WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step)
You have put in a lot of effort to create your WordPress blog. If you haven’t spent some time on WordPress SEO, then you may not get traffic to your blog.
To reward your hard work or earn the benefit of your hard work, it is necessary to spend this little time.
In this article, Our focus is on simple SEO steps that can increase traffic to your blog. You will gain knowledge about the best practices for a WordPress blog. The arrangement of steps is based on how we set up WordPress.
Steps for WordPress SEO
SEO is a simple technique, it only takes a few steps to optimize your content. If you are using WordPress, you have done half the work. Just Keep the following points in your mind. You will feel some improvement in your ranking soon.
Creating Dedicated pages for categories.
Arranging Categories in Pages WordPress lets you categorize your blog posts.
With WordPress, you can sort your blog into categories and tags.
If you have more topics on your blog, it’s best to divide your posts into different categories.
Sort all posts that are related to a specific type into a specific category.
If your niche has sub-niches, create a dedicated page for your sub-niches.
This will enhance the user experience (UX). Additionally, it will improve the organization of your posts. It facilitates the indexing of your posts by search engines. Your website will have good interlinking and a better view of search engines. It will improve your SEO.
For instance, if your website is about blogging and has three topics, such as
Article Writing,
WordPress for blogging,
blogger for blogging.
You can categorize these topics into three categories. Further, you can divide these categories into subcategories like “Writing Tools” and “Writing Techniques” for article writing. Divide “WordPress for Blogging” into “WordPress Setup” and “WordPress SEO”. Divide “Blogger for blogging” into “Blogger Setup” and “Blogger SEO”.
Next, you have to create a dedicated page for each category. For example, create three pages, blogging, WordPress, and Blogger
These pages can now be optimized for more specific keywords. It will be of great use for SEO rankings.
Use of the WordPress SEO plugin
SEO plugins are extremely important for WordPress SEO. It makes it effortless for us to perform SEO tasks. There are several plugins that can be used for referencing.
These plugins have a charge. Buying a plan may be challenging for beginners. These plugins also offer free features that are very helpful for users in improving SEO.
There are some popular SEO plugins that we can use.
The logical URL structure for SEO
A logical URL structure is beneficial for the user’s experience.
A URL that is SEO-friendly is one that contains keywords related to content and is simple and easy to read.
For example, a page containing information about WordPress SEO should look like this:
https://it10.com/wordpress-seo-guide
This link will encourage searchers to click it if they want to learn WordPress SEO. The reason for this is that the link is straightforward and means “WordPress SEO”. Now, it will contribute to an increase in CTR.
This link is also indicating to Google or other search engines that it has the keywords ‘WordPress’ and ‘SEO’, and the search will convert it to ‘WordPress SEO’.
So whenever search engines crawl the website, they index it in their database in a related category for searchers.
Good practice for URL structuring
Use SSL. Secure Sockets Layer encrypts. It will use the HTTPS version instead of HTTP.
It’s recommended to use relevant 2-3 words, with a maximum of four words URLs. Don’t overload the URL with more keywords, as it may be considered spam.Use hyphens instead of underscores. For example, https://it10.com/wordpress-seo-guide
It’s a simple task to complete in WordPress, just follow the steps.
The following is a method for checking and updating the permalink structure of your WordPress site:
Click Settings and then Permalinks.
Select “post name” as an option and to save the setting click on the “Save Changes” button.
picture
Benefits of Internal Links
Internal linking is very helpful to improve your WordPress blog’s SEO. It has two advantages: First, you can provide referrals to a topic for readers. This is good for user experience. Second, users will spend more time on your blog. It will increase the engagement of visitors with your content. It will also boost your page views and improve the reach of other pages.
Because of these reasons, Google gives some credit for internal links and considers your blog content as reachable content.
Make sure to include internal links at the end of the post, so that the reader can continue to the next topic after reading the first one. If it is necessary to include a link in the post for reference, make sure that the link opens in a new tab. This will make it easy for the reader to return to the main topic after viewing references to the term.
Generally, include links to 2-3 previous blog posts in your post. In the beginning, it will be difficult because of the lack of content. You need to keep one thing in mind: link to related content or posts; irrelevant links spoil the user experience and are not good for the user experience.
Internal links can also be created using SEO plugins.
Google Search Console Submission and Benefits
Google provides a free service to web owners, It is called Google Search Console.
The former name for Google Search Console was Webmaster Tool. It is a very useful tool for web owners. It enables Google’s search engine to index your website. Google Search takes a considerable amount of time to discover and index your website if you don’t submit it to the Google Search Console.
In addition to site submission, it provides many tools to provide valuable information to webmasters. It helps to analyze statistics and improve your site’s position in search engine results pages (SERP).
The tool’s primary objective is to help website owners improve their content by providing search statistics. This information is very useful to identify problems and fix them.
The performance report displays the number of times a webpage appears in a search result (impressions) and the number of times the page’s URL is clicked (total clicks). Additionally, it displays the average CTR, the average position of your website in search results, a list of external links to websites, broken links, and pages with a 404 error, etc.
Website SEO can be greatly improved with the help of these statistics. Based on these reports, we can modify our strategy.
In addition to Google Search Console, we should also submit our website to Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and other similar sites.
After registering in Google Search Console, we need to submit our website’s XML sitemap.
In the XML Sitemap section, you will learn how to create XML Sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.
Creating and Submitting XML sitemaps to the Google Search Console
An XML sitemap is a file created using Extensible Markup Language (XML) that is both human-readable and machine-readable. Search engines use XML sitemap to understand website structure.
It helps to index all your pages quickly with the Google search engine. Otherwise, Google will take a long time to find your website pages.
How to generate XML sitemap.
There are several free services to generate XML sitemaps online. The WordPress SEO plugin can be used to automatically generate an XML site map. Go to the plugin’s site map setting option. Generate an XML sitemap, and after creating the XML sitemap, copy the sitemap link. Submit the sitemap link to Google Search Console. The site map link looks like this: http://yourwebsitename.com/sitemap.xml
The importance of visitor comments for SEO.
Visitor comments improve the engagement of visitors with your blog. They ask questions because they think your blog is authentic.
Let us know how it benefits our article content and SEO.
Visitors ask genuine questions that are related to your content.
Their inquiries are seeking solutions to problems that are not addressed in your article. Answering these questions can be very beneficial for other visitors.
Thus, comments help to add more useful content and add value to your article. It helps to improve the user’s experience. It indirectly enhances the SEO of your blog.
Eliminating spam from comments
Comments are very helpful for our blog’s SEO. But spam comments harm our blog’s SEO. So it is mandatory to eliminate spam comments. These spammy comments also slow down your WordPress blog.
You may delete these unwanted comments while replying to genuine comments. Having a large number of comments makes it impossible.
To resolve this problem, you can use anti-spam WordPress plugins.
For example, Akismet, Jetpack, Antispam Bee, and Anti-spam are the plugins that can prevent spam.
These plugin filters work based on some rules; therefore, they can filter genuine comments if they find something not according to their rules. But that comment may be valuable for your readers and search engines.
To solve this problem, it is possible to locate these genuine comments in the trash and restore them.
Importance of secure URLs for SEO
It’s crucial to use HTTPS instead of HTTP, which is a secure version of URLs, by incorporating SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates.
In this version, data is encrypted prior to being exchanged on the Internet between a website and a server.
Using SSL on a website ensures that user data is safe when transmitted over the internet.
It is impossible for anyone to intercept data and extract information from it. If the web browser displays a look icon on the left side of the address bar and the URL prefix starts with HTTPS instead of HTTP, it indicates that the website uses SSL. The browser flags a website as insecure if it doesn’t use SSL.
It will enhance visitor trust in your website. Google also recommends to use of SSLs. Websites that don’t use SSLs are ranked lower by Google in the SERP. Google takes care of visitors and doesn’t compromise the security of users.
Using SSL is considered a great user experience. SEO is greatly influenced by SSLs.
Some useful options in WordPress.
Before we launch our website, it’s important to change some settings in WordPress.
Discouraging search engines from indexing the site.
One option is used to discourage search engines from indexing your website site.
The purpose of this is to prevent search engines from crawling and indexing our site until we establish a WordPress website or blog properly.
We don’t want search engines indexing our pages that are not proper or the website is not structured properly.
You can check this option to discourage search engines when you don’t have proper content.
But you must ensure to uncheck this option after a proper setup and adding content to the website, to allow search engines to crawl your WordPress blog.
To change the option follow the steps.
Settings -> Reading -> Search engine visibility (Check Box Discourage search engines from indexing this site)
Saving Post In Draft
We can also save our Posts in draft until we refine their content properly. You can also view it in this mode. And publish it when you complete your post-refinement.
Related Posts
What is Technical SEO, How To Improve 7 Part of Technical SEO