Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website. Sadly most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started.

If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices.

In this guide, we will share the top WordPress SEO tips to help you improve your WordPress SEO and get more organic traffic.

 

You might have heard experts saying that WordPress is SEO-friendly. This is actually why a lot of people choose WordPress to start a blog or a website.

While WordPress makes sure that the code it generates follows the SEO best practices, there is a lot more you need to do if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.

We have a number of actionable steps that you need to take to properly optimize your WordPress SEO.

To make it easy, we have created a table of contents to help you easily navigate through our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.

 

Finally, see more SEO tools and resources to take your WordPress SEO even further.

Introduction  Of SEO Guide

We know the idea of optimizing for WordPress SEO can be intimidating for beginners, especially if you’re not a tech geek.

But don’t worry — it doesn’t have to be complicated. Start here to learn the basics, and then you can start applying them to your own website.

 

What is SEO?

 

 

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a strategy used by website owners to get more traffic by ranking higher in search engines.

Search engine optimization isn’t about tricking Google or gaming the system. It’s simply about creating a website that has optimized code and formatting which makes it easy for search engines to find your website.

When people search the web for the topics you write about, your search-engine-optimized content will appear higher in the search results, and you’ll get more people clicking through to your website.

 

Why SEO is important (SEO Guide)

Search engines are often the foremost important source of traffic for several websites.
Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to know and rank pages appropriately in search results. However, those algorithms aren’t perfect — they still need your help to know what your content is about.

If your content isn’t optimized, then search engines won’t skills to rank it. When people look for the topics you write on, your website won’t appear within the search results, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.

It is really important for all business owners to make their website program-friendly so that they’re going to maximize their search traffic.

 

Basics of WordPress SEO (SEO Guide)

SEO can get technical, but it doesn’t have to be. Just learning a few basic SEO tips to optimize your site can give you a noticeable boost in your website traffic.

You don’t have to be a tech genius to use the techniques below. If you’re already using WordPress, then you’ve got what it takes!

Let’s get started optimizing your website.

 

Check Your Site’s Visibility Settings (SEO Guide)

WordPress comes with a built-in choice to hide your website from search engines. the aim of this feature is to offer you time to figure on your website before it’s able to go public.

However, sometimes this feature can get checked accidentally and it makes your website unavailable to look at engines.

If your website isn’t appearing in search results, then the primary thing you would like to try to do is to form sure that this feature is unchecked.

Simply log in to the admin area of your WordPress site and visit the Settings » Reading page.

 

 

You need to scroll down to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ section and make sure that the box next to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ is unchecked.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your changes.

 

Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress

SEO-friendly URLs contain words that clearly explain the content of the page, and they’re easy to read by both humans and search engines.

Some examples of SEO friendly URLs are:

https://www.wehavedigitool.com/how-to-install-wordpress/

https://www.wehavedigitool.com/common-wordpress-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/

Notice that these URLs are readable and a user can guess what they will see on the page just by looking at the URL text.

So what does a non-SEO-friendly URL look like?

https://www.wehavedigitool.com/?p=10467

http://example.com/archives/123

 

 

For more detailed instructions take a look at our guide on what is an SEO-friendly URL structure in WordPress.

 

WWW vs non-WWW

If you are just starting out with your website, then you need to choose whether you want to use www (http://www.example.com) or non-www (http://example.com) in your site’s URL.

Search engines consider these to be two different websites, so this means you need to choose one and stick to it.

You can set your preference by visiting the Settings » General page. Add your preferred URL in both the ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ fields.

 

 

Despite what someone else might say, from an SEO standpoint there’s no advantage to using one or another.

For more detailed information on this topic, take a look at our guide on www vs non-www – which is better for WordPress SEO.

 

The Best WordPress SEO plugin

One of the best parts about WordPress is that there’s a plugin for everything, and SEO is no exception. There are thousands of WordPress SEO plugins which makes it harder for beginners to choose the best WordPress SEO plugin.

Instead of installing separate plugins for individual SEO tasks, we will help you choose the best WordPress SEO plugin that does it all, and it’s 100% free.

 

Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin

 

 

When it comes to choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will most likely narrow your choices down to the two most popular solutions: All in One SEO (AIO SEO) or Yoast SEO.

AIO SEO is the original WordPress SEO plugin that’s used on over 2 million websites. In this tutorial, we’ll be using AIO SEO for screenshots and examples.

For more details, you can see our complete guide on how to set up All In One SEO for WordPress.

 

Add XML Sitemaps in WordPress

 

 

An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted file that lists every single page on your website. This makes it easy for search engines to find all of your content.

While adding an XML sitemap does not boost your site’s search rankings, it does help search engines find the pages quickly and start ranking them.

If you’re using the AIO SEO plugin, then it will automatically create an XML sitemap for you. To find your sitemap, just go to this URL (don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name):

http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

We will show you how to submit your XML sitemap to Google in the next step.

 

Add Your Site to Google Search Console

 

 

Google Search Console, also known as Webmaster Tools, is a set of tools offered by Google to give website owners a look at how their content is seen by the search engine.

It provides reports and data to help you understand how your pages appear in search results. You also get to see the actual search terms people are using to find your website, how each page appears in the search results, and how often your pages are clicked.

All this information helps you understand what’s working on your site and what’s not. You can then plan your content strategy accordingly.

Google Search Console also alerts you when there is something wrong with your website, like when search crawlers are unable to access it, find duplicate content, or restricted resources.

We have a step-by-step guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.

If you’re using AIO SEO, then you can follow this guide on how to add Google Search Console.

 

Once you have added your website to Google Search Console, click on the Sitemap from the left menu and then paste the last part of the sitemap URL.

 

 

Click on the submit button to save your changes.

Google Search Console will now check your sitemap and use it to improve your website’s crawling.

Once you have successfully added your sitemap, it will appear as pending. It does take Google some time to crawl your website. After a few hours, you would be able to see some stats about your sitemap. It will show you the number of links it found in your sitemap, how many of them got indexed, a ratio of images and web pages, etc.

We recommend that you check your Search Console at least on a monthly basis for gathering insights and to see your website’s SEO progress.

If you’re not using AIO SEO, then you can watch our video that shows an alternative way:

 

Optimizing Your Blog Posts for SEO

Often beginners make the mistake of thinking that installing and activating a WordPress SEO plugin is all that’s needed. SEO is an ongoing process that you must keep up with if you want to see maximum results.

All top SEO plugins allow you to add a title, description, and focus keyword to every blog post and page. It also shows you a preview of what users will see when they Google your website.

We recommend that you optimize your title and description to get maximum clicks.

When writing your blog post, simply scroll down to the SEO section and take full advantage of it.

 

 

If you’re wondering how to choose a focus keyword or focus keyphrase, what is a good title, or what is a good meta description, then we have covered it in detail in our beginners guide to optimize your blog posts for SEO.

We highly recommend that you read it because on-page SEO is crucial for your success.

 

Doing Keyword Research for Your Website

 

Many beginners use their best guesses to figure out what topics people are looking for and what they should add to their blogs and website.

It is like shooting an arrow in the dark. You don’t need to do that when you can use real data to find out what people are looking for.

Keyword research is a research technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover words users enter into search engines to find content, products, and services in your industry.

You can then use those words and phrases on your website to get more search traffic.

There are a ton of keyword research tools (both free and paid) that you can use. We recommend using SEMRush, it helps you discover keywords and even find out the keywords where your competitors are ranking.

For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to do keyword research for your WordPress website.

 

 

Properly Using Categories and Tags in WordPress

 

 

WordPress allows you to sort your blog posts into categories and tags. This makes it easy for you to manage your content by topics, and for your users to find the content they’re looking for.

Categories and tags also help search engines understand your website structure and content.

Often beginners get confused on how to best use categories and tags. After explaining this to thousands of readers, here’s how we approach categories and tags.

Categories are meant for the broad grouping of your posts. If your blog was a book, then categories will be the table of content.

For example, on a personal blog, you can have categories like music, food, travel, etc. Categories are hierarchical, so you can add child categories to them.

On the other hand, tags are more specific keywords that describe the contents of an individual post. For example, a blog post filed under the food category can have tags like salad, breakfast, pancakes, etc. Think of these as indexes section in a textbook.

For more on this topic, see our guide on categories vs tags and SEO best practices for sorting your content.

By using categories and tags properly, you make it easy for your users to browse your website. Since it’s easy for users, it also makes it easier for search engines to browse your website.

 

Make Internal Linking a Habit

 

 

Search engines assign each page on your website a score (page authority). The recipe for this score is kept secret so that people cannot game the results. However, the most common signals of authority are links.

This is why you must link to your own content from your other blog posts and pages.

You should make it a habit to interlink your own posts whenever possible. If you have multiple authors, then create a pre-publish blog post checklist that requires them to interlink at least 3 other blog posts.

This will help you boost your pageviews, increases the time users spend on your site and ultimately will improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.

 

Optimize WordPress Comments

 

 

Comments are often a robust indication of user engagement on your website. Engaged users mean more links back to your site, more traffic, and improved SEO.

However, you would like to form sure that your comments are real and not spam. Spammers submit comments with bad links which could affect and even ruin your search rankings.

This is why we recommend everyone to start out using Akismet. It is one of the 2 plugins that come pre-installed with every WordPress site, and it helps you combat comment spam.

If Akismet alone is unable to handle comment spam, then see the following pointers and tools to combat comment spam in WordPress.

If your blog posts attract tons of genuine, spam-free comments, then you ought to pat yourself on the shoulder for building such an enticing website!

However, too many comments on a post can make it load slower which also affects your program rankings. (Keep reading below to seek out out more about how speed affects SEO.)

To prepare your website so that it can handle the burden of comments placed on your server and speed, you’ll split comments into multiple pages. See our tutorial on the way to paginate comments in WordPress.

(If you’d wish to get more comments on your site, inspect these 11 ways to urge more comments on your WordPress blog posts.)

 

NoFollow External Links in WordPress

As mentioned above, links help search engines decide which pages are important. When you link to a website, you are passing some of your site’s SEO score to that link. This SEO score is called “link juice.”

For good search rankings, you need to make sure that you are getting more link juice from other websites than you are giving away.

Adding the “no follow” attribute to external links (links to websites that you don’t own) instructs search engines not to follow those links. This helps you save link juice.

A normal external link looks like this in HTML:

<a href="http://example.com">Example Website</a>

An external link with the nofollow attribute looks like this:

<a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example Website</a>

By default, WordPress does not come with an option to make links nofollow. However, if you’re using the AIO SEO plugin, it makes it easy for you.

When you’re adding a link, simply click the Add “nofollow” to link option.

 

 

For more details and alternate methods, see our guide on how to add nofollow links in WordPress.

 

Full Posts vs Summaries or Excerpts

 

 

WordPress displays and links to your posts from a number of pages like home page, category archive, tags archive, date archive, author pages, etc.

By default, it shows the full article content on all these pages. This affects your site’s SEO, as search engines may find it to be duplicate content. Full articles also make your archive pages load slower.

Showing full articles everywhere also affects your page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to read the full article in their feed reader without ever visiting your website.

The easiest way to solve this is by showing summaries or excerpts instead of full articles.

You can do this by going to Settings » Reading and select summary.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to customize WordPress excerpts without coding.

 

Optimize Your Site’s Speed and Performance

 

 

Research shows that the average human attention span is shorter in the internet age than that of a goldfish.

Web usability experts believe that users decide whether they want to stay or leave within a few seconds of visiting a website.

That means that you only have a few seconds to present your content and engage users as a website owner. You don’t want to waste this precious time making your visitor wait for your website to load. Search engines like Google now rank faster websites higher than slow-loading websites.

If you need to improve your site’s speed, check out this expert advice on 18 useful tricks to speed up WordPress and boost performance.

 

Optimizing Images in WordPress for SEO

Images are more engaging than text but they also take more time to load. If you are not careful with image sizes and quality, then they can slow down your website.

You need to make sure that you use images that are optimized to load faster. See our guide on how to speed up WordPress by optimizing images for the web.

Another trick you can use to optimize your images for search engines is to use a descriptive title and alt tags. These tags help search engines understand what your image is about. They also help users with visual impairment as their screen readers can read the alt text to them.

WordPress allows you to easily add title and alt tags when you upload an image.

 

 

 

If you are a photographer or add many images to your WordPress site, you need to use a gallery plugin.

We recommend using the Envira Gallery. In our speed tests, we found it to be the fastest WordPress gallery plugin. It’s also fully responsive and SEO-friendly out of the box.

For more tips, see our complete beginner’s guide to image SEO.

 

Security and Safety of Your WordPress Site

 

 

 

Each week, Google blacklists around 20,000 websites for malware and around 50,000 for phishing. When a site is blacklisted, it doesn’t show up in any search results in the least.

This means that the safety of your WordPress site is crucial permanently rankings. You don’t want all of your diligence on SEO to visit waste if your site is compromised by a hacker.

The good news is that it’s not that difficult to stay your WordPress site safe — see the step-by-step instructions in our ultimate WordPress security guide.

At Wehavedigitaltool, we use Sucuri to protect our website against attacks. To see why we recommend this service, inspect our case study of how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months.

 

Start Using SSL/HTTPS

 

 

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) may be a technology that encrypts the connection between a user’s browser and therefore the server they’re connecting to. This adds a further security layer to your WordPress site.

Websites secured with SSL are indicated by a padlock check in the browser’s address bar. This makes your website more trustworthy, and it’s required if you’re running an Online Store with WordPress and processing sensitive payment information.

All top WordPress hosting companies offer free SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt. See our guide on the way to get a free SSL certificate for your website for more details.

If you would like a premium wildcard SSL certificate or simply a daily certificate with a security warranty, then we recommend using NameCheap.com.

Their SSL certificates accompany a minimum of $10,000 security warranty and up to $1.75 million security warranty. You also get a TrustLogo site seal to display on your site for added credibility.