Basic SEO Practices For WordPress Sites. Learn more.

One of the motivations for you choosing WordPress as your website’s CMS may be as you have read that it is SEO-friendly straight out of the box. In actual fact, you only have to check out WordPress’ own list of compelling features on their homepage to see that they are very proud that the platform is SEO-friendly.

However, this doesn’t mean that just launching a WordPress website is sufficient to rank at the very top of the SERPs. You still need to know what the correct SEO tactics for a WordPress are that you need to utilise as well as how to implement these. The very good news is that WordPress makes this simple to do and easier for beginners to increase their traffic from Google.

The WordPress platform has many features which adhere to SEO best practices to make your life easier. This means that you can focus your efforts on the tasks which make a real difference to your rankings and organic visibility.

SEO For WordPress

Adopting WordPress SEO best practices is very important for attracting more traffic to your website. Unfortunately, most SEO for WordPress guides are far too technical for new users to get started. If you are serious about upping your website traffic, then you need to pay close attention to the WordPress SEO best practices.

You may have heard the experts saying that WordPress is SEO friendly. This is actually why a lot of individuals choose WordPress to start up a blog or a website. While WordPress ensures that the code which it generates follows the SEO best practices, there is a lot more you need to do if you want to maximise your SEO efforts.

How To Do SEO On WordPress Website

Prior to you making any changes to your website, it is good idea to see where you are at the moment. There’s a lot to profit from getting it right: you need to run your site on a server with up-to-date software at a web hosting company that provides excellent performance.

So ask yourself these questions:

• On what hardware and software are your websites running?
• What is your hosting plan?
• Are you utilising a budget shared hosting provider?
• Have you made an investment in a dedicated hosting plan at a well-known web host that fine-tuned its servers for use with WordPress?

Check you’re using suitable hosting

The suggested hosting plan to run WordPress should include a modern version of PHP, MySQL or MariaDB as well as HTTPS support. It is quite possible to work with older server software however that is not advised. If you check up your site health, you are able to see the technical details of your installation. As well, if you open the dashboard of your hosting provider, you should be able to see what kind of plan you are on.

Remember that paying for good WordPress hosting pays dividends when you’re doing SEO for your WordPress site. Upgrading your web hosting plan is one of the simplest improvements that you can make.

Upgrade To PHP 7.0 Or Higher

Many of the WordPress sites out there still run on outdated versions of PHP. One look at the WordPress stats shows that around 15% of the websites still run on a PHP edition in the five series, while PHP 7.0 and up have been accessible for years.

Backward compatibility is holding back WordPress as a technology and site owners from getting the most out of their websites. These older PHP versions don’t receive any more security fixes and are therefore gradually more vulnerable to attacks.

Which SEO Plugin Is Best For WordPress?

The best WordPress SEO plugins is definitely Yoast. Yoast SEO for WordPress is a popular SEO plugin which allows you to optimise your WordPress website for search engines. It allows you the opportunity to easily add SEO titles as well as descriptions to all posts and pages on your website. Also, you can utilise it to add Open Graph metadata as well as social media images to your articles.

Yoast SEO for WordPress automatically generates an XML sitemap for all your website content which makes it straightforward for search engines to crawl your website. In addition, it helps you easily import your SEO data if you have been using another SEO plugin.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you are keen to find out more about SEO then you need to do our SEO and Web Analytics Course. Follow this link for more information.