SEO for WordPress – An introduction

WordPress is a very search engine friendly content management system. By changing a few settings and installing a few plugins, you can optimize your WordPress blog or website easily.

As you know, an optimized WP site with great content is an invaluable asset for anyone who wants to make a living online. In this article, I am going to share with you some simple yet amazingly effective tips to optimize your website for search engines.

Internal linking

When it comes to SEO for WordPress sites, internal linking deserves a special mention. When done properly, it can improve your site’s search engine rankings, increase pageviews, and improve usability. While writing an article, you can add links to related articles on your site.

You can also have a RELATED ARTICLES section at the end of each post to help users find more information on the same topic. The important thing here is to use relevant keywords while linking to other sections of the website.

Title tags

A title tag tells search engines what a website or webpage is all about. Use keyword phrases that you are trying to get your site to rank for as title tags. To do so, you can install the SEO title tag plugin, which lets you optimize the title tags as you wish. This is a simple yet highly effective way to make your WordPress blog SEO friendly.

Headings

The use of proper headings not only makes it easy for users to read your articles, but also tells search engines what the page is all about. So, you should try to use important keyword phrases as headings and subheadings. You can use H1 for the main heading, H2 for subheadings, H3 for small headings, and so on.

Pingbacks

If you want others to link to your site, you should take the initiative by linking to other sites. This is something you need to remember while doing SEO for WordPress blogs and websites.

To make sure a site owner knows that you have linked to his site, you can go to SETTINGS, select DISCUSSION, and activate the options that notify people when you link to their site and notify you when someone links to your site.

Image tags

Use Alt attributes to tell search engines about the images on your site. You can save your images using a keyword related to the text that accompanies the image. By doing so, you can get more traffic to your images.

Sitemap

Adding a sitemap to your WP site is very important. It makes it easier for search engines to index your webpages. If you have the know-how, you can do it manually. If not, you can use an automatic sitemap generator to create a sitemap for your site. It is one of the simplest ways to make your WordPress blog SEO friendly.

Markup validity

Use the W3C Validator to check the markup validity of web documents. It can give you a pretty clear picture of your website’s code and highlight the sections that need to be corrected.

Plugins

One of the biggest advantages of having a WP blog or site is that you have tons of plugins at your disposal. These plugins can make the job of doing SEO for WordPress sites a lot easier. The best part, of course, is that they are completely free. You can simply go to WordPress website, choose the plugins you want, and install them on your site.

Search engine friendly URLs

Permalinks on WP sites usually look like yourwebsite.com/?p=25. To make your WordPress blog SEO friendly, you can go to the WP dashboard, select SETTINGS and then select PERMALINKS.

You can enter /%postname%/ in the custom structure field and click ‘Save Changes’. Your post titles will now look like yourwebsite.com/postname. This is a format which is both
SEO friendly and user friendly.

Conclusion

Making a WordPress blog SEO friendly becomes a simple task once you understand the basics of search engine optimization. So, follow the tips given above, optimize your WP website for search engines, and get more traffic.

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