WordPress is quite a friendly environment when it comes to learning how to SEO your site, but some of the important elements are still a little buried among all the other features, or require third-party plugins. That’s why today we want to present 7 tips on how to use SEO on WordPress with relatively little effort.
1. Improve Internal Linking
Since links are the essence of SEO, your internal linking structure should be the first thing to focus on with on-page SEO. Apart from the fact that manually linking to other posts within your site is a very good practice, you can also automate the process a bit.
You can get a plugin like SEO Smart Links that will scan your content and then automatically link certain keywords to their corresponding posts and pages.
Another interesting plugin is WP Internal Links. It allows you to create a “link ring” where certain group of posts links to each other, in a manner that every post links to the next one in line, and the last one links to the first one, hence creating a ring.
2. Remove Broken Links
Google really doesn’t like broken links. And the worst part is that you can’t really prevent them from appearing on your site. For instance, if you link to a given site, and then the site goes offline then you end up with a bad link.
The only thing you can do is scan your site every once in a while to find all broken links. Here’s where the Broken Link Checker plugin comes into play. It analyzes your site and then presents a report containing all links that are broken.
3. Cache Your Site
Caching is one of the performance optimization methods that makes your site load much faster than it does now. The concept itself is a bit complicated, but thankfully we’ve got a plugin like W3 Total Cache that makes the whole thing as easy to use as it can be. Basically, you only have to activate the plugin to enable caching on your site.
4. Adjust Permalinks
Your permalink structure can be an important SEO factor. However, by default, WordPress doesn’t use the most optimized structure available. If you go to the WP Admin section of your site and then to Settings > Permalinks you can pick a more optimized one. We recommend you to go with “Post name.”
5. Don’t Use Hundreds Of Tags
Some time ago the internet was crazy about tags and tagging each post with tens of different tags. Nowadays, it’s no longer considered a good idea. If you want to use tags then tag each of your posts with 3-5 tags at most.
6. Use Alt Tags With Images
The alt tag is one of the old parameters in HTML. Basically, it contains a text that’s going to be displayed in case the image is not available. For some reason, Google pays attention to the contents of the alt tags. Therefore, the best practice is to use your side keywords (if they’re relevant to the image) as the alt tags.
7. Good SEO Plugin
Last but certainly not least. An SEO plugin can make or break your search engine presence. The one we recommend – WordPress SEO – allows you to set tens of different parameters designed especially to improve your SEO.
It supports things like: titles and meta settings, social media settings, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, RSS footer messages, and many more.
Finally, don’t forget to put some work into structuring your content in a clear and readable way. These days, Google pays close attention to the way content is presented and how easy it is to digest.