It is very important to ensure that your WordPress site is visible in order to gain a better SEO result. A site that is visible will not only be found easily by the users but the search engine will also like it and thereby end up ranking it higher in the search pages. Therefore, whether you are a beginner or an expert, improving the site visibility and your WordPress SEO is crucial. This will help you to gain more traffic to your website.
You will come across several guides and blogs that will tell you a lot about WordPress SEO but sadly all of these revolve around the technical aspects of it, which is aplenty in WordPress. This may be a bit difficult for you to follow, especially if you have very little or no knowledge of developing a site. If you are new to it, then you will have a very difficult time to get started.
If you wonder how to go about it, you can take help of experts such as NewYorkSEO.Company to wade through the technical field of WordPress and ensure a better SEO. The experts will guide you through the process and help you to:
- Get started and know the basics
- Pay attention to and follow the WordPress SEO best practices and
- Increase your website traffic if you are serious about it.
As for the WordPress SEO beginners, it is good to start with by knowing that WordPress itself is SEO friendly. This knowledge will take away the fear or apprehension that you may have regarding WordPress, which ideally is the most favoured platform for all those who want to start a website or a blog.
Need for WordPress SEO
WordPress is the platform that ensures that the codes generated follow the SEO best practices which will help you in maximising your SEO efforts. There are a lot of actionable steps that you may and need to take so that you can optimise your WordPress SEO. In order to make it easy through the entire WordPress SEO process, you will need to start from the basics, especially if you are a beginner.
If you want to know everything about WordPress SEO, then you will need to take one step at a time. There are lots of steps to follow that includes both the advanced and basic properties such as:
- Knowing what SEO is and why it is so important
- Having adequate knowledge about the basic processes of WordPress SEO
- Checking the visibility of your site and making amendments as and when required to improve it
- Knowing and using SEO friendly URL structures
- Selecting and using the best WordPress SEO plugin
- Adding XML sitemaps in it
- Adding your site to Google Search Console
- Optimising the blog posts for better SEO
- Following the WordPress SEO best practices
- Using categories and tags properly in WordPress
- Creating better internal linking
- Optimising WordPress comments
- Not following external links
- Deciding between full posts and summaries
- Caring for the speed and security for better WordPress SEO
- Optimising the performance of your site
- Optimising the images
- Using SSL or HTTPS for security and safety of your WordPress site and finally
- Using more SEO tools and resources.
When you follow all these steps, not necessarily in that order, you will find it much easier to take your WordPress SEO even further higher to a new level.
Checking Visibility Settings of the site
Going to the basics, WordPress SEO can get really technical but it does not have to that way all the time. You can get a perceptible boost in your website traffic even if you make some tweaks in the basic setting of it.
The best way to optimise your site is by maximising the visibility of it by making a few changes in its settings. You do not have to be a technical expert for this. Just follow these simple steps and you are done with. However, if you are already using WordPress, then it will be much easier for you to follow.
In order to check the visibility settings of your site you will need to look for the WordPress built-in option that allows you to hide your site from the search engines. The main purpose of this option is to allow you and give you time needed to work on your site before you let it go public. Sometimes this option can be checked accidentally making your site unavailable to the search engines.
If you find that your site is not appearing in the search results then the first thing you should do is to check and make sure that this option is unchecked. The process to follow is fairly simple.
- First, log in to the admin area of the WordPress site
- Visit Settings
- Go to Reading page
- Scroll down to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ section
- Go to the box next to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’
- Make sure it is unchecked.
Finally, make sure that you click on the ‘Save Changes’ button so that you can store the changes you have made to the visibility settings of your WordPress site. Soon you will see that the SEO, the rank as well as the number of traffic to your site is increased significantly.
Using SEO friendly URL structures
You will even add to the functionality and performance of your WordPress site if you use SEO friendly URL structures in it. These structures contain words that clearly explain what is the content of the page about. The most unique thing about these SEO friendly structures is that these can be read easily by both humans as well as the algorithms of the search engines.
In order to make SEO friendly URLs you will need to make sure that:
- These are readable and easy for a user to guess just by looking at it what they will see on the page when they click on it
- These have SEO friendly permalink structure that will ensure better position in the search results.
These couple of steps will enhance your WP SEO by a significant extent.