engines and receiving more organic traffic.
FAQs Regarding How to Make Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly
1. Can SEO be done on WordPress?
WordPress makes it simple to structure, manage, and publish SEO-friendly content. This is why it is regarded as the best CMS for search engine optimization. However, simply creating a WordPress site will not put you on the first page of Google search results.
2. Are longer blogs better for SEO?
Long-form content ranks higher in organic search than short content for this reason. The ideal blog post length for SEO, according to a HubSpot study from 2021, should be 2,100-2,400 words. That’s much longer than the 200- or 500-word blog posts that most writers and webmasters consider ideal.
3. Is there a free SEO for WordPress?
The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins. It’s a free plugin with nearly all of the features you’ll need to optimise your website. SERP previews, XML sitemap creation, meta description rating, and other features are all available.
4. Which SEO plugin is best for WordPress?
SEO Press – The cheapest WordPress SEO plugin that covers all of your bases. WP Rocket – The best plugin for increasing site speed and ranking higher. All-In-One SEO (AIOSEO) – The best way for beginners to see their pages rank higher. Ubersuggest – The best web app for domain and keyword research.
5. Does Google prefer WordPress?
In short, when most people discuss SEO, they are referring to how high your company ranks on Google search results pages. Many website designers claim that WordPress websites are ranked higher than website builder websites by Google. Is this accurate? No it is false.
1
0
