Improving Search Engine Optimization for a WordPress Site

The term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is thrown around a lot, with different people providing a variety of definitions. In reality, SEO in its simplest form refers to optimizing a website to get better search engine results. Using WordPress for the creation of your website or blog will give a good start on SEO for your site, as WordPress incorporates several methods of SEO that are automatically applied to your pages and posts; though, this may not be enough to give you the search engine results you are hoping for. To increase the amount of traffic from search engine queries, learn how to improve Search Engine Optimization for a WordPress site.

Focus on Content

There is a popular saying that gets passed around – content is king. The reason behind this is that search engines, especially Google, focus on the content of your website before factoring in other details and determining search rankings. When you write a WordPress blog posting or an informative article, you should aim to provide relevant content. Once your content is created, you can start worrying about additional SEO for your WordPress site. This will also help you retain visitors, as people are more likely to want to come back to your site and share your posts, if they found your content useful.

SEO Plugins for WordPress

With your content written, you can begin implementing additional SEO for your WordPress website. One of the easier ways to do this is through the use of WordPress SEO plugins. There are hundreds of different WordPress plugins that provide some form of SEO, from automatic sitemap generators to keyword usage calculators. Be far, one of the most popular and widely used SEO plugins for WordPress is the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast. A free download, this plugin will automatically generate XML sitemaps and provides a method of analyzing your post to ensure you do not use a keyword too often or not enough.

URL Optimization

By default, WordPress is set to name the URL of all of your posts with a unique identifier. This results in an unreadable URL containing a series of numbers. Instead of automatically naming your posts using the default setting, you have several other options. Your first two options are to have your posts placed in a structure based on the date it was published, as in http://example.com/2014/04/10/post-name; though, the better option is to simply have the URL of your post named after the actual name of your post, as in http://example.com/post-name. Whichever method you prefer, any of these options are better for SEO on your WordPress site than going with the default setting. You can find these options under Settings – Permalinks.

In addition to the use of SEO plugins, URL optimization, and providing relevant content, there are many more methods of ensuring good SEO for your WordPress site, including social media integration and making sure that you provide each of the major search engines with updated XML sitemaps each time you create a new post or page.