Simple Tips to Improve WordPress for SEO

WordPress has to be one of the world’s most popular content management systems. However, having a well-designed template and an impressive theme isn’t enough to get your site noticed by the search engines.

You need to upgrade your WordPress site with some SEO tactics and strategies to get noticed and make your site stand out in the online world. Here are some tips that we put together to ensure that your WordPress site is optimized for performance while offering a clean user experience.

1. Remove Some WordPress Defaults

There are a few default items that you need to remove from your WordPress site. The sample page and the ‘Hello world’ post have to go immediately; it’s the easiest way for new users to see that your site is not entirely functional and operated by someone that does not know what they are doing. While you are working on the site, place an ‘Under Construction’ page with a countdown timer to face new site visitors to your URL.

It’s also important to remember to change o remove the ‘uncategorized’ category from your posting options. Instead, create your unique categories for your pages and posts and use keywords that are popular in your niche.

2. Set Update Services and Permalinks

The WordPress default setting for permalinks is not an effective URL structure for SEO purposes. Therefore; you will need to change the setting to  (/%postname%/) as a matter of best practice.  The benefit of this method for your SEO is that it sets all your pages to run with URL parameters.

Include some Update Services in Your WordPress site. The sites crawl rate determines the time it takes Google to index your new web page. WordPress offers you the opportunity to speed this up by adding update services in the general services page. Make sure that you have these four in your list;

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http:%2F%2www.domain.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Having your site indexed correctly and quickly is possibly one of the most essential functions of SEO. Without a correct listing that is visible to the search bots, your page will never be found in search results.

3. WordPress Homepage: Blog Posts or a Static Page?

WordPress started off as a blogging platform and was upgraded and developed over the years into the fully functional CMS platform that exists today. However, this means that the default setting for your homepage will be your blog. You can change this to a static page by visiting your settings and changing the default in your reading settings from latest posts to static page. For each article in a feed, show the excerpt and ensure that the ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ button is left unticked.

4. Customize Media Settings

WordPress provides default settings on how to handle image thumbnails. If you want to set your dimensions for your images (for the thumbnail, medium, and large options), without being cropped automatically, then this is a critical default to change. =

5. Use Google Analytics

Never manage a site without using some form of tracking or analytics tool to monitor your site’s visitors and performance. Google analytics is free, easy to use, and available as a plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to connect your profile to your WordPress without copy pasting it. Once it’s connected, there is a multitude of settings that you can tweak to enhance your own user experience and optimize your website’s analytics. Loading analytics on your site can help you with tasks such as identifying 404 pages and tracking user time on pages, as well as what posts and pages frequently visited on your site. Make sure you set up your analytics plugin correctly. Incorrect data can cause your plugin to deliver false results, so make sure that you do it right the first time.

Summary

All it takes to create a functional WordPress site that offers a clean user experience is a few tweaks and changes. If you want to unlock the full power of your WordPress site, then consider installing the SEO Powersuite. Visit us for an SEO powersuite discount that will make the plugin cost affordable enough to include in your SEO strategy.