WordPress SEO 20 Tips and Best Practices Part #1

 Most people choose WordPress as the CMS for their website because it is easy to use and SEO friendly.

Both of these are true, but it's important to remember that WordPress is just a Content Management System (CMS). So the fact that you are using WordPress is not enough to rank on search engines.

Fortunately, WordPress makes it very easy to implement many of the best SEO practices.

In this guide, we'll cover the 20 best SEO practices, share tips to help you rank higher, and show you how to apply them to your WordPress website.

Here are the behaviors that made the list:

Check search engine visibility settings.

Set the preferred domain.

Configure Permalinks.

Manual approval is required for blog comments.

Install SEO friendly theme.

Install an all-in-one SEO plugin.

Be sure to map the site

Exclude low-cost content from indexing.

Install Ahrifs SEO Plugin.

Write a "clickable" title.

Set SEO-friendly URL slugs.

Use headers to create rankings.

Link to internally relevant content.

Add alt text to images.

Write a great title tag.

Write a great meta description.

Nest pages in subfolders

Install WP Rocket

Reduce code.

Install short pixels.

1. Check your search engine visibility settings.

WordPress has a checkbox, if checked, effectively SEO for your website is a death sentence because it prevents Google from indexing your pages. And if Google can't index your pages, they can't rank them.

You will find these under Settings> Reading> Search Engine Visibility:

Search engine visibility in WordPress

Make sure it is not marked if you want to retain any of the rankings.

2. Set the preferred domain.

Google looks at domain.com and www.domain.com separately, so it's important to choose the preferred version for your site. You can do this under Settings> General. Just set the WordPress address (URL) and site address (URL) to your preferred version.

Preferred domain in WordPress

For a new website, it doesn't matter which version you choose. But if your pages are accessible on both URL versions, your best bet is to use the version with as many backlinks as possible.

To see which version it is, insert the two between the characters in the analysis tool and check their referring domains.

For us, this is clearly the non-www version:

Referring Domains to Preferred Domains in Site Explorer

The beauty of WordPress is that it automatically shifts to the preferred version so that search engines and visitors can access your site only on the preferred domain.

Warning

If your site has been up and running for some time, changing the preferred version may cause technical issues. If you have any concerns, it's worth adding a developer's help list to make sure everything goes smoothly.

3. Set up Permalinks.

Permalinks are primarily URL formats for your posts and pages, and the "post name" option is most SEO friendly because it helps:

Make it clear what the page is about.

Keep URLs short, which may prevent them from cropping up in search results.

However, if you are already using a different permalink structure, changing it can cause pages to break. So if you make any changes, you'll want to crawl your website with tools like Ahrefs' Site Audit to check for 4XX errors.

4XX errors in the site audit of the characters

If any, you may want to use Redirection, a WordPress plugin, to redirect old URLs to new ones.

4. Manual approval is required for blog comments.

Spam blog comments are not likely to cause penalties or serious SEO issues as they are not always followed. But according to Google, they can still cause some SEO problems for a number of reasons.

Happy Fortunately, offering WordPress users the option to customize all blog comments for manual approval makes this issue really easy to solve once and for all.

You can do this in Settings> Discussion> Comments Manually Approved:

Approval of Blog Comments in WordPress

5. SEO friendly install them 

Almost all WordPress themes these days are responsive and mobile friendly, so there's no need to worry. When choosing a theme you really need to evaluate its performance.

If the theme is full of unnecessary code and features, it will slow down your website. And that's not a good thing, given that page speed has been a factor in Google's rankings for over a decade.

So when choosing a theme, it is important to read the details to find out what it contains. If there are a bunch of features that you wouldn't use, this might not be the best choice for you.

You can also run the theme demo through PageSpeed ​​Insights to get a better sense of its performance.

WordPress theme in PageSpeed ​​Insights

If you already have a theme and its performance is not good, give a shot at Tips # 18–20 and if it is still slow then hire a developer to improve it.

6. Install an all-in-one SEO plugin.

Enhance WordPress SEO functionality and make it easy to improve aspects of your site with the All in One SEO plugin. We use Yoast SEO, but there are many other alternatives.

To install it, go to Plugins> Add New> Search for "Yoast SEO"> Click Activate> Click Install:

Installing Yoast SEO for WordPress

Most settings will be nice out of the box, but we will adjust some of them as we go.

7. Be sure to map the site

Sitemaps list important posts and pages on your site to help search engines discover them. Yoast SEO maps the site for you, but you need to make sure the option is on.

To do this, go to SEO> General> Features> Toggle "XML sitemaps":

XML sitemaps are toggled in Yoast SEO.

8. Exclude low value content from indexing.

You should only allow Google to index pages that offer value to searchers. Archives based on tag pages and formats rarely fall into this category, so it is usually best to exclude them from indexing.

To do this, go to SEO> Search Appearance> Taxonomies> Toggle "Show tags in search results?" Close:

Deleting tagged pages from indexing in WordPress using Yoast SEO

Do the same for formatted archives.

9. Install Rewards SEO Plugin.

Our free WordPress SEO plugin audits and monitors content performance and makes recommendations on how to improve it.

For example, if the plugin sees that one of your pages is no longer in the top three for your targeted keywords, it tags it as "not performing well anymore." Will do and personally suggest ways to improve based on you. Setting:

Character SEO Plugin

Here, it suggests that we update a post that no longer ranks. If we hit the suggestion carat, it gives advice on how to do it:

Content Recommendations in the Letters SEO WordPress Plugin

Recommendation

The next eight points are related to content. Keep these in mind when adding posts and pages to your WordPress website.

10. Write a "clickable" title.

Every page and post in WordPress requires a title, which you set here:

Clickable title in WordPress

This title is usually displayed elsewhere on your WordPress website. For example, the title of this post appears on our blog archive page:

Example of a blog post title

For this reason, it is important that your title persuades viewers to click on your page and accurately state what the page is about. In other words, the title should be clickable but not clickable.

If you're struggling to write something that fits the bill, be inspired by the SERP titles of the top ranking pages for your targeted keywords, as they are often identical or similar to the page title. You can do this in Google, but it's best to use our free SERP checker for more accurate, non-personal results:

Free letter SERP checker

For example, you can see above that many ranking pages for "SEO Tips" talk about increasing traffic or ranking in their SERP titles. So this is probably a good angle for a clickable title for this topic.