Ultimate Guide to Help With WordPress SEO
WordPress SEO is crucial if you wish to get more traffic to your website and register more sales. Sadly, most of the SEO guides you find out there are too technical for the new users. If you are serious about increasing the traffic to your WordPress website, you need to pay attention to the SEO best practices discussed in this post. These tips will help get more organic traffic.
Basics of SEO on WordPress
The whole purpose of search engine optimization is to help you get a better search engine ranking position. It is good to note that WordPress SEO can be a bit technical. However, by understanding a few SEO tips, you will be able to optimize your website without any problem. You don’t necessarily have to be a tech genius to use the following techniques.
- Check the visibility settings of your website
WordPress has a built-in feature that enables you to hide your site from search engines. The purpose of this option is to give you time to complete your website before getting it public. At times, this option can be checked accidentally. To make sure this hasn’t happened, you need to confirm that the option is unchecked.
Login to your admin area and go to Settings >> Reading page. Scroll to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ section and ensure the box next to the ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ is not checked. Save the changes.
- Using SEO friendly URL structure
This is another method you can use to boost WordPress SEO. These URLs have keywords that explain more about a page. They are read by both search engines and humans. Agood example of an SEO friendly URL is ‘http://www.yourdomainname.com/how-to-install-wordpress/
As you can see, the URL is readable and gives information about the page. Having an SEO friendly URL as a permalink will improve your ranking. You need to go to Settings >> Permalinks page. Select the ‘Post Name’ option then save the changes. That way, the title of your post will be used in the permalink.
- Decide on whether to use WWW or non-WWW
One thing you need to understand about search engines is that the consider http://www.example.com to be completely different from http://example.com although the links open to the same website. You therefore need to choose one format and stick with it.
From the admin area, you can set the preferences you want by going to Settings >> General page. Add the preferred URL in both ‘WordPress Addresses and in the ‘Site Address’ fields. Save the changes.
There is a lot more that can be done to improve WordPress SEO. At times, you may need to use WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO plugin. The rule of thumb is to make calculated decisions. Don’t do anything for the sake of doing it. Due diligence is a must.