SEO can easily get technical but it shouldn’t necessarily have to. And that’s, especially, the case when you have your website set up on WordPress. Understanding some SEO basics for optimizing your website can be helpful in boosting your site’s traffic quite significantly. So, if you’re interested in learning some SEO tricks for WordPress, read on and you’ll find out.
1. Check The Visibility Settings Of Your Website
There is a built-in feature which hides wordpress websites from the search engines. That is actually to help ensure that you have enough time for working on your site and making it ready before it can go public. Just make sure that you haven’t accidentally checked this option and your site is visible to Search Engines.
To check visibility settings of your site, login to your admin panel and go to Settings > Reading. Scroll down until you find “Search Engine Visibility” section and uncheck the box in front of “Discourage Search Engines From Indexing This Site”. Finally, click on “Save Changes” and you’re done.
2. Make Your URL Structures SEO Friendly
SEO-friendly URLs tend to have your keyword or words that explain your webpage’s content. These URLs are easily readable by both the Search Engines and the humans. An example of SEO-friendly URL structures can be https://www.example.com/how-to-install-wordpress/. Now, this URL is quite human understandable and suggests what the page can have. It will help improve the chances to get a higher rank in SERPs as well.
To check and set up the permalink structure for your website, go to Settings > Permalinks. Select post name option before clicking on “Save Changes” button for these changes to take effect.
3. Add XML Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps are the specially formatted files which list all the pages of your websites. Existence of these sitemaps makes it straightforward for the search engines to find all the content you have on your site. It’s helpful for search engines to find all your pages quickly before starting to rank them. If you’re using Yoast SEO plugin, your XML sitemap will be created automatically and it can be found at the URL: http://yoursitename.com/sitemap_index.xml. The next step elaborates how this sitemap can be submitted to Google.
4. Add The Site To Google Search Console
Google Search Console refers to the tools that Google offers to site owners for determining how the search engine sees their content. It gives data and reports which highlight how the pages are appearing in the search results. That’s exactly where you have to submit your website’s sitemap so that all its pages can be found by the Search Engine easily. Here’s how to do that. First add your site to the Google Search Console and then click on Crawl menu before selecting the Sitemaps option in Crawl section of left sidebar. Next, click on Add/Test Sitemap button towards top right. Enter the sitemap URL mentioned above and click on submit.
WordPress makes it a lot convenient for you to create search engine friendly websites. You just have to understand the basics and you can do everything on your own quite easily.
