Improve WordPress SEO
When building a website, one of the biggest decisions you have to make is deciding on the content management system (CMS) that you will use. There are several options such as Joomla, Drupal and having a custom CMS created by a back-end developer. But, one platform reigns supreme, WordPress.
WordPress is currently deployed on over 70 million websites. Large companies and sites including the likes of Mashable, Time, Techcrunch, The New Yorker and many others, including this blog, all run on WordPress.
It also has the largest developer community. As a result, there are hundreds of plugins that have been created to extend its functionality. There are also millions of themes out there.
From an SEO point of view, WordPress SEO is a good CMS solution. Its relatively intuitive user experience makes it easy to implement good SEO practices.
The following are a few quick tweaks that you can implement on your WordPress site and get a boost in search engine rankings.
WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com
This one is straight forward. Hosting your site on WordPress.com is good enough if its a hobby blog or simple personal site. However, if you are running a business or serious organization, you need something more powerful.
WordPress.com tends to limit what you can do for your site’s SEO.
To get the full benefits of WordPress, I recommend moving your site to a self-hosted WordPress.org site.
This way, you can fully customize themes, plugins and widgets for the best SEO.
Also, all the points below refer specifically to self-hosted WordPress websites.
Permalinks Structure
A permalink structure is the format in which WordPress page URLs appear in the browser bar. The permalink structure should be as clean as possible. This helps Google and other search engines index your website correctly.
The best permalink structure is one that uses the name of the post. Thus, the structure should be /%postname% or /%category%/%postname%/. You can set this in the Settings Menu in WordPress admin back-end as shown in the image below.
Keyword rich URLs are good for SEO. They also inform users what your page is all about.
Say for example you are writing a post about iPhones.
You wouldn’t want a URL that reads like this.
It is better for SEO to have your URL as or
SEO-friendly Themes and Plugins
WordPress comes with many features and is pre-configured for SEO right-out-of-the-box. The code is also relatively clean so it loads pretty fast. Page load time is increasingly becoming an important SEO factor. There isn’t been any direct evidence to show that sites that load faster enjoy better rankings, but the fact is, fast loading sites offer better user experience.
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