6 Quick WordPress SEO Tips to Optimise Your Website or Blog

6 Quick WordPress SEO Tips to Optimise Your Website or Blog

There’s no disputing the fact that WordPress is by far the most prominent CMS out there. The brainchild of Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, WordPress has risen to superstardom in the blogosphere in the 11 short years since it was released. When you consider that there are is an enormous amount of alternative content manage systems available, this statistic speaks volumes about WordPress popularity. If you decide to go with WordPress, you will definitely be with good company. The New York Times, CNN, Mashable, and eBay all run their blogs on the most popular CMS in the world – WordPress.

So I thought it would be useful to put together a quick list of SEO tips to help anyone who has just launched a WordPress site or has an existing site they’d like to rank better in the search engines. Just to point out these tips relate to the self-hosted version from WordPress.org, not the hosted version at WordPress.com.

1. Install an SEO management plugin. 

WordPress out of the box doesn’t offer much control of important SEO tasks such as writing meta tags, so to do these you need to install an SEO plugin. Probably the most popular of these is Yoast, which offers lots of useful features. All-in-One SEO Pack plugin is also very popular being geared towards users who don’t need all the advanced features offered by Yoast.

2. Make sure you have permalinks setup. 

Permalinks enable you to have more meaningful URLs for your site. These help inform the search engine what the page is about and make more sense to users as well. The default is page number like /p=123. I often go for post name which is understandable by all.

3. Use tags and categories for blog posts. 

WordPress has powerful capabilities to manage and organise blog content in a sensible way. This is achieved using tags and categories. Not only will this help your human visitors find and understand the content more easily but also the search engines.

4. Write meaningful keyword rich content. 

Whether you’re using WordPress to run a website or blog, the site’s only going to be as good as its content. Make each page as good as it can be, and be aware of relevant keywords you can include where possible.

5. Use a mobile friendly theme. 

There are thousands of themes to choose from for your WordPress site, but whichever one you choose make sure it is mobile responsive.

6. Make sure the site is quick Opening. 

Have you ever visited a website only to wait ages for the pages to load? No one enjoys this experience and the search engines don’t like it either. Also a persistently slow site may be pushed down the search engine rankings.