WordPress SEO
People sometimes make the mistake of classifying WordPress as just a blogging platform. Although that used to be true in the past, WordPress has evolved throughout the years into a versatile content management system (CMS). While you can still use WordPress to create a simple blog, now it also allows you to create fully functional websites and mobile applications. The main advantages of WordPress are its ease of use and the fact that it is written using standard compliance high quality code and produces semantic mark up which makes it very attractive to search engines. In this post we will explore the best practices of SEO as they pertain to WordPress websites.
What is the Best WordPress SEO Plugin?
Yoast SEO Plugin
Within Worpress it is common to use plugins to add specific features to the site. There are various plugins available for search engine optimization but one of the most highly recommended is the Yoast SEO plugin. The Yoast plugin allows you to pick a focus keyword around which your content can be tailored, leading to an improvement in the SEO of that content.
WordPress SEO Tips for Keyword Research
An owner of a business should then think of the words that describe their business and perform keyword research to find out which of those words are being searched for the most on search engines. One way to do this is to visit Google’s Keyword Planner. Here you will be able to enter in a keyword and it will present you with a range of other words and phrases that relate to your original word and will relay how often that each of these suggested words has been searched. It also allows you to see how much competition for those words exist – that is, whether there are many competitors using that keyword to attract visitors to their sites. What you should look for are keywords that are searched frequently but have low competition.
SEO in WordPress: Where to Place Keywords
Once the keyword has been selected you would then focus your website content around that search term. You would do this by mentioning the keyword in the text of your webpage’s content frequently. Ideally the keyword would be mentioned in the webpage’s Title, the webpage’s URL, in the H1 heading and other headings, in the Alt text of any images on the page, and in the main written content. The Yoast Plugin makes this easy with a page analysis section that provides a checklist of SEO tasks to complete and allows you to see if you have missed any optimization opportunities.
WordPress SEO Guide to Linking
Finally, it is important to consider linking. Internal linking should be used when possible. This is when you link from one page of your website to other pages within your website. This is important because Google recognizes that you have established a good internal linking structure and rewards this effort with higher search rankings. It is also important to try to develop inbound links – links from other websites that lead to your website. An example of this would be if an article from an online publication mentioned your website and linked back to you. Registering with online business directories like Yelp can help with this as well as they would also offer links back to your website.
For more detail on search engine optimization of WordPress sites watch this video by online entrepreneur, Alex Fleck.