Improving your SEO skills is one of the essential parts of every blogger’s life. SEO (search engine optimization) helps you to get more traffic to your website. It is a process, which affects the visibility of a website in web search results such as Google. Simply said, great SEO brings you a higher position on the search results page, which brings you more visitors from search engines. In this article, we would like to show you how to optimize SEO for WordPress site.
Why is SEO so important?
Search engines are the crucial source of visitors for the most websites. All search engines work on a specific algorithm, which recognizes the meaning of a content. SEO helps them to understand what the content is about.
Keeping your site optimized allows engines to rank your page in the right way, so when your readers search for topics of your content, your website will be part of the search results.
SEO for WordPress
You should check your Search Engine Visibility (built-in option for WordPress) at first. This function is most common during the site debugging it allows you to prepare your content before the official start of your page.
Just log into your WordPress site as admin. Click on “Settings” on the left-side banner and choose “Reading” option. It will show you your reading settings. Scroll down the page and check if your “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” option is unchecked. After that just “save changes” to change your settings.
SEO friendly structures in WordPress
You can choose between many options of displaying your URL address in WordPress. You can find all of them in the settings under the “Permalinks” option. Then, in the Common Settings section, you can see all of the advantages.
Under the “SEO friendly structure” we mean “Post name” variant which contains of words that describe the meaning of the post. That makes them easily readable for humans and search engines.
Optimizing SEO for the blog post
There is a lot of WordPress plugins specialized for SEO. You can find the list of the recommended ones in our last article in the plugin section of our blog. One of the most popular SEO plugins is Yoast SEO. This plugin offers complete optimization of your site for search engines. But it doesn’t end only with the installation and activation of the plugin. After finishing your blog post just scroll down the editor to the Yoast SEO section and fill in the title, description, and keywords. In snippet preview, you can see how Google shows your page.
Categories and tags in WordPress
Sorting your WordPress content by categories and tags helps you categorize your content into the topics and makes your blog more readable. You can imagine categories like a chapter in a book or like a tree hierarchy of folders on your computer. It groups and subgroups all of your posts.
Tags are specific to an article. You can use them to describe your content with keywords. For example, you will prepare a blog post about VPN. You put this article into the Security category with the tags: WordPress site, VPN, security. Your readers will see these tags on your site. By clicking on them they can find another interesting post on your blog.
Linking related posts
Internal links help Google to understand the structure of your website. You should create a connection between all of your posts. More links in your content bring better results in the search engine. But focus on the links to the pages, which may be interesting for the reader. No one wants to read an article with too many and not relevant links.
This is how to optimize SEO for WordPress. We hope that you found what you needed to know. If you would like to know more about optimizing your page, please visit our WordPress category on the blog.