It is estimated that WordPress has a CMS (content management system) market share of around 63%. Here are some tips on how to best combine WordPress and SEO:
1. Keep your WordPress site updated
New updates for WordPress are released regularly. In the WordPress dashboard, you can easily update whenever a new version is available. In addition to improved security and stability, you will occasionally get updates that can have a directly positive impact on your SEO results.
In version 5.5, which was released in August 2020, for example, “lazy loading” is standard. This means that images on the website are not loaded until just before they become visible to the user. This will reduce the website’s loading time, which Google’s algorithm rewards.
2. Make sure WordPress isn’t hiding your website from Google
Under “Settings” and “Reading” you’ll find a feature that lets you ask search engines to not index the website. This can be useful in the initial phase, before you’ve finished building the site. But once the site is live, it’s important that you remove this setting again.
3. Useful plug-ins for SEO work on WordPress
There are over 55,000 plug-ins/extensions available for WordPress. Here are some tips on which ones you should choose:
Yoast SEO (https://nb.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/): This is a dedicated SEO plug-in, and a very good place to start. Yoast has a premium version, but even the free version gives you many useful tricks. Including:
- Easy access to edit meta title and meta description.
- Automatic sitemap.xml (this helps Google read/understand the website correctly).
- Overview of how strong the text you write is, from an SEO perspective.
- Tools to implement structured data and breadcrumbs.
Smush (https://nb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/): Use Smush to compress the images on your website without compromising visible image quality. Google values fast websites highly, so you can achieve a strong SEO effect by using Smush.
- Reduces images, both in file size and in pixels (width/height).
- Can be used both manually and automatically when uploading new images.
WP Fastest Cache (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fastest-cache/): This is also related to speed, since it is such an important factor for Google. If you don’t know what cache is, this may seem a bit technical and difficult.
Simply put: WP Fastest Cache creates static HTML versions of your web pages. This means that various scripts don’t need to be downloaded from the server every time a new visitor comes to your site. As a result, you’ll get faster load times, especially if your website has many visitors at the same time.
- Easy to install and use. Clear old cache manually with a single click.
- Automatically deletes old cache and creates a new one when you update pages and posts.
- Easy to exclude individual pages if you don’t want to use cache across the entire website.
Really Simple SSL (https://nb.wordpress.org/plugins/really-simple-ssl/):
This is a small plug-in with big impact! Does your URL start with http or https? If your URL starts with http, you should download this extension right away.
Really Simple SSL ensures that SSL certificate is properly implemented. You usually get the SSL certificate from your web host, and many include this in the price. Simply put, SSL certification means that the communication between the website and the visitor’s PC is encrypted. Google prefers secure websites and will penalize sites without an SSL certificate.
- Easy installation. In most cases, all you need to do is activate the extension.
- The plug-in automatically fixes most issues that can occur with WordPress and SSL.
4. Use clear and natural permalinks
By permalinks, we mean how the URL structure looks after the domain name. For example, the URL of this article is https://www.solidmedia.no/seo/wordpress-seo. The part that comes after /solidmedia.no/ is the permalink. Even though permalinks are not the most critical factor in SEO, it is beneficial for both Google and your website visitors that URLs don’t just consist of characters and numbers. In WordPress, this is very easy to fix.
Go to “Settings” and “Permalinks”. As you can see from the image below, you have a range of options. We recommend using one of the two bottom options so that the links get the same names as categories, posts, and page titles.
5. Keep it simple, structured, and user-friendly
Finally, we’ll share some SEO tips that apply to all websites.
- Use a design that is mobile-friendly, clean, and simple.
- Assume that the visitor is short on time, and make sure they can find the right information quickly.
- Use precise headings. Know who you are trying to communicate with, and create targeted content based on this.
- Be meticulous in your content selection. Make sure to remove any duplicate pages.
