How to Make Your WordPress Website Design SEO Friendly

Author: Michael Scorcia Category: Web Design Date: May 12, 2022

If you use WordPress for your website design, you probably chose it because of its stellar reputation. One of the many reasons it is so popular is that it is a match made in heaven for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Even though a WordPress content management system (CMS) offers many tools to aid in your SEO efforts, it doesn’t do all the work for you. You still must design an SEO friendly WordPress website first.

In case you’re unfamiliar, SEO is an approach to help your site appear higher in results on search engines. Where you rank is determined by several things, including the use of popular keywords in your content, a user’s ability to crawl your site and easily find the information they need, and the loading speed of your site. The algorithms used by search engines change frequently, and there’s no secret sauce for always ending up on top. But there are some important steps you can take as you navigate how to optimize your WordPress website for SEO.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization Tips

The reason WordPress and SEO pair so well is that the CMS makes it intuitive to utilize best practices for making an SEO friendly WordPress website. As you are going through the process, here’s how to optimize SEO on your WordPress site:

Keyword research: Finding and incorporating the keywords used most often when searching for the topic covered on your web page is critical for SEO. You can try out various words and phrases on search engines to get results of content like yours. You can also use tools like Google Autocomplete, Google’s Keyword Tool, or Keyword Inspector.

Select the right hosting service: Since speed is a determining factor in whether your site is an SEO friendly WordPress website, it is critical to find a hosting service that is going to help you improve or maintain your loading speed.

Choose an SEO optimized theme: Crisp website design attracts web crawlers because it helps them quickly find the information they are looking for. On the flip side, a site loaded with superfluous features, plugins, and code negatively impact it. Being mobile reactive also helps SEO ranking.

Develop a sitemap: When planning how to do SEO on your WordPress website, make sure creating a sitemap is part of it. XML sitemaps list every page on your site, making it easier for search engines to find, browse, and categorize your content. You can do it manually or use a plugin.

SEO your permalinks: To make sure you have an SEO friendly WordPress website, update any randomly assigned URLs to incorporate keywords into your permanent links and get another bite at the SEO apple.

Optimize titles, tags, categories, and meta descriptions: These will tell search engines, and users, what to expect on your pages. When you build a new page or create a new blog post, WordPress will prompt you to add meta descriptions, title tags, categories, and keywords. Don’t forget to add your SEO keywords when it does.

Don’t ignore images: Make sure your images are sized and compressed to optimize your site speed and add keywords to your ALT text to give the search engine more information to index your content and create an SEO friendly WordPress website.

Link to internal content: When you link to other pages on our site, you help visitors stay on your site longer and search engines find more of your content.

Check your settings: Go to Settings > Reading > Search engine visibility and make sure the box is unchecked! Otherwise, you’re telling the search engines not to index your pages – an SEO friendly WordPress website no-no. Also be sure to set a preferred domain under Settings > General to direct search engines to the correct URL.

Install an all-inclusive plugin: Plugins like Yoast SEO and All-In-One SEO perform readability checks and can help you achieve faster site speeds or suggest additional SEO keywords to use in your metadata, ones that you may not have already thought of.

Just because you use WordPress doesn’t mean you have an SEO friendly WordPress website. You must do some work to take full advantage of its features. Our professional WordPress website development services capitalize on this powerful, popular platform to create a basic, complex, or e-commerce SEO friendly WordPress website. Contact us today.