If you are running a WordPress website, you may have heard the term, “SEO”, also known as Search Engine Optimization. WordPress, on the other hand, comes with basic SEO optimization and to be true, you should not expect much from WordPress itself.

But, it does provide you the necessary platform such that it can be utilized for better SEO. All you need this small nifty guide.

Search Engine Optimization is a must if you want to survive on the online world. Google loves certain standards, and you might be tempted to hire an SEO expert. The need for SEO expert is a different topic altogether and that’s why I want to keep it away for now.

Blogs that rank high on Google optimize their internal blog with changes that are necessary for anyone running WordPress or any other platform. Once, you install WordPress, you need to follow the below guidelines to take full advantage.

Without wasting more time, let’s get started with the small guide to make your WordPress blog SEO friendly.

How To Make WordPress Blog SEO Friendly

Get Great Hosting, Proper Theme, and Appropriate Plugins

Hosting: The first step is to make your WordPress website more SEO friendly is to get a great hosting. Hosting such as HostGator, BlueHost, WebHostFace, etc. are few of the best hosting providers out there. If you are just starting out on your journey, choose a package that suits you and then change to a better hosting package.

If you are on managed hosting, inMotion hosting provides a great option to get started. You can check best WordPress hosting on IndexWP to know more where to get started.

Theme: Theme is also an important part of the SEO equation. If you use a substandard theme from the WordPress repository or from any 3rd party Theme vendor, you might get a theme that is not properly SEO optimized.

Free themes are rampant with the bad code and you might want to take care in getting the themes. For you, IndexWP already did the hard work. You can check the themes category or use the search function to get hold of any niche based theme.

• Things to keep in mind while choosing a theme:
• Clean and professional looking themes perform the best.
• Loading speed of the theme should be less than 2 seconds or faster.
• The code should be written in latest technology following industry standards.

Note: Genesis Themes are famous for their SEO friendliness and it is always better to go with Genesis themes.

Plugins: I have always debated on how important is the plugins are. Just like themes, a good plugin improves your website SEO rather than making it worse. It is always a good idea to read the review of the plugin before using them on your website.

You can get tons of advice from our plugins review section, or just use the comment section below for any advice.

PermaLink Settings

I once had a friend who started a tech website. At that time, I was myself not well-versed in how important the permalinks are. After I knew how permalinks enhance both the user experience and the search engine crawling, I changed the permalinks of my own website and also told my friend to change it.

After the change, all the posts are better crawled by the search engine. To change the permalink, go to the settings > permalinks and change it to the post name (%postname%).

Get Yoast SEO Plugin

Plugins are great. They simplify the complex tasks for you by providing you a better view of what you want to achieve. For SEO purposes, there are many plugins you can use, but I would recommend Yoast SEO above all. The plugin, when installed, takes you through a simple wizard and enables you to improve the SEO of the website.

It takes care of the titles and descriptions and other tons of things that you don’t have to worry about.

Check out this nifty blog article on IndexWP to know more.

Generate SiteMap

Sitemaps are a way of telling the user or the search engine about the structure of the website. They are important and if you have installed Yoast SEO plugin, it might have created a simple sitemap for your website.

You can also use many sitemap generation plugin available in the WordPress plugin repository or just stick with what the SEO plugins offered you.

After generating the sitemap, you need to submit the sitemap URL to the Google search console. This will enable your website to be indexed faster and better.

Give Uncategorized a better name

How many times have you seen a website listing their best articles in uncategorized? Not only it seems unprofessional but also hampers the experience of both the users and the crawlers.

It is always a good idea to give it a proper name.

Get the On-page SEO right

Other than hosting, themes or plugins, the most important factor is the on-page SEO for any blog post/page. Always keep your on-page SEO to a good shape.

There is a great guide by Moz on on-page SEO. Check it out to know more on-page SEO.

Website Loading Speed

One of the biggest factors for better SEO score is the website loading speed. If you site takes long to load, google bot will rank it lower than the website which loads way faster.

Google bots think like a user. Any user who visits your website will not be happy when he/she has to wait for the website to load.

You can use cache plugins such as W3 Total Cache or WPSuperCache to make your website faster. Check out this article on IndexWP to know which one to use.

Wrapping Up

With the above tips to improve your website SEO, it’s time to wrap up for now. If you have any more tips, don’t forget to share it through the comment section below.

Also, share the article with your friends and family.