WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. Not only is it used by almost a quarter of new webmasters, it’s also the system of choice for 17% of Alexa’s top one million sites on the web. If you work with WordPress, or you’re considering building a website on the platform, you will have probably wondered about SEO and whether there is anything specific you can do to optimize your site. The answer is that there are a number of SEO techniques you can use that are especially effective for WordPress sites.
1. Optimize Your Page URLs
You need to take a look at the page URLs on your site. Are they completely unrelated to the page itself? If a URL on you page for example is, http://www.mywebsite.com/news?page=34vdgd it explains absolutely nothing to a search engine about what is contained on that page. However, if you change the URL to something like, http://mysite.com/news/article/my-great-article-on-wordpress-seo then it’s much easier for search engines to determine what is on the page and direct appropriate traffic to your site in the process.
2. Get an SEO Plugin
One of the great things about and open-source content management systems like WordPress is how easily you can develop plugins and extensions, which once easily installed provide certain functionality that the original software cannot perform. One of the most useful tools to install is an SEO plugin. There are a number of good WordPress plugins; all you have to do is search for “SEO plugins” in your plugin manager and you’ll be given a wide choice. Most of these will provide you with the ability to enter important keywords for each page whilst you’re editing it, doing this will improve the quality of your SEO marketing no ends.
3. Link to Your Related Articles
Another plugin to keep an eye out for is a related articles extension. You will have seen related articles at the bottom of the page on a number of news and blogging websites before and they’re a great idea for your WordPress site too if you would like to improve your SEO. Not only do they give you a great internal link structure, something that search engines will take as a sign of your site’s quality, but many of the plugins work on keywords and article tags, which gives you a reason to fill out your tags and improve your SEO in this way also.
4. Create an XML Sitemap
XML sitemaps are extremely important, especially if your WordPress site is reasonably new. An XML sitemap will let a search engine know that your site actually exists and that it should send web crawlers to it in future. You can get a plugin which will create an XML sitemap for you and it will automatically update whenever you make changes to the site. This means that whenever a crawler comes to visit your site, it will be able to establish exactly what content you have and how much importance it holds. Getting a sitemap is an effortless way of optimizing your site.
About the Author: Bough SEO is an SEO marketing company based in London, England. Their expertise extend far beyond search engine optimization; they also offer web development, social media optimization and website analytics services.
SEO for WordPress is not rocket science, but it does require a moderate level of experience and understanding of common SEO practices. WordPress SEO plugin has always been quite effective at helping improve traffic to blogs