A WordPress SEO strategy can deliver a wide range of benefits to your overall internet marketing activities.
So you want to create a website or a blog, and you’re confused about what platform to choose? WordPress (WP) is a fully customizable blog platform designed specifically with SEO in mind. As well as being SEO friendly, WP has great design templates and plugins available (to increase the functionality of your website) and an easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS).
Here are the SEO advantages of WordPress:
WordPress is a powerful platform
It is extremely easy to create or edit posts, manage categories, and add images and comments in WordPress. With a simple yet intuitive interface, you’ll get started in minutes. WordPress has a good architecture, offers flexibility in design and has a well-thought-out SEO infrastructure.
Third-party plugins such as the All in One SEO plugin make optimizing even easier! The plugin allows you to add keywords and descriptions to each page to communicate to Search Engines what your website or web page is about, so it ranks for the right keyword searches.
WordPress is widely used
WordPress is widely distributed and supported with third-party developers updating or building new plugins for the platform all the time. It is estimated to power over If you need to troubleshoot any WP problems, you can always do that at the WordPress forums!
WordPress has fully customizable templates
The flexible template system makes it very easy to change designs on a whim. With the help of an advanced web designer or SEO specialist, you can make your WordPress blog unique and appealing to your users and customize it to reflect your personality or your company’s brand.
WordPress can easily be crawled by Search Engine spiders
With the WordPress built-in SEO-optimized navigation system, you are free to decide how the links appear as well as their structure to allow a more descriptive URL that will add weight to your Search Engine ranking. A good navigation menu to the categories archives and pages will encourage the search engine to visit connecting links covering most of the website.
WordPress has tons of SEO-related plugins
Do you want to create sitemaps and automatically ping servers? Can do. Do you want to filter spam? Can do. Do you want to display videos? Can do. Do you want to individually manage your META tags? Can do. There are tons of SEO WordPress plugins available – easing the WordPress SEO process.
WordPress has an easy-to-use Content Management System
Search Engines give a preference to blogs or websites that are managed and regularly updated with fresh and unique content. WordPress has an easy-to-use CMS to be able to upload content and images easily and quickly; no more struggling with HTML or a difficult-to-use CMS! Blogging has now become a key element of an effective SEO strategy. WordPress allows you not only to create posts easily, but also optimize your posts around your targeted keywords.
WordPress encourages link-building
The blogrolls, pingbacks and trackbacks built into WordPress help you link to other sites, giving them credit, but also opening a door for them to link back to you. Good sites linking to your site add weight to your search engine score.
WP also lets you add helpful plugins which encourages good comments and links on your site and gives you more control over which links to make dofollow/nofollow (dofollow links are indexed by search engines and influence your search engine ranking).
WordPress allows you to create sitemaps easily and quickly
By downloading additional plugins, WordPress allows you to create a sitemap link on every page so visitors and Search Engines alike will have easy access to your posts.
It not only makes it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for, it also makes it easier for Search Engine spiders to find your website as well! With the Google SiteMap Generator Plugin for WordPress, you can generate XML files to submit to Google Sitemaps.
WordPress favors content syndication
Content syndication is the distribution of your content to others, including blog followers or even Search Engines. WordPress allows you to automatically notify your feed subscribers and your listed servers when you post a new article. These include RSS and Atom feeds. Now that’s content distribution!
WordPress is free
Sounds too good to be true? WordPress is open-source software, created and supported by a huge community of technicians over the world. You may start using it today, without paying anyone a licence fee.
Open source software
WordPress is open source software which means that it is free to download and there is a large community of third-party developers and programmers always working on adding SEO WordPress plugins to enhance the application. One of our favorite SEO plugins is the All in One SEO Pack which allows you to customize the meta tags from each post and page, create canonical URLs and fine tune navigational links.
Open source software
WordPress is open source software which means that it is free to download and there is a large community of third-party developers and programmers always working on adding SEO WordPress plugins to enhance the application. One of our favorite SEO plugins is the All in One SEO Pack which allows you to customize the meta tags from each post and page, create canonical URLs and fine tune navigational links.
Permalinks
One of the main WordPress SEO features is the ability to customize the URL for every page and the flexibility it provides with respect to the URL structure – using keyword-rich URL’s will add weight to your Search Engine ranking. You can alter the structure of permalinks and add keywords you want to focus on for each post you make. Easy to remember URLS are also helpful for visitors to remember pages they have visited on your site.
SEO-friendly website architecture
With WordPress, it is easy to create both pages and posts on your website and then organize them into different keyword-rich categories which helps Search Engines to index your content. You can easily change your posts to pages or vice versa, as well as move them into a different category or even multiple categories. It’s also easy to interlink in between any pages and posts and you can specify a different URL for your categories.
Anchor text customization
Another important aspect of WordPress SEO is the ability to customize internal anchor text links with keyword-rich text. The anchor text is the visible, clickable words in a hyperlink. The text in these hyperlinks helps Search Engine spiders figure out what the ‘linked to’ page is about and rank the page for a relevant keyword. You can use the anchor text for links within your site as well as other external sites.
Optimizing images
With the insert image button in WordPress, you can easily upload and optimize images by adding ALT (alternative) tags. The ALT tag text will appear when the image does not render properly onscreen. It also serves another purpose – Search Engines cannot read an image and rely on the ALT text to understand what the image is about. The text should reflect the keyword theme and content on the page so as to help Search Engines can determine relevancy.
A few tips for the road
Download and install WordPress with a stand-alone hosting account. You can find specific WordPress hosting products on the web for a few dollars a month.
Buy a domain name and use it for your blog. It is better than a subdomain of your actual domain name and easier if you ever decide to split your website and blog in the future.
Interested, but not knowing where to start? Ask a WordPress SEO specialist.
To summarize
WordPress comes ready to embrace SEO straight out of the box. Its features and functions will guide Search Engine spiders through your posts, pages, and categories: your site will be better and faster crawled and spiders will easily gather information they need to include your site within their index. Contact us to find out how you can customize the design, enhance the functionality and improve the WordPress SEO of your website or blog.