WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners

Improving your WordPress SEO is critical for increasing website visitors. Unfortunately, the majority of WordPress SEO tips are just too complex for newcomers to understand.

If you want to increase the number of visitors to your website, you should follow the WordPress SEO best practices.

We’ll go through the best WordPress SEO strategies in this post to help you enhance your SEO and obtain more organic traffic.

Experts may have told you that WordPress is SEO-friendly. This is one of the main reasons why so many people pick WordPress to build a blog or website.

While WordPress ensures that the code it creates adheres to SEO best practices, there is still a lot more you can do to make your SEO efforts more effective.

To effectively improve your WordPress SEO, we have several concrete measures for you to follow.

What Is WordPress?

WordPress powers 35% of all websites, including BBC America, Time.com, and TechCrunch.

WordPress had formerly used to develop the official website of The Rolling Stones.

If WordPress works for these global giants, it’s easy to see why it’s the go-to for many website developers.

In 2003, WordPress began as a blogging platform, yet somehow it swiftly evolved into a robust and adaptable solution for running full websites, plus therefore by 2020, it will also be capable of serving as an eCommerce solution.

What Is WordPress SEO?

While there’s no doubting that WordPress saves time and makes it easier to follow best practices without any prior knowledge, you must recognize that ranking your website on Google requires work.

Unless your site has significant technical flaws that prevent it from being crawled and indexed, your CMS choice has little effect on your ability to rank high. WordPress isn’t a magical weapon that can use without any additional work; it takes time and work.

SEO may rapidly become technical, but the beauty of WordPress is that it is easily accessible to individuals who aren’t technically inclined or even people who don’t consider themselves to be technical.

The fact that you’re utilizing WordPress doesn’t imply your SEO strategies will alter.

You must still generate excellent content, gain excellent links, and ensure that your site is well-optimized and free of technical difficulties that might slow it down.

However, WordPress takes care of many of the essentials that help your site rank right out of the box, and the tips and methods listed below will help you adopt growth-driving methods exclusively on the platform.

But why did WordPress become so popular?

It’s basic and straightforward to use. To establish a WordPress website, you don’t need to be a developer, and it’s highly user-friendly, even for novices.

It is adaptive and versatile. You may personalize WordPress to your needs with literally hundreds of themes (many of which are free), while also expanding the fundamental functionality with one of the more than 55,000 plugins available. If you are an experienced PHP developer, want to learn the language, or want to hire a professional to transform a custom design into a stand-out site, the platform can also host customized themes.

There is a terrific community here. WordPress is open-source, and the WordPress community is incredible. Whether the problem is straightforward or complex, there is always aid available, from support forums to easy-to-follow documentation.

Of course, it isn’t the best platform for everyone, and there are occasions when alternative CMS alternatives are more appropriate. The necessity for regular upgrades, potential vulnerabilities, and a modest learning curve to launch customized themes are all commonly stated problems and downsides of WordPress. However, for the most part, it is a robust platform that also provides excellent SEO foundations.

Why SEO is important

For most websites, search engines are the primary source of traffic.

Google and other search engines utilize advanced algorithms to understand and rank material accurately in search results. However, those algorithms aren’t perfect, and they’ll still need your help to figure out what your content is all about.

Search engines won’t know how to rank your content if it isn’t optimized. Your website will not appear in the search results when people search for the topics you write about, and you will miss out on all of that traffic.

All company owners must optimize their search traffic by making their websites search engine friendly.

Basics of WordPress SEO

Although SEO might get technical, it does not have to be. Simply mastering a few simple SEO methods to enhance your site may result in a significant increase in internet traffic.

To apply the tactics listed here, you don’t need to be a tech whiz. If you already use WordPress, you already have everything it takes!

Let’s get to work on improving your website.

Check Your Site’s Visibility Settings

WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to conceal your website from search engines. This option seems intended to allow you more time to work on your website before it is ready to go live.

However, this option might be ticked by mistake, rendering your website inaccessible to search engines.

The first thing you should do if your website isn’t showing up in search results is to make sure this option is unchecked.

Simply go to the Settings » Reading page in the admin area of your WordPress site.

You must scroll down to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ area and uncheck the option next to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site.’

Don’t forget to save your changes by clicking the ‘Save Changes’ button.

WWW vs non-WWW

If you’re just getting started with your website, you’ll need to decide whether you want to utilize www (http://www.example.com) or http://example.com in the URL.

Because search engines perceive this to be two separate websites, you must select one and stick to it.

By going to the Settings » General page, you may customize your preferences. In both the WordPress Address and ‘Site Address’ columns, type your chosen URL.

Regardless of what someone else says, there is no SEO benefit to employing one over the other.

The Best WordPress SEO plugin

One of the interesting facts about WordPress is that there’s a plugin for almost anything, including SEO. There are many WordPress SEO plugins available, making it difficult for novices to pick the ideal one.

Instead of installing various plugins for different SEO activities, we’ll show you how to pick the finest WordPress SEO plugin for all of them, and it’s completely free.

Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin

When it comes to selecting the finest WordPress SEO plugin, you’ll almost certainly be limited to one of two options: All in One SEO (AIO SEO) or Yoast SEO.

AIO SEO is the first WordPress SEO plugin, with over 2 million installations. For screenshots and examples, we’ll use AIO SEO in this guide

Add XML Sitemaps in WordPress

An XML Sitemap is a specifically prepared file that contains a list of all of your website’s pages. This allows search engines to easily discover all of your information.

While including an XML sitemap does not improve your site’s search rankings, it does assist search engines in swiftly locating and ranking the pages.

If you use the AIO SEO plugin, it will generate an XML sitemap for you automatically.

Add Your Site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console, often known as Webmaster Tools, is a suite of tools provided by Google that allows website owners to understand how Google views their content.

It gives you information and statistics to assist you to figure out how your sites appear in search results. You can also view the actual search phrases people use to locate your website, how each page shows in the search results, and how often visitors click on your sites.

All of this data might assist you to figure out what is and isn’t working on your website. After that, you may design your content strategy.

If something is wrong with your website, Google Search Console will warn you, such as when search crawlers were unable to reach it, duplicate content gets identified, or resources are banned.

Google Search Console will notify you if search crawlers proved unable to reach your website, similar material got discovered, or resources were blocked.

Optimizing Your Blog Posts for SEO

Beginners frequently believe that simply installing and activating a WordPress SEO plugin is sufficient. If you want to get the best results, SEO is a continuous process that you must keep up with.

Every blog post and page may have a title, description, and target keyword, and all of the top SEO plugins allow you to do so. It also gives you a sneak peek of what people will see if they search for your website on Google.

To receive the most hits, we recommend that you improve your title and description.

Doing Keyword Research for Your Website

Many newcomers make educated estimates about what subjects people are searching for and what they should include in their blogs and websites.

It’s the equivalent of launching an arrow in the dark. You don’t need to do that when you can figure out what people are looking for using genuine data.

Content authors and SEO specialists utilize keyword research as a research strategy. It aids you in identifying terms that people use to access content, goods, and services in your sector using search engines.

You may then use those terms and phrases on your website to increase traffic from search engines.

You may utilize a variety of keyword research tools (both free and commercial).

WordPress SEO Best Practices

You will already be ahead of most websites if you follow the basics of WordPress SEO and utilize the finest WordPress SEO plugin.
If you want to get even greater results, apply the WordPress SEO recommended practices listed below.

These aren’t very complicated, and most of them won’t even require you to touch any code. They will, however, make a significant impact if you follow them.

Properly Using Categories and Tags in WordPress

WordPress gives you the option of categorizing and tagging your blog entries. This makes it simple for you to organize your material into subjects and for your users to discover the information they need.

Search engines can better grasp your website’s structure and content by using categories and tags.

Beginners frequently become perplexed as to how to utilize categories and tags effectively. Here’s how we handle categories and tags after explaining them to thousands of readers.

The purpose of categories is to divide your content into major categories. If your blog were a book, the table of contents would be categorized.

On a personal blog, for example, you can have categories like music, cuisine, travel, and so on. You may add child categories to categories since they are hierarchical.

Tags, on the other hand, are more precise terms that characterize a given post’s contents. For example, a blog entry in the food category may include tags such as salad, breakfast, pancakes, and so on. Consider these to be the indexes portion of a textbook.

You make it easy for your users to navigate your website by appropriately employing categories and tags. Because it is simple for consumers, it is also simple for search engines to navigate your website.

Full Posts vs Summaries or Excerpts

WordPress connects to your articles from a variety of pages, including the home page, category archive, tags archive, date archive, author pages, and so on.

By default, it presents the complete article content on all these pages. This has an impact on your site’s SEO since search engines may consider it duplicate material. Your archive pages will also take longer to load if you have full articles.

Your page views will be affected if you display entire content everywhere. Users that subscribe to your RSS feed, for example, will be able to read the entire article in their feed reader without ever having to visit your site.

Conclusion

Once you’ve mastered WordPress SEO best practices, you’ll want to advance your knowledge even further to stay ahead of the pack.

We hope that this post has taught you how to correctly optimize your WordPress site for search engine optimization. Implementing a couple of these WordPress SEO tactics should result in an increase in traffic within a few months as the search engines digest your adjustments.

If you’re using WordPress, you’ve made a wise decision. You’ll be in an excellent position to outrank your opponents if you follow the procedures above. For additional concerns, you may contact Nummero Leading Digital marketing agency in India