SEO beginners face many challenges. There are so many things to do and learn at the beginning, making it impossible to differentiate between the important tasks that should be done first and the least important ones that can be implemented later.
There is a plethora of information about ‘WordPress SEO’ on the web.
The problem is that if you are new to WordPress and SEO, you may not know where to start or which path to follow.
You know you want to increase your traffic quickly, but you are unsure how the different SEO principles and best practices can apply to a WordPress website.
This post explains how to approach the SEO optimization of a WordPress website (either new or existing) by following proven SEO best practices.
These are the 7 steps to follow:
- Choose an SEO Friendly WordPress theme
- Select an SEO Friendly Hosting Provider
- Make Sure Your Website is Secured
- Check your Technical SEO
- Optimize Your On-page SEO
- Create content that satisfies the user's intent
- Promote your Website (Off-Page SEO)
1. Choose an SEO Friendly WordPress theme
I decided to add this as number one on the list since improving your rankings will be difficult without an SEO-friendly theme.
From experience, many people either don’t know what to look for in a WordPress theme to make it search engine friendly or ignore this altogether, which is a big mistake.
How do you select an SEO-friendly theme?
A good WordPress theme has the following features:
It’s mobile-friendly – Having a mobile-friendly website is a must, and if your WordPress theme is not responsive, then this is a very good opportunity to consider redesigning a website.
There are many reasons why this matters.
For starters, Google introduced mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal in 2013. If your website is not optimized for mobile, you are missing out on the 50% of potential traffic navigating the web on mobile.
Second, you are not taking advantage of a responsive design's many benefits to online businesses, which can hurt your conversion rates and sales.
It has built-in support for schemas. Schemas, or structured data representation, have gained importance in the last couple of years, and although they are not yet part of the Google ranking algorithm, they can help your SEO efforts.
In short, schemas or microdata are a way to describe your data to search engines using certain tags in your HTML code.
Google uses this information in their search results when showing rich snippets or knowledge graph entries.
If your theme does not have schema information built in, you must hire a developer to make these changes for you or use a third-party plugin.
You can still get it to work, but it’s much better if the theme natively supports structured data.
It’s developer-friendly – A WordPress website is never static. There will be cases in the lifetime of a website where you will have to make changes to the underlying code.
Good WordPress themes have hooks and filters that help developers perform changes quickly and efficiently.
Usually, this is achieved through a framework (read more details below), which is the intermediate layer between WordPress core files and themes.
It loads fast—Everyone likes a fast-loading website. Google rewards fast websites by giving them a small ranking boost, and users are more likely to interact with and revisit a website that loads without delays.
While there are many techniques to improve the loading speed of a WordPress website, if your theme is not designed with speed in mind, it will be very difficult to achieve loading speeds in the range of 2-4 seconds.
Elements like image sliders, background videos, extreme mouseover effects, custom animations, or visual editing plugins make a website look stunning but also very slow.
You must choose the first option if you had to choose between a functional and fast website and a ‘wow’ website that only works on high-speed Wi-Fi connections.
On-page SEO optimized – I have discussed on-page SEO many times in the past, but when it comes to choosing a WordPress theme, your primary concern is to make sure that it is compatible with basic on-page SEO concepts like:
- The use of a single H1 tag per page.
- The proper output of ALT tags for images.
- The proper output of page titles and descriptions.
- The correct use of canonical URLs and many more.
Pro Tip: Have a look at my previous post on how to SEO audit your website and make sure that your chosen theme adheres to those guidelines.
Recommended WordPress themes and frameworks to use
Over the years, I had the opportunity to work with several different WordPress themes and frameworks, but when it comes to my websites or websites we develop for our clients, we always go with studio press themes that are based on the powerful Genesis framework.
The main reason is that the Genesis framework and themes are generally accepted by the SEO industry as the best SEO themes available today.
The website you are reading now is based on the Genesis framework, and many of the most popular websites on the Internet run by SEO experts are also based on Genesis.
It’s not free; you may have to pay as much as $100 to get the Genesis framework and a child theme to get started, but it’s one of the best investments you can make for your SEO efforts.
Besides the SEO benefits, these themes are easy to use (from an administrative perspective) and developer-friendly.
2. Select an SEO Friendly Hosting Provider
Next on the list is SEO-friendly hosting. Hosting providers can often indirectly affect your SEO efforts without you realizing it.
I have seen cases where hosting providers add restrictions in a website's robots.txt to block bots from accessing its full content, limit the times a website is crawled, or add delays to the crawl rate, and this hurts SEO.
There are several good hosting providers out there, so I won’t make a specific recommendation besides mentioning that WordPress runs better on VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting than on shared hosting.
If you are serious about your blog or online business, VPS hosting is your only choice.
Your website will run faster, be more secure and if you choose a reliable hosting provider you will also have prompt support when you need it.
3. Make Sure your Website is Secured
How is WordPress security related to SEO? Websites that don’t have strong protection get hacked and loaded with malicious code that adds outgoing links to websites with bad reputations.
In many cases, the website owner doesn’t know this is happening. Hackers use clever ways to hack into a website and add visible code under certain conditions.
The result? Your rankings drop, and your website is removed from Google search until you take action to clean the malware and submit a reconsideration request.
If you have experienced this once, you know how frustrating it is, especially if your income depends on your website.
Regarding security, ‘prevention is always better than cure’.
4. Check your Technical SEO
Now that we have dealt with the above important tasks that indirectly affect your SEO, we can start working on things that directly impact rankings and traffic.
First on the list is technical SEO.
Technical SEO is a term used to describe settings you must configure to improve your website's indexing and ensure that nothing technical prevents search engine bots from accessing your content.
For best practices, you need to check the following:
- Can search engines access your website, or is your robots.txt blocking them?
- Is your XML Sitemap optimized and submitted to Google and Bing?
- Did you set a preferred domain in WordPress and Google Search Console?
- Do you provide users with an HTML sitemap?
- Do you have a custom 404 page that is properly configured?
- Do you use redirects (301, 302) correctly?
- Is your website configured to handle both http:// and http://www requests?
- Do you take advantage of structured data and schemas?
- Are there any broken links in your content?
- Are there any crawl or not-found errors reported in the Google search console?
- Did you set the canonical URLs correctly for all the pages of your website?
- Is your website mobile-friendly?
- Do you have a breadcrumb menu enabled, and it is properly tagged?
- Do you implement ‘paging’ correctly for multi-page posts or pages?
- If your website is available in multiple languages, is this correctly defined in your code and Google Search Console?
- Does it load fast?
- Do you use SSL?
Despite using the word ‘technical’, you don’t have to be a technical guru to handle these issues. If this sounds too complicated, you can read step-by-step instructions with screenshots and annotations in my SEO Course.
5. Optimize Your On-page SEO
Once you finish the technical SEO, you can concentrate on your On-page SEO. As the name implies, on-page SEO concerns the page (or post) and how you can optimize it better.
The most important elements that need attention are:
SEO-Friendly Titles – This is perhaps the most discussed element in SEO.
The title of a page is very important since this is the first strong signal you can send to users and search engines, and you can describe in less than 60 characters what the page is about.
One of the examples I would like to use to explain how to come up with a good page title is the one used by Google AdSense.
Look at the screenshot below and notice how keywords blend nicely in the title, followed by the product name.
Using keywords in your title is not keyword stuffing; on the contrary, it makes search engines' (and users') job easier.
What would be keyword stuffing in this example is to use a title like this: “Make money online | Make Money | Make money with AdSense”
Meta Description Optimization – The same concepts apply to the page's meta description.
Google may select this part to appear in the search results, so it has to be descriptive and interesting to encourage users to click and visit your website.
This is the description used by Google AdSense (see screenshot above). Again, notice how they use the keywords “make money online,” “content monetization,” and “make money” in a way that looks natural and appealing.
H1 tag Optimization – Another on-page SEO element is the H1 tag. As mentioned above, this depends on how your theme is configured. You should ensure only one <h1> tag on the page.
The value of your H1 can be the same as your page title (which is usually the case with most WordPress themes) or a close variation.
In the AdSense example, the H1 tag value is “AdSense, turn your passion into profit”.
Internal links – Links pointing to other pages within your website are considered internal links.
You can use them to help users find out more information about a certain topic, and at the same time, you assist search engine crawlers in discovering more pages from your website.
When adding internal links, you can use keywords in your anchor text, it’s not the same as external links but don’t overdo it.
Keep your internal links short and add them only when it matters.
Outgoing links—It’s normal to have links within your content pointing to external websites. Google interprets these links as ‘votes of trust’, which still affect a page's ranking position.
The problem with links, in general, is that they can be manipulated. To improve their rankings, many webmasters contact other webmasters, asking them for links either for free, for a fee or by giving them incentives (for example, sending free products for reviews).
How is this related to on-page SEO? If Google believes that the outgoing links on your page are part of a deal, your website will be penalized, and your rankings and Google trust will drop.
To avoid such a situation, you should only link out when it benefits your user and avoid using keyword-optimized anchor texts unless it is natural.
Use the rel=”nofollow” tag when you want to reference, recommend, or review other products in your content.
6. Create content that satisfies the user's intent
Although content is part of the on-page SEO process, I added it as a separate section to gain more importance.
In the past, when we were discussing content and SEO, we concentrated on things like:
- Doing keyword research to find out what users search for
- Publishing articles with unique content that contained those keywords
- Rinse and repeat
Things have changed. Content SEO is no longer about keywords but also about understanding the user intent.
Any content that does not consider what the searcher is looking for when typing a particular keyword in Google has no chance of gaining high rankings.
Google understands user intent with the help of Rank Brain (its new automated system that is part of the ranking algorithm), and that’s how it manages to keep its users happy and its reputation high.
As webmasters and SEOs, we can utilize this knowledge to help us create better content.
How? Search for a keyword in Google and carefully examine the type of content (both in terms of format and meaning) of the websites appearing in the first 5 positions.
So the new refined SEO copywriting process becomes:
- Perform keyword research to find out what users search in Google related to your niche.
- For each candidate keyword, carefully examine the results in Google search and understand the user intent.
- Create detailed, insightful, and SEO-friendly content while satisfying the user's intent.
- Rinse and repeat.
How is content related to WordPress SEO? Even if you correct the technical and on-page SEO, you can still achieve high rankings without great content.
That’s why it’s important to remember the role of content when discussing rankings and SEO using WordPress or any other platform.
7. Promote your Website (Off-Page SEO)
Off page SEO is the last piece of the puzzle for optimizing your WordPress website.
So far, all actions have had to do with changes or settings you can adjust within your website.
Off-page SEO gives search engines more reasons to trust your website than others.
Link building: The most popular off-page SEO technique is SEO backlinks. It’s a huge topic and something that many beginners find difficult to understand and implement.
What you should understand about link building are the following:
- Avoid bad linking practices (buying links, link exchanges, etc.)
- Stay away from easy-to-get links (spam links in comments, article directories)
- Stay away from links coming from low-quality websites or blogs
- Bad links (like those described above) are not harmless; they can damage your rankings and put your website into trouble (think Google Penalties).
- Natural links are good and welcomed.
How do you get good links?
In short, the best ways to get strong links that will make a difference in rankings are:
- Publish great content (see point 6 above) that is worthy of links
- Position your content in front of the people who are more likely to link to it (social media is of great help in this manner)
- Build connections with other bloggers in your industry and keep them updated whenever you publish new content. If the content is good and related to their business, they may link to it naturally.
- Write superb content and get it published on reputable websites bigger than yours (guest posting).
Key Points
If you are a beginner at WordPress SEO, you need to understand that there is more than one factor that plays a role in rankings.
First, you must start with your website and check your WordPress theme, hosting, and security.
Then, you must thoroughly check your technical SEO and ensure that search engine bots can access and understand your website’s content and structure.
Next, you need to worry about your on-page SEO. This is the part where you can send search engines many ‘signals’ about the meaning of your content and the purpose of your page.
Finally, don’t forget that long-term success comes from the quality of your content and how other websites on the Internet think of your website (that’s off-page SEO).
