SEO Tips for Owners of a WordPress Site
When you have a WordPress site, perhaps for the first time, it’s easy to make mistakes. SEO is a complicated topic, so it pays to stay on top of the basics at least to avoid problems with your site later.
Here are some useful SEO tips for WP site owners.
Use an SEO Plugin
WordPress plugins are an excellent way to perform some basic SEO functions without needing to always do them manually.
The first plugin for this purpose is the All in One SEO Pack. It has over two million active installations and is updated regularly too. It provides XML sitemap support to update Google and Bing on the structure of your site. It also supports automatic META tags, custom titles, and Google AMP support for faster loading pages too.
The second plugin is Yoast SEO. This is an extremely popular SEO plugin. It is a very reliable addition to WordPress. It did have an issue previously with images being created as individual pages, which saw sites being penalized with ‘thin content’ penalties, but this has since been resolved. Yoast has many loyal users who’ve used this plugin for many years.
Create an Account on Google Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Both the Google Console and Bing Webmaster Tools provide a way for site owners or webmasters to advise the search engines about their site(s). In turn, both online tools provide access to relevant information based on the findings of Google and Bing.
Reports can be generated about the traffic concerns, what pages are indexed, keywords searched for when reaching the site(s), and any reports generated for site owners, e.g. a sitewide penalty. Without registering on these two management facilities, it’s not easy to discover if your site has been issued a penalty for some reason.
Also, if the search bots from either search engine are having difficulties crawling your site, the error will show up on the dashboard too.
Don’t Forget to Setup an XML Sitemap
The XML sitemap seems like a minor thing but it’s not. It creates an organized diagram of the structure of your site. This helps the search engines to better understand the important sections and how much content there is without exhausting the crawl budget on the site.
The crawl budget varies depending on the traffic that the site currently receives. It can get exhausted when the Googlebot or Bing’s bot goes down blind alleys and subsequently fails to index some of the more important pages or posts as a result.
There are XML plugins to create a site map for you, but a good SEO plugin (see earlier in this article) usually has this facility and may help you submit it to Google and Bing too.
Research SEO Techniques or Hire an SEO Company
Keeping up with the latest in SEO techniques is difficult. There are SEO podcasts and blogs, but it’s a fast-moving area and we all lead busy lives. If you feel that you aren’t capable of keeping up with what’s new and important in the world of SEO, then it’s time to consider outsourcing key tasks to an agency.
A Boca Raton SEO company is going to have the team to provide the services needed to research search terms, advise on site structure, and suggest the best approach to improving search engine rankings. This is vital if you want your site to grow in the future and avoid making SEO mistakes through lack of knowledge.
WP makes it pretty simple to get the basics in place. That’s the beauty of its content management system. Just remember – the more you put into effective SEO, the more you’ll get out of it.