20 Tips and Tricks to Make Your WordPress Website More SEO-Friendly

Do you really want to make your WordPress website SEO friendly? Here we’re going to tell you some tips and tricks which will help you in doing this. However, when Google ranks any page or content, it uses more than 100 ranking factors. But by the tips mentioned in this article, you can easily make your WordPress website more SEO friendly and can get top rank in search engine.

If you want your WordPress blog to rank well in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), here are some things you should consider right now.

Use SEO Plugin
Use Sitemap
Improve WordPress Website Loading Speed
Change Default Permalink Structure
Check your site’s Visibility Settings
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
Use Nofollow Tag for Untrusted Links
Use Internal Linking
Image Optimization
Use HTTPS
Create High-Quality Backlinks
Keyword Research
Article Content Length and Quality
Optimize Title and Meta Descriptions
Use the Cache Plugin
Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Use Premium WordPress Themes
Block/Delete Spam Comments
Choose a Good Web Host
Monitor Errors on Google Webmaster Tools

1. Use SEO Plugin

However, WordPress is an SEO friendly blogging platform. But you can make it more SEO friendly by using some SEO plugin. There are many SEO plugins are available in the market, which you can use on your blog.

Here are some recommended WordPress SEO Plugins:

Yoast SEO Plugin
All in One SEO Plugin
Google XML Sitemaps
Broken Link Checker
Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
W3 Total Cache

From above plugins list, we highly recommend to go with Yoast SEO plugin which is one of the most popular and best SEO plugin for WordPress. You can easily optimize your page’s/post’s Title and can add Meta Description.

2. Use Sitemap

Sitemap always helps search engine bots to crawl your website better and better. Although it does not boost your search ranking but it helps your content to be indexed faster and crawl better.

You can easily create an XML sitemap with either Yoast SEO plugin or with Google XML sitemaps plugin.

You can easily find your XML sitemap by simply adding sitemap_index.xml or sitemap.xml at the end of your website address.

For example: https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml or https://example.com/sitemap.xml

After creating the sitemap, next step is to submit the sitemap to Google Search Console so that Google monitor and maintain your site presence in Google search results.

For this, you simply need to verify your site ownership in Google Search Console and submit your sitemap to Sitemaps menu showing on left sidebar.

Google will take some time to crawl your website but after a while you would be able to see the submission result with all crawled pages.

3. Improve WordPress Website Loading Speed

Page speed is one of the most considered ranking factor by Google. If your site takes longer time to load, your site will not be able to perform well in Google search results. It means, you really need to pay attention to it.

Fast loading affects both website ranking & user experience and performs better in search results. Below are some online website/tools that you can check to measure the speed of your WordPress website and by taking their suggestions and issues, you can easily improve your site’s loading speed.

To increase the speed of your WordPress website, following are the things which you can try:

Use latest version of PHP
Deleted all unwanted and inactive plugins
Optimize your all images
Delete unwanted media
Minifying the JS/CSS
Use good Cache plugin
Avoid 301 redirects

4. Change Default Permalink Structure

WordPress default permalink (URLs) is not SEO friendly and looks something like this – http://example.com/?p=123

But don’t worry you can change it easily by navigating to https://example.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php.

WordPress comes with 6 different Permalink Structure:

Plain – https:// example.com/?p=123
Day and name – https:// example.com/2021/05/12/sample-post/
Month and name – https:// example.com/2021/05/sample-post/
Numeric – https:// example.com/archives/123
Post name – https://example.com/sample-post/ (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)
Custom Structure – https://example.com/%postname%/

If you are using WordPress default permalink, you can change it to Post name permalink which is highly recommended permalink. If your site is very old, then you can leave this option because by changing the permalink structure, your site will return many 404 errors which will further affect your SEO ranking, so it’s always better to change the permalink structure in newly launched website.

5. Check your site’s Visibility Settings

WordPress CMS comes with a built-in option that prevents your website from being indexed in all search engines. If you check this option by mistake as well, then your site will not appear in the Google search or in any other search result. This option is good for a newly launched website.

To check this option, simply login into your WordPress Admin Dashboard and navigate to Settings -> Reading where you just need to uncheck the option “Search engine visibility” as shown below:

6. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

Even in pandemic time, the Smartphone market still has high growth potential as compared to desktop traffic because more searches are done by mobile. Therefore, to improve the mobile user’s experience, Google introduced mobile-friendliness as another ranking factor.

To check whether your site is mobile friendly or not, you can use the following Google’s mobile friendly test tool.

Within a fraction of seconds, you’ll get the test result.

7. Use Nofollow Tag for Untrusted Links

Third party Ad links, affiliate links, spammy links and useless links play an important role in lowering your site’s ranking. If you use such type of links for your content, you always need to set the rel = “nofollow” tag for them.

<a href=”#” rel=”nofollow”>Reference by XYZ</a>

8. Use Internal Linking

Internal linking always plays an important role in making your content better and relevant. This technique also improves your website SEO and reduces the bounce rate of the site. Internal linking makes your content even more useful for your visitors.

According to Moz, these types of links are useful for 3 reasons:

They allow users to navigate a website.
They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
They help spread link equity (ranking power) around websites.

9. Image Optimization

Image is another important aspect in creating an SEO friendly website. But most of the new bloggers ignore this point. If you use a lot of images on your site, then it is very important to compress and resize them. This reduces your image size and improves your website speed.

There are many free and paid plugins available in WordPress.org through which you can easily optimize your images.

Here is a list of some recommended WordPress Image Optimization Plugins:

In addition, don’t forget to use IMAGE ALT tags to rank better in image search results.

10. Use HTTPS

HTTPS is one of the Google ranking factors and the sites that runs on HTTPS, always outperform on Google search results.

Google still wants a more secure web, so its Chrome browser encourages website owners to switch to HTTPS by showing unsafe tag to the sites that are not using HTTPS.

So if you are already running a site that uses HTTP, make sure that you should migrate your site to HTTPS in a proper manner and take care the following things while migration from HTTP to HTTPS.

The first step is to take full backup of your WordPress site including all files and database.
Purchase and implement SSL certificate (You can get a FREE SSL from Let’s Encrypt)
Define Force SSL Admin to true in wp-config.php file (define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);)
Update both WordPress Address and Site Address under General Settings.
Update all existing HTTP links (images, js, css, videos, iframes, internal links, audio etc)
Implement 301 Redirection via .htaccess
Regenerate and re-submit new sitemap to Google Search Console
Add HTTPS version of site in to Webmaster Tools
Update your CDN (if implemented)
Switch the URL in Google Analytics
Test and Go Live

11. Create High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are the oldest Google ranking which helps in increasing DA (Domain Authority), website ranking and traffic. But if you create bad/spammy or low-quality backlinks for your site, it can cause a lot of damage to your website ranking results Search Engine Penalty.

For creating high quality backlinks, you can use Blog Commenting, Guest Article Submissions, Social Signals, Write testimonials for other sites, Create Infographics, Leverage public relations etc.

It is also important to keep an eye on the backlinks of the site. If your site loses backlinks, your site ranking may decrease in search engines.

To check and monitor the backlinks, you can either use Ahrefs Backlink Checker or SEMrush.

12. Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the foundation of SEO. If you write unique and valuable articles on your WordPress blog, but do not do Keyword Research, then your site will not rank first in Google search result.

Without Keyword Research, you cannot rank your post/article on the first page of search results. Keyword research is not a difficult task. There are many SEO great tools and websites that help you find the best keywords.

For better and fast results, always use Long Tail keywords with low competition because long tail keywords are more profitable to get organic traffic.

Furthermore, you should include your all important keywords in the first 100-150 words of the article which actually helps Google to understand what your page is about.

13. Article Content Length and Quality

The length of your content also plays an important role in ranking your content. Always try to write detailed, high-quality and lengthy articles.

The content large in length always performs better in search engines than Shorter content.

Keep in mind the following points while writing the article:

Quality – Pages must be well-written and highly valuable
Research – Investigate keywords; people may use to find your content
Keywords – Build target keywords into your pages
Freshness – Create timely content; refresh or retire stagnant pages
Multimedia – Images, video and audio can set your content apart
Answers – Create content that can be turned into answers in the SERP
Depth – Shallow content falls, aim for substance

Google focuses a lot on the quality of the content. After the Google Panda and Google Penguin Update updates, it has started penalizing low-quality content. If you want to attract the attention of Google, then create unique and well-thought content that is useful for the visitor because content is always KING.

14. Optimize Title and Meta Descriptions

Post titles have a significant impact on SERPs. So always try to write informative and unique titles with a maximum limit of 50–60 characters. To get better rank in search engine, add your main keyword at the beginning of post title. Keep in mind that your keyword is low-competition and people search for this keyword.

In context of Meta Description, the maximum length should not be more than 150-160 characters. Your Meta description is the text that appears below the title in search results. This plays an important role in increasing the Click Through Rate (CTR) on your content. Use your Main Keyword in Meta description too.

If your title and description do not attract the reader, they will not be able to rank in the SERPs.

Furthermore, you should create a short and readable URL for your article. Long URL search results are not fully visible which results bad or poor impression on visitors.

15. Use the Cache Plugin

The cache plugin is very important for any WordPress site. This makes your site super fast and reduces the load on the web server.

There are a lot of caching plugins available in the WordPress Plugin repository. But W3 Total Cache is one of the best plugin for WordPress that comes with features like page caching, browser caching, object caching, database caching and minification.

As already discussed, the main goal is to reduce the page loading speed of your site and improve the user experience.

Here is a list of recommended WordPress Cache Plugins:

16. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)

CDN helps improve the performance of your site. It caches your site’s static content on its servers and provides content to your users through servers that are closest to the user’s locations. This actually reduces your server load and improves page load times.

There are many companies are available which offers CDN services.

Some recommended CDN services:

17. Use Premium WordPress Themes

When your blog or website starts getting popularity, buy a Premium WordPress Themes for your blog. The coding of premium themes is very good and they are Ultra SEO friendly. There are so many benefits of using Paid WordPress themes are: 24×7 Support, Hidden links free, Tons of features, SEO Friendly etc

Below is the list which you can consider for buying the Premium WordPress themes:

18. Block/Delete Spam Comments

Spam comments greatly affect your WordPress SEO. For Example, If you write an article on a WordPress SEO and someone comments on that article, ‘Buy Sell CARS’, then the search engine will not like it at all.

In this case the page will be marked as spam by the search engine and your site can also be penalized by Google.

You can use the following plugins for the protection of SPAM comments:

19. Choose a Good Web Host

If you make a mistake in choosing a web host, it will greatly affect your WordPress SEO because your website will be mostly in downtime and will load very slowly.

And already discussed, page speed is one of the Google ranking factors. There are many web hosting companies that promise to be the best, but after purchasing hosting from them, you feel that they have cheated you.

Here we have made a list of some Best Web Hosting that you can use for your WordPress website.

20. Monitor Errors on Google Webmaster Tools

It is very important to regularly check all Errors (mobile issues, security issues and crawl errors, broken links etc) in Google Webmaster Tools. If you have too many Errors on your site, Google will crawl your site very slowly.

To fasten the crawl process, you should fix all errors as soon as possible.

Other things which you may also consider for making your WordPress Website more SEO Friendly:

Use H1 Heading Tag
Link your Special Content as much as possible
Optimize Robots.txt
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Regular SEO Audit
Use Schema Markup
Publish latest new content frequently
Website Security
Increase DA rank

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many things you need to consider in order to make WordPress site SEO Friendly. Hopefully, the things which we mentioned in this post will helps you to make your WordPress site more SEO friendly.

You may also like:

20 Tips and Tricks to Make Your WordPress Website More SEO-Friendly

1. Use SEO Plugin

2. Use Sitemap

3. Improve WordPress Website Loading Speed

4. Change Default Permalink Structure

5. Check your site’s Visibility Settings

6. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

7. Use Nofollow Tag for Untrusted Links

8. Use Internal Linking

9. Image Optimization

10. Use HTTPS

11. Create High-Quality Backlinks

12. Keyword Research

13. Article Content Length and Quality

14. Optimize Title and Meta Descriptions

15. Use the Cache Plugin

16. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)

17. Use Premium WordPress Themes

18. Block/Delete Spam Comments

19. Choose a Good Web Host

20. Monitor Errors on Google Webmaster Tools

Conclusion

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1. Use SEO Plugin

2. Use Sitemap

3. Improve WordPress Website Loading Speed

4. Change Default Permalink Structure

5. Check your site’s Visibility Settings

6. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

7. Use Nofollow Tag for Untrusted Links

8. Use Internal Linking

9. Image Optimization

10. Use HTTPS

11. Create High-Quality Backlinks

12. Keyword Research

13. Article Content Length and Quality

14. Optimize Title and Meta Descriptions

15. Use the Cache Plugin

16. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)

17. Use Premium WordPress Themes

18. Block/Delete Spam Comments

19. Choose a Good Web Host

20. Monitor Errors on Google Webmaster Tools

Conclusion

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This Post Has 2 Comments

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