WordPress is used on more than 25% of all websites and it powers more than half of websites that run off of a content management system. This makes search engine optimization (SEO) for WordPress critical for many small businesses and bloggers. Here is some WordPress SEO advice for beginners. We’ll address everything from tips at initial setup of the page to SEO for newly created content on an existing site.
Consider the Titles Every Time
One of the benefits of WordPress is the fact that it builds each article’s title into the URL. This means WordPress already creates SEO friendly titles by design, so long as you don’t let it create URLs based on the date of the post. This also means you have to be careful not to reuse titles if you don’t want to confuse search engines or readers. Think carefully about your titles before you create them and include key search terms in the title, so they appear in the URL. Where possible, the most important search term should be at the start of the title. Also, keep the titles less than 100 characters so that they are easily shared and don’t get cut off on the user’s screen.
Use an SEO Plug-In
There are SEO plugins that collect data of value to marketers. You should build these SEO plug-ins into your website from the beginning so that you can see the evolution of your reader base over time. Some of these plugins help you identify the keywords that you rank best for, the key search terms bringing the most people to you, and user behaviour on your site. Work with a company like Click Intelligence to help you determine which key search terms bring in your best-paying customers, identify customer segments that you could dominate with a few tweaks to your site or targeted content, and learn how to adjust your SEO strategy to rank higher than your rivals. For more information about Click Intelligence, click here.
Caching to Keep Your Customers
Caching plug-ins makes your website faster and this is essential to making your mobile visitors happy. The second benefit of caching plugins is that they reduce the load on your web server. Caching plug-ins do not eliminate the need to make your website mobile-friendly or lean and mean, but it helps. You have to have a medium/large site for content delivery networks (CDNs) to be a viable alternative or supplement to caching. Also consider the value of a web host who gives your site sufficient memory and bandwidth to load fast enough to make your visitors happy, much less run so fast that search engines don’t penalize you for a slow load.
Conclusion
If you want your WordPress blog to perform well with search engines, make sure you follow some of the tips above. Making your site easily crawlable by search engines, building SEO into the titles and URLs of every post, and installing an SEO plug-in on the site to collect data essential to optimizing the site later are all easy ways to improve your search rankings and increase visibility for your site.
