WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems, used by everyone from bloggers to small businesses. WordPress offers an easy way to create and manage a website. Once you’ve settled on WordPress for your site, you’ll want to make sure you optimise it for search engine rankings. Here are some easy tips for WordPress SEO.
- Use a specialist SEO company. The easiest way to be sure you’re getting your SEO right is to hire experts. A specialist agency will know all the best tricks to improve your rankings and will know all about any changes in algorithms and ranking factors, saving you a lot of the work of keeping up with an always-changing industry.
- Check your site speed. Page loading times are an important step in improving your site. Faster pages make the site better to use for site users, but it also cuts bounce rate by not putting people off a slow site, and Google take speed into account for your search rankings. Choose a reliable host to avoid slow servers, and slim down anything slowing down your pages.
- Don’t let Google index your site until you’re ready. If you’re in the process of starting up a WordPress site, you’re probably making all kinds of changes that can result in 404 errors and other problems that impact your search ranking. In the back end of WordPress, look for an option that disallows search engines from indexing your site. Tick this box, and play around with your site as much as you want without upsetting search engines. When you’re finished, uncheck the option, and your site will start to be indexed again.
- Install an .xml sitemap plugin. These plugins are vital for WordPress, as they give search engines links to all your pages, allowing them to index your site much more quickly.
- Install an SEO plugin. A good SEO plugin can do a lot of your SEO jobs for you automatically with no effort from you. You can use the plugin to manage or remind you to manage things like page titles, meta descriptions, keyword optimisation, categories, tags and indexing.
- Block spam comments. There are lots of tools for WordPress to block spam, so make sure you’re using one. Spam comments can cause issues, as they contribute nothing useful and irritate site users. If they’re sharing dodgy links, this can impact your rankings, as the search engines will think you’re sharing questionable content. Search engines will also penalize your content for spam comments with low-quality keywords. Handle spam fast and get rid of it, to avoid being penalized by Google for somebody else’s spam.
- Use internal links. When you’re creating new content, link to older content that is relevant to your current topic. This is useful for your readers but is also useful for search rankings. Internal links keep people navigating around your site, which tells the search engines that your content is helpful and your site is worth staying on. It also helps Google to find and rank more pages on your site, improving your overall rankings.