SEO Basics for WordPress Users and Beginners

According to SearchEngineWatch, WordPress now powers one-sixth of all websites. That's a staggering number of sites and a massive achievement considering the wide range of hosting and development platforms out there. It's a testament to just how beneficial, and easy to use WordPress as a CMS is.

Of course, the number of high quality WordPress themes on offer doesn't hurt anything either. Given the number of users adopting this platform, it's somewhat surprising that more don't know how to improve their SEO results using the tools, plugins and other options native to WordPress. This brief guide will help.

Get Your Post Names Right

WordPress automatically creates a URL for each post or page that you put up on your site. And while it generally does a decent job of it, there are times that the result isn't ideal. You need to make sure that your page and post URLs don't have a bunch of question marks and random text bits in them.

Instead, it needs to include your domain name and the name of the post. You can control this through the built-in Permalink Settings feature found in your control panel. The more streamlined and simple your URLs are, the better your SEO results will be.

Use Yoast – Install It Now

You're likely to find this piece of advice on every single post detailing SEO for WordPress and there are some very good reasons for this. Yoast is a simple, easy to use plugin that can offer dramatic benefits to your online visibility. It's free (which is always appreciated), and it's native to WordPress.

It's also one of the most comprehensive tools out there for digging into the SEO aspects of each page and post on your site. It allows you to track just how well optimized your pages are, makes suggestions for better results, tells you where more information or additional keywords are needed and more.

However, you'll need to go through the set up with care. Make sure you set it up correctly and that it's configured right.

Always Optimize Your Images

This is another bit of advice regularly given to WordPress users, but it's surprising how few site owners and bloggers actually follow it. When you upload an image to your WordPress site, you're given a number of different fields that can be filled in. You don't HAVE to fill in those fields, but you should.

They can offer significant advantages and boost your SEO through Google image searches. The title, alternate text, caption, description and even link URL can all be optimized with the appropriate keywords and descriptive text.

Have Tracking Capabilities Installed

If you really want to improve your SEO results, you need some way to track your efforts. The most common (and probably the best overall) option is Google Analytics. You can add Google Analytics to your WordPress site relatively easily – just follow Google's instructions on the Analytics page of your account.

Using this tool, you can dig down into a broad range of different metrics for your site, including the bounce rate, where most visitors land initially, where they go once there, the pages of interest to most visitors and much more. With the information gleaned here, you can modify your site, your blogging schedule and even the focus of your entire site to take advantage of visitor trends.

SEO for WordPress users is actually much simpler than it is for those using other platforms. If you choose the right tools and take the appropriate steps, you can build excellent results and draw in much more traffic to your website or blog.