A Brief Guide to WordPress SEO

Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin

One of the easiest ways to ensure that you are partly on top of the WordPress SEO game is to install a WordPress SEO plugin.

There are many out there, but the two that you are probably going to choose from are Yoast and AIOSEO (All in One SEO). 

Both of them have oodles of user-friendly features, are easy to set up, and get you going on the path to making your website SEO-friendly.

Let’s see some basic things you can do to improve your WordPress SEO. 

1. Choose whether you want www or non-www for your site URL and stick with it – you can choose this in your WordPress website’s setting
2. Make sure your site is visible to search engines – again this is a setting in your WordPress site and can be easily changed
3. Add your site to Google Search Console by creating XML site maps

SEO is so crucial because you need to optimise your website, blog, and pages for search engines to find and index easily.

If not, they will not be able to find your website, and all that work you put into it would go down the drain. Thus, the main point of SEO is to ensure you get organic traffic coming your way. 

WordPress SEO Optimisation – Focus on Optimising Your Blog Posts

Once you’ve chosen the best SEO plugin for WordPress and done the basics for WordPress SEO optimisation, then you need to move on to optimising each one of your blog posts. 

If your website is still new, you might not have many blog posts or pages to work with. That’s fine. Start with the ones you have and make sure you follow the same rules for all the new posts you add. 

The WordPress SEO plugin you use will give you lots of critiques and feedback on how to improve your WordPress SEO. Follow it!

For example, in Yoast, you can ensure that your on-page SEO and readability scores are green for each post. If they aren’t green, Yoast tells you what’s wrong, and how to fix it. It’s a no-brainer!

1. Ensure that you add your focus keyword into your title, headings, and the body of the blog post
2. Optimise your title and description to maximize organic traffic
3. Use a keyword research tool like SEMRush, to discover keywords, and to figure out what keywords your competitors are using
4. Properly use categories and tags in WordPress – remember that categories are the overarching buckets (choose 5-7 of these) and tags are specific to each post
5. Don’t forget to internally link your posts – that’s how search engines can index more of your site and it makes it easier for users to find related content on your site

As you can see, it’s just about checking off the boxes. Create a checklist for yourself, if need be, and ensure that you follow the rules above for each of the posts you write.

Image Optimisation Is Crucial for WordPress SEO

One of the best ways to improve your website SEO is to work on the images on your website. Google has a page just for images and a lot of your organic traffic could potentially come from your images.

Follow the rules to ensure your image SEO is on point:

1. Use Alt-Txt for all your images – do not forget this crucial thing
2. Make sure that you adhere to the 4:3 or 16:9 ratios when setting up an image on your site – that’s what Google shows to browsers primarily
3. Allow lazy loading of your images – that means that images above the fold are loaded first, and as the user scrolls down, the images below the fold are loaded after
4. Try as much as possible to use original images – stock photos are not a good idea
5. If you want bonus marks, create an image sitemap as well

Image SEO is quite crucial, but almost everyone ignores it because it seems unimportant. Don’t underestimate the power of good image SEO.

No Need To Feel Overwhelmed by WordPress SEO Optimisation

As a newbie WordPress owner, reading through this guide on optimising WordPress SEO might give you that anxious feeling in the pit of your stomach.

You might be feeling overwhelmed by all that needs to be to make your WordPress SEO friendly. Not only that, but you also know that Google changes and/or adds to its rules about SEO optimisation every year.

As a business owner or an entrepreneur, you barely have enough time to write enough posts during the week. That’s why a WordPress SEO service is going to be your best friend during such times. 

If you have no intention of becoming an expert in WordPress SEO, and all you want to do is write blogs, and leave the rest up to a real expert, then the main thing you need to do is hire a WordPress SEO service. 

There are many of them out there, but remember that they should focus on all three aspects of SEO – on-site SEO, off-site SEO, and competitor analysis.