WordPress and SEO: A Match Made in Marketing Heaven
Within the digital marketing sphere, WordPress has a pretty stellar reputation for just about everything. Its SEO capabilities, in particular – many of which are built in and easy to use – play a huge part in what makes the platform such an attractive option for so many website owners and marketing professionals. So, when clients ask us, “Is WordPress good for SEO?” We answer with a confident yes.
WordPress and SEO go together like peanut butter and jelly: their relationship is effortless. It just works. When you log into WordPress and start building or editing pages, you have the option to input meta descriptions, tags, categories, keywords, etc. Plus, each time you update a page, WordPress automatically alerts Google, which helps move those pages up in the search engine’s rankings. It doesn’t get much more effortless than that.
WordPress SEO Features
All WordPress sites are ready for SEO optimization right out of the box. They don’t require any special software to get started (although there are several WordPress plugins available to bolster your SEO efforts if you think you need them). WordPress SEO without a plugin is simple and effective, thanks to the following built-in features:
- Metadata customization: Each time you build a new page or create a new blog post on your website, WordPress gives you the option to input several types of data, including meta descriptions, title tags, categories and keywords, which Google and other search engines use to match your page content with the search terms your potential customers are searching for.
- Attractive permalinks: WordPress allows you to give each page on your site a custom permalink. Rather than being assigned cumbersome URLs made up of random numbers and letters, you’re able to create simple URLs that contain your page’s keywords. Like the metadata above, these permalinks are utilized by search engine crawlers to help your potential customers find your content.
- Image optimization: WordPress helps you leverage your images for better SEO results in a couple of ways. First, it helps you optimize your image file sizes for faster loading speeds (a surprisingly important factor in SEO); and second, it gives you the opportunity to label each image with alt text, which is yet another opportunity for you to push the keywords your potential customers are most often searching for.
- SEO-friendly themes: Website crawlers look for more than just keywords and metadata. They also look for good website design, and WordPress has no shortage of themes that are clean, simple and SEO-friendly.
- Mobile usage optimization: Mobile website traffic has gone up more than 200% in the last decade. If you want your website to be found, it must be optimized for mobile usage – and most WordPress themes are already optimized for exactly that.
To dive even deeper into your WordPress SEO efforts, WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and All-In-One SEO perform readability checks and can help you achieve things like faster site speeds, or even suggest additional SEO keywords to use in your metadata – ones that you may not have already thought of.
If you’re struggling with how to add SEO to WordPress or would like more information on WordPress SEO best practices, contact us now. One of our team members will be in touch to help you get started.
About the Author
Carolyn is COO at Paradigm Marketing and Design, where she oversees the agency’s day-to-day operations and ensures the quality of every deliverable that crosses our desks. At Paradigm, we believe every project has a purpose, and Carolyn makes it her mission to turn that belief into reality with strategic guidance and oversight that help businesses achieve growth goals and maintain their competitive edge.
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