Beginner Guide to WordPress SEO
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS). It is a popular and user-friendly tool for people with no coding experience who want to create websites and blogs at no price. Everyone can install, use, and modify WordPress for free. In short, WordPress is the most popular and easiest way to create your website or blog.
Why is Search Engine Optimisation Important?
Search engines are the most important source of traffic for most websites. Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to understand and rank pages in search results. However, those algorithms are not always perfect, and they still require your assistance to understand your content.
Search engines will not know how to rank your content if your content is not optimized. Your website may not appear in search results when people search for the topics related to your content. As a result, you will lose all traffic. Hence, it is important for all businesses to make their website search engine friendly to optimise search traffic.
Beginners’ Guide to WordPress
1. Review Your Website’s Visibility Settings
There is a WordPress feature that allows you to hide your website from search engines. The main aim of this feature is to provide you time to work on your website before it goes live to the public. However, this option can be accidentally enabled, rendering your website inaccessible to search engines. As such, if your website is not appearing in search results, the first thing you should do is uncheck this option in WordPress. To do this, you would need to log in to your WordPress site’s admin area and navigate to the Settings » Reading page.
2. Importance of Internal Linking
Search engines assign a score to each page on your website (page authority). The formula for this score is kept a secret to avoid tampering with the results. On the other hand, internal links are the most common authority signals. This is why it is a good idea to interlink your content to your other blog posts and pages whenever possible. If you have multiple authors, create a pre-publish blog post checklist that requires authors to interlink at least three other blog posts.
3. Image SEO Optimisation in WordPress
Images are more appealing compared to text, but they take longer to load. If you are not careful with image sizes and quality, they can cause your website to load slowly. As such, it is good to use images that have been optimised to load quickly.
Another method for optimising your images for search engines is to use descriptive titles and alt tags. Upon uploading an image to WordPress, you can easily add title and alt tags. These tags help search engines determine the subject of your image. Screen readers can also read the alt text to visually impaired users.
Conclusion
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems, and with some careful research and planning, you can set up your first WordPress website in a matter of minutes. Furthermore, with these few WordPress tips, your website can gain visibility and improve your business’s SEO.
