There is no doubt that WordPress is one of the most convenient, easy-to-use and therefore popular website-creating and content management platforms. For creating a website with WordPress, you need not have deep knowledge of web designing or other technical things, and so, people love to create WordPress sites and manage them. However, merely creating a website is not enough in today’s tough marketing world. You need to have proper SEO of your site in order to rank it up in Google and other major search engines. Also you have to make your site secure, otherwise hackers will take no time to ruin it. Also your site should perform well so as to attract more and more visitors and increase your sale. No worries! Here are some tips with which you can improve SEO of your WordPress site.
1. Some Defaults that You Should Remove
WordPress sites have “Hello World” post and a “Sample Page” by default. These two are fine if the site is in development. However, once it is ready to go live, you will have to remove them. No problem even if you totally eliminate them by deleting them from the trash; it will make your database less messy.
Another default element is the “Uncategorized” category. You may keep it, but then at least take trouble to create a new category that can become the most popular one in the future and set it as default.
How will this help for SEO? As such the “Hello World” post and sample page cause not much of a problem to SEO, but by removing them you improve user experience. However the default “uncategorized” category has much effect on SEO and so, you should ensure to remove or change it and also create new relevant categories for your posts.
2. Set New Permalinks
WordPress sites come also with default permalinks, which are not a good URL structure for SEO. It’s best to change this setting to Post Name (/%postname%/). Some like to include category too in this (/%category%/%postname%/). But this can give rise to some issues when content for categories is not optimized.
How will this help for SEO? Default settings of WordPress set all pages to run through URL constraints, which is something against Google.
3. Homepage: Static Page or Blog Posts?
WordPress is basically a blogging platform, which has now become content management system too. So, as its conception was for bloggers, by default it sets your homepage to display your latest posts. But you can change it even to a static page, by:
- Creating a blank age for your latest entries
- Go to Settings -> Reading settings
- Select between static page and latest posts for Front Page Displays
- For each post in a feed, display the excerpt
- Make sure to uncheck “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”
Note that some of the themes make use of a different method by allowing you to choose a page template to display blog posts instead of using default settings. This may not be a very desirable method, but you should know this.
How does this help in SEO? It will help you avoid potential indexation issues and duplicate content.
4. Media Settings Customization
There are settings available in WordPress by default to manage image thumbnails. If you don’t like these default settings, you can customize your own dimensions from the three available options, viz. thumbnail, medium and large. You can maintain the proportion of images when resized.
How does this help in SEO? Thumbnails help in displaying an image smaller than full size which is useful for bandwidth and performance.
Thus, you can make small changes and modifications to make your site highly optimized for search engines. Look more how to improve SEO of WordPress here.
