Today, we’re focusing on SEO, an invaluable way to bring free traffic to your WordPress website. In this beginner’s guide, we cover:

• What is SEO, and is it important for WordPress?
• How does SEO work on WordPress?
• What are keywords and do you need them?
• Which SEO plugin is best for WordPress?
• How to set-up SEO on WordPress
• How to get a WordPress site on Google
• How to optimise URLs for SEO

We hope you enjoy reading! If you have any questions, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

what is SEO, and is it important for WordPress?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s the process of optimising your WordPress website so that it’s displayed as high as possible on search engine results pages.

Most people find information using search engines like Google and Bing. They enter a search query, and the the search engine displays a list of relevant webpages in return.

SEO therefore aims to help search engines find and index your webpages, and also ensures that your content is high-quality so that it’s ranked highly in relevant search results.

Billions of search engine searches are made every day, so SEO is a great way to bring organic traffic to your WordPress website. Generally, the higher up your website is on search engine results pages, the more people will click onto and visit your site.

how does SEO work on WordPress?

WordPress is naturally well-optimised for search engines, so choosing WordPress as your CMS is a great start. However, there are lots of additional things you can do to optimise your site and ensure it’s ranked as highly as possible.

Search engines use complicated algorithms which are constantly changing, with countless factors influencing your WordPress site’s search engine rankings. These include:

• Page speed
• Content
• Mobile friendliness
• Domain authority
• User experience
• Technical SEO
• Site security

We can’t cover everything here, but we’ve got plenty of WordPress SEO tips and advice below. For help optimising your WordPress site in other SEO-relevant areas (such as speed, UX, security and mobile friendliness), read our Ultimate WordPress Optimisation Guide or get in touch.

what are keywords and do you need them?

Keywords are the main topics, words and/or phrases that your WordPress website is about. These should be the same words and/or phrases that your target users are searching for on search engines. For example, if you run an online gift shop, your keywords might include ‘online gifts’ or ‘gift ideas’.

The keywords you choose will determine which search engine results pages you appear on, and therefore who comes to your WordPress site. This means it’s very important to choose the right keywords and prioritise these in your content, metadata and other site data used by search engines.

Many WordPress site owners just guess their keywords, but doing keyword research allows you to find out exactly what words and phrases users are entering into search engines. There are lots of keyword research tools available online, such as Moz’s Keyword Explorer and Google’s Keyword Planner.

which SEO plugin is best for WordPress?

To optimise your WordPress site’s SEO, an SEO plugin is essential. The best SEO plugin, according to us and many millions of other WordPress users, is Yoast.

Yoast is a free plugin which allows you to optimise your pages for particular keywords, write specific information for search engine results pages, preview your links on Google search results, and much more. There’s also a paid premium version with additional features.

how to set-up SEO on WordPress

Once you’ve installed Yoast (or another, similar SEO plugin) on your WordPress site, you’ll find that ‘SEO’ appears as a menu item on the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard. Simply click on this, and then ‘General’, to get the plugin set-up and working correctly.

Make sure to complete the general configuration information for your website first. Then go back to ‘SEO’ in the menu and select ‘Search Appearance’. Under the ‘General’ tab, add your organisation’s name and logo.

Next, update your SEO titles and meta descriptions for your pages and posts. This information is like a search engine ‘teaser’ for your webpages, giving a glimpse of what users will find if they click through from the search engine results.

You can update both SEO title and meta description in the Yoast SEO toolbox, which is found underneath each page or post’s text in the back-end.

SEO titles should explain, in brief, clear language, what a page is about. Google is only able to display the first 50-60 characters for title tags, so try to stick to this limit. You should also include the main keyword you’re targeting.

A meta description is a slightly longer snippet which explains a bit more about a page’s content and encourage people to click. Again, this should include your main keyword(s) and be concise and easy to read.

Whilst it’s best to write bespoke SEO titles and meta descriptions for every page and post on your site, it’s also worth setting default options to ensure the information is never left blank. You can set default SEO information under SEO > Search Appearance, in the ‘Content Types’ tab.

how to get a WordPress site on Google

Google is pretty good at finding and detecting new sites, but you can make sure your WordPress site is listed on Google with the following steps.

Firstly, you’ll need to check your site’s visibility settings. WordPress gives you the choice about whether or not to make your site visible to search engines. Whilst most people want their site to be found, others choose to hide it (for example, if a website is just for sharing private information with a small group).

You can check your visibility settings in Settings > Reading. Make sure that the ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ box is NOT ticked. If you need to make any changes, such as unticking the box, be sure to click ‘Save Changes’.

Secondly, you’ll need to create an XML sitemap. This is a list of your website pages; it’s used by search engines such as Google to find and index your site.

With the Yoast plugin, an XML sitemap is automatically created for you. To find it, you just need to add /sitemap_index.xml to the end of your website’s URL – for example, pedalo.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml.

Thirdly, you’ll need to set up Google Search Console. This is a free set tools and reports provided by Google to help you understand and optimise your website’s organic performance.

Start by creating a Search Console account, entering the URL of your website and clicking ‘Add Property’. Then go to your Search Console dashboard, select ‘Manage Property’, and ‘Verify this site’. To verify with Yoast, you’ll need to select the HTML tag option and copy the tag data.

Now go back to your WordPress dashboard, go to SEO > General and then select the ‘Webmaster tools’ tab. In the Google verification code box, paste the HTML tag data, and click ‘Save changes’. You then just need to go back to Google Search Console and click ‘Verify’.

Finally, you can send Google your sitemap via Google Search Console. Simply click on ‘Sitemaps’ in the left-hand menu, add the sitemap URLs provided by Yoast, and click ‘Submit’.

Google will now check your sitemap and use it for indexing. After a few hours, you’ll be able to check your sitemap stats on your Search Console profile, so you’ll know for certain that your WordPress site has been found.

how to optimise URLs for SEO

In the final section of this blog, we cover how to optimise your WordPress website URLs.

URLs are part of the information used by search engines to understand and rank your content. Effective URLs, containing keywords or other relevant words/phrases, give you the best chance of being ranked highly in search results.

You can also change the URLs for individual posts and pages by going into the back end of each piece of content, finding the ‘Permalink’ underneath the title box, and clicking ‘Edit’.

If you change any URLs, make sure to set up redirects so that users who click on the old URL are redirected to the new, correct URL (and don’t end up encountering a dreaded 404 error message!). This is quick and easy to do with the WordPress Redirection plugin.

need help optimising your WordPress site?

We’ve got loads more advice and tips for optimising your WordPress site in our Ultimate WordPress Optimisation Guide. Alternatively, if you’d like personalised support from an award-winning team of WordPress developers, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

why WordPress speed is important

WordPress speed is more important than ever.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, users expect to get information quickly and will exit slow sites. So if your website isn’t loading rapidly, you’re probably losing a lot of website traffic.

In addition, site speed is also a search engine ranking factor. The quicker your site loads, the higher up it’s displayed in the organic listings on search engines such as Google and Bing. This again means that having a slow site will is likely to result in a loss of website visitors.

You can find out more about how to measure and improve your site speed for WordPress in our Google PageSpeed blog.

the top WordPress speed-killing plugins

Here are the most common speed-reducing plugins. We see these slowing down WordPress websites unnecessarily time and time again…

1. ReCaptcha

What the plugin is used for: ReCaptcha, and other similar plugins, protect WordPress forms – such as for logging in, commenting, or making contact – from spam entries. Users have to confirm they’re not a robot, thus preventing bots from submitting form responses.

How it kills site speed: It loads on every page of your WordPress site, whether there’s a form or not. This means that it slows down even simple pages that don’t need the ReCaptcha functionality for security.

What to use instead: We recommend Akismet. It performs the same spam-filtering role, but without loading on pages where it’s not needed.

2. Contact form 7

What the plugin is used for: Contact Form 7 allows you to add multiple contact forms to your WordPress site, including customisable form fields.

How it kills site speed: It loads unnecessary speed-reducing files across your whole WordPress site – even on webpages without contact forms.

What to use instead: Try a different contact form plugin, or simply prevent irrelevant files from loading with the Asset Cleanup plugin – see below for more information.

3. WooCommerce

What the plugin is used for: WooCommerce allows you to add an online shop to WordPress. This means you can showcase and sell both physical and digital goods through your site.

How it kills site speed: Again, this plugin adds files to pages where they’re not needed (such as pages that aren’t for e-commerce), thus slowing down your whole WordPress site.

What to use instead: There’s a reason why WooCommerce is most popular open source e-commerce solution in the world – and that’s because no other plugin works as effectively. However, with the Asset Cleanup plugin (discussed below), you can block extra files from loading on pages where they’re not needed.

4. AddThis

What the plugin is used for: AddThis, and other similar social sharing plugins, enable you to add social media buttons to your WordPress site. This makes it easier for users to share your content on social media and follow your social profiles.

How it kills site speed: As well as loading its own files, AddThis also loads various files from Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, thus increasing page loading times.

What to use instead: For social media integration, most WordPress sites don’t even need a plugin – a small snippet of code in your post template will do exactly the same job. You can get customised code for your site using Sharing Buttons or a similar tool.

5. MonsterInsights

What the plugin is used for: MonsterInsights, and other Google Analytics plugins, track website data and provide statistics and reports. This helps you understand user behaviour and make data-driven edits to optimise your WordPress site.

How it kills site speed: Tracking files are loaded on every page of your WordPress site, significantly reducing speed.

What to use instead: Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about this as the files to track visitor data are needed across all WordPress pages. However, if you implement cookie consent correctly then all data tracking functionality will be blocked until a user accepts cookies. This makes your first website load much quicker – a rather unexpected benefit of GDPR and cookie notices!

6. WPBakery

What the plugin is used for: WPBakery, and other visual builder plugins, allow you to create different page designs and layouts on your WordPress site.

How it kills site speed: Most visual builders load JS and CSS code that is not needed, thus slowing down page loading times.

What to use instead: Keep the plugin but try tweaking settings to block unnecessary files or allow editing in the back-end only.

speed up by cleaning up

As mentioned above, one great solution to get your WordPress site loading as rapidly as possible is by installing the Asset Cleanup plugin. This allows you to block plugin files that are not needed whilst keeping all of your essential functionality.

It shows you a list all files being loaded on each page and allows you to block anything that is redundant (and therefore slowing things down), either on specific pages or across your whole WordPress site.

This means more streamlined webpages, faster speeds, better user experience and happier website visitors!

Are you aware of any other WordPress plugins that kill site speed? Or would you like expert help to boost speed or optimise your WordPress site? Please get in touch.

For more expert WordPress tips, make sure to read our Ultimate WordPress Optimisation Guide and other WordPress blogs.