SEO is a vital consideration for any website. Without proper SEO in place, your website will be doomed to languish in obscurity. Search engines drive the majority of internet traffic today, which isn’t surprising when you consider how much most of us rely on these tools throughout our daily lives. If you can get your website to the top of search engine results pages for your most important keywords, you can massively increase traffic to your website over a relatively short space of time.
WordPress is perhaps the only CMS out there that comes with some truly impressive built-in SEO capabilities. It is definitely one of the best CMS platforms out there for any website owner who also needs to give their SEO a tune-up. If you are new to web design, managing your SEO can be a daunting proposition. In fact, even if you have been designing websites for a while, SEO is a whole other ball game.
Having a CMS that automates some of your SEO and massively facilitates the implementation of other techniques is invaluable. WordPress doesn’t just handle the most basic SEO functions either, it can be used to manage many of the cornerstone elements of a website’s SEO strategy.
Image Optimization
Many website owners, both newbies and experienced developers alike overlook the importance of ensuring that their images are formatted correctly. That means including alt tags, captions, and descriptions. WordPress’s built-in editor enables users to manage all of these and more with ease.
Including images in your blog posts is a great way of breaking up large bodies of text and making your website more aesthetically appealing. However, images aren’t just there to prettify the place; they also serve an important function as far as your SEO is concerned. For example, WordPress gives users the ability to “create alternative text” for their images. You can use this alternative text to promote your most important keywords.
HTML Markup
The purpose of HTML markup is to make it easier for search engines to decipher the layout of a website and its content more easily. There are a number of HTML5-based WordPress plugins that make optimizing your markup for search engine crawlers much easier, or even automatic.
Managing Metadata
Search engine crawlers will utilize metadata to better understand the layout of your website and the content that is contained within it. The easier it is to manage your metadata, the more you can take advantage of the potential that it offers. Fortunately, WordPress makes managing your metadata as simple as it could possibly be.
If you are able to add important keywords to your metadata, you will be more likely to rank highly for those keywords. WordPress has some pretty good built-in capabilities in this regard, but it is through the various plugins available, such as Yoast SEO, that you can really turbocharge your use of metadata.
Set Your Own Permalinks
Being able to set the specific URLs for every piece of content that you post is a massive advantage when it comes to SEO. By creating links that are optimized for both people and search engines, you not only improve your SEO score but also encourage users to click on links to your content after seeing the URL. WordPress makes it as simple as it could possibly be for you to choose your own URL structure and create URLs that people and search engines can read with ease.
Not only this, but the ability to set your own permalinks means that you can add your most important keywords to your URLs. Not only will your permalinks look better and make more sense to a human user, but they will also assist in boosting your search ranking position as well.
More Efficient Content Creation
The best way of boosting your SEO in the long-term will always be to produce genuinely popular content that your users flock to. If you are consistently producing the kind of content that pulls in big audience numbers, you will find it easy to maintain a high SEO score.
Focus On User Experience
WordPress enables users to install a range of themes and plugins that both alter the look of their website and expand its functionality. Google’s SEO algorithms have grown increasingly sophisticated over the years; they are now able to use a variety of metrics to ascertain what the user experience is like. This is determined by considering a range of different factors, including the time it takes to load a website and the way that its URLs are formulated.
Page speed – the speed with which a website loads – is one of the most important metrics that Google uses to establish an SEO score and it has been playing an increasingly prominent role. As well as WordPress’s built-in tools for optimizing page load speed, there are also numerous plugins that can further enhance your website’s efficiency.
No CMS can offer the same capabilities as WordPress when it comes to refining and enhancing your user experience. By taking advantage of all the various tools that WordPress offers you for improving your user experience, you can give your SEO a significant organic boost.
Easy Mobile Optimization
The majority of internet traffic today comes from mobile devices and the portion of traffic that mobile accounts for has been increasing for a number of years. Websites can no longer afford to ignore their mobile users; they need to be designed with mobile users in mind. It used to be that websites had to create dedicated mobile versions to serve up to users browsing on mobile devices.
But the standard approach now is to create dynamic webpages that automatically adjust and rearrange themselves to suit the display that the user is viewing them on. WordPress does much of this work automatically and the majority of WordPress themes are already optimized for mobile.
There are lots of CMS options out there today, but WordPress is unique in the benefits that it offers from an SEO perspective. With WordPress on your side, you will find it much easier to manage your SEO. In fact, much of the legwork will be done for you.