When you have a website on the WordPress platform, you at least need to know the basics of WordPress SEO. You don’t have to be an expert or ninja, but knowing what you are doing is key if you want to have the opportunity to rank your site in the search engines.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. You put SEO in place so that you can give your site the best opportunity to rank in SERPs for Google and Bing. Showing up in search organically (not paying for ads) means that you can save money or use it toward other marketing efforts so it is worth learning.
Your Content
Your content is a key component to your SEO success. The search engines crawl the internet looking for content to index and without it, there will be nothing there. Search engines are giving less and less attention to skeleton websites so making sure that you beef your site up with enough content is important.
Some people say that you can do just fine on your blog with posts that are 500 words, but other people tell you never to post content that is less than 1,200 words so what is the real amount of words that you need to be successfully listed at the top of the search engines?
According to Backlinko, its conclusion after analyzing 1 million search results, was that posts of about around 2,000 words are the ones that are at the top of the search engines. Short fluff articles are nowhere to be seen.
The more helpful and insightful content that you can put in your blog posts and articles, the better for SEO. If you have stuff random content in your article to make it longer, we recommend against this as you will hurt your visitor’s user experience.
Write about anything that your visitors would be interested in, gain trust and authority and the search engines will reward you.
Choosing a SEO Plugin
If you want to make your life a lot easier when you are doing SEO, you need a SEO plugin for your WordPress site. There are two plugins that are well-known and loved throughout the SEO community and they are Yoast SEO and All-In-One SEO.
If you are a beginner you might want to go with Yoast SEO since it is a little more friendly to those that might find SEO complicated.
Having a plugin to help you with your SEO will save you time and effort. It is easy to get lost in SEO tasks if you don’t have something to keep you on point. Either one of these SEO tools will give you a list of tasks you need to complete and grade you to see if you did them on the post that you are working on. This visual aid and reminder is helpful even after you are a SEO professional.
Adding a Sitemap
Adding a sitemap to your Wordpress site is great for SEO since it helps the spiders make sure that they crawl each page of your site. Don’t worry, these are not the creepy critters that you try to keep away from. These spiders (bots) are what allows Google to index your site and keep the search results up to date.
While not every website may not need a sitemap, since they are so simple to create, why not have one? You can install a plugin that will create the sitemap for you so you can place it in Google Search Console to help with indexing of your website.
If you are building out content for the search engines, the sooner that they find it and index it, the better so having an sitemap to help them along the way is a great idea.
Add Your Site to Google Search Console
When you are working on your WordPress SEO, Google search console is a suite of tools that will help you with your site. Through this platform, you will be able to check your search appearance, what traffic you are getting from search, status updates on technical issues, your site’s crawl data and on top of all of that, you will even find educational resources.
Being able to use GSC is free and there is no limit on the data. The better search results that Google returns, the better results for their users so they want to help “the good guys” rank better in the serps.
Don’t Forget Internal Linking
Remember to do a good job at internal linking throughout your site. Interlinking simply means that you link to other posts and pages within your site. This allows link juice to flow freely throughout your site but it also allows your users to have a great experience which tells Google that your site is a good one to show in the search engines. The more user friendly your site is, the more Google likes it.
Conclusion
Now you know enough SEO for your WordPress site to get started. Creating a website and optimizing it for search doesn’t have to be difficult if you follow these simple steps and use the tools and resources we noted. SEO is an important part of your online marketing and can bring in thousands of viewers to your website if you rank for keywords with high volume searches or a lot of low volume search keywords.