The Best WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners

Are you building a new WordPress website for the first time, or are you a seasoned veteran? WordPress has, by far, proven to be an effective tool for leading the pack in the highly competitive digital market environment. Not only does WordPress power over 43 percent of the internet and published content, but it also has the potential to outrank even the most authoritative pages due to its overwhelming popularity. The availability of over 55,000 innovative and radical plugins in its official directory allows the marketer to cover all the SEO and content bases without a hassle.

But sometimes, it can be quite difficult to know what step to take next. Not to mention, the internet is jam-packed with millions of websites, with each of them trying to get their set in front of potential customers and gain their vote of trust. 

Is SEO Really Important for WordPress?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is extremely important in the world of website design and development, and not just for WordPress. In fact, SEO can be a huge driver of new customers and sales for your business if done correctly. Without the proper SEO, your website won’t do well in search engine results pages (SERPs). And without being in those SERPs, you won’t be able to get new visitors who are actually interested in what you have to offer. Either way, when it comes to SEO — and WordPress in general — there’s always room for improvement. If you have ever used Google or Bing to search for something like “best restaurants in San Francisco,” you might have noticed that some websites show up at the top with their name followed by a list of keywords related to their business. This means that they have done some work behind the scenes to make sure their website is compatible with search engines and displays properly when people look up certain terms online.

WordPress SEO for beginners can be a little tricky because there are so many different factors that go into getting ranked at the top of Google. However, if you follow these steps, you’ll be able to optimize your WordPress site or blog and get it to rank well in no time! By the end of this WordPress guide for beginners, you will feel like a professional marketer with a wealth of new knowledge in your toolkit.

1.Choose the Right Permalink Structure

In this WordPress SEO guide for beginners, the first tip is to select and set up the correct permalink structure, which is the URL of the page. Your site or blog’s URL should be not only short and easy to type as well as remember but also SEO-friendly. If you’re not using a custom permalink structure, WordPress will automatically create a URL for you by combining your post title and the post slug. This is great for your WordPress SEO and internal linking. It’s also easy to remember, but it’s not ideal if you want to use your blog as part of a domain name. The best practice is to choose a name that reflects the content on that particular page and use it as a permanent link in your content management system (CMS). 

 2. Set up a Blog Page

A blog home page is the landing page that readers see when they arrive at your site, and it should contain several elements to help convince readers to stick around. This is where you can add new content and make sure that it gets found by search engines. You need to create a separate post for each new article you publish so they are easily discoverable by other people who are interested in learning more about your topic. Below given are some key points in this WordPress SEO guide a beginner must consider:

• A clear call to action that encourages people to subscribe or follow your blog
• An introduction to your brand and what you write about
• A description of your content that shows readers why they should care about it (also known as a “tagline”)

3. Install an SEO Plugin 

The best way to get started with WordPress SEO is by installing an SEO plugin. An SEO plugin helps you optimize your site by automatically generating meta tags, keywords, and descriptions for each post on your website. There are many free SEO plugins available, but we recommend Yoast SEO. This is because it’s easy to use and provides all the features you need for on-page optimization. The plugin comes with a ton of options for optimizing your content for search engines and improving user experience on your website. However, it can be overwhelming if you’re a beginner in the WordPress SEO turf or if you’ve never used a plugin before.

4. Install Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service that tracks your website’s traffic, helping you understand how users interact with your site. This information can be used to optimize your pages for better user experience and higher conversion rates. Google Analytics also allows you to create goals, which can be used in Google Adwords campaigns. The Analytics dashboard will show you how many people clicked on ads and where they came from. In addition, this platform will enable you to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts by tracking your keyword rankings over time. 

5. Enable XML Sitemaps in WordPress

XML sitemaps are a great way to help Google and other search engine bots understand your website more easily. They let you tell Google which pages exist on your site and where they are located. The more complete the sitemap, the more likely it is that Google will discover new content on your site. To enable XML sitemaps in WordPress, navigate to Settings > Writing in the dashboard and then click “XML Sitemaps” under the heading “SEO.” Enter a title for your XML sitemap (it should match up with your other titles), paste it into the URL of your sitemap file (which we’ll create next), and then click Save Changes.

6. Enable Robots.txt

The Robots Exclusion Protocol (Robots Exclusion Standard) is a file that lets search engines know what parts of your site they should or shouldn’t index in their search results pages. A robots.txt file tells search engine spiders what they can and cannot crawl on your site. By default, WordPress doesn’t have this file enabled, but it should be added for optimal SEO results. 

7. Use Heading Tags in Your Content

Heading tags are important for WordPress SEO, but they’re also important for people. Google wants to deliver the best results to its users, so they have made many changes over time that have affected search engine rankings and how people discover websites online. As such, Google and other search engines use headings to figure out what your page is about. This helps them to give you relevant results when someone searches for something like “best food apps for android.” The heading tag tells Google that this section of text is about the best food apps for android. If you’re writing an article about the best food apps for android, then it’s important that you use headings at the start of each section. This will make sure that your content is easily readable by humans and machines alike.

8. Use Internal Linking to Boost Rankings​

Internal linking is another great way to improve your WordPress site’s SEO. When you link one page on your site to another page on your site, this tells search engines that these pages are related and should be ranked higher together than if they were separate pages. This can also help increase rankings if you have multiple pages with similar keywords in their titles, as well as if the two pages have similar content but slightly different keyword terms (i.e., if they’re both about “dogs,” but one page is titled “dog toys” while another is titled “dog beds”).

9. Maximize website speed/Load Time to increase search engine rankings

The factor “load time/speed” has made it to our WordPress SEO guide for beginners. Reason?

Well, speed matters a lot when it comes to WordPress SEO and ensures higher rankings as well as traffic on search engines! Google has made it clear that it prefers websites that load fast over those that don’t. If your website takes more than three seconds to load, Google will rank it lower in search results than those with lightning-fast load times. Not to mention, a site or page that takes up 5-7 second to load often end up losing potential customers and a higher bounce rate. There are many ways to speed up your website without compromising its quality. You can make use of caching plugins and browser caching tools to reduce bandwidth usage and boost page speed. You can also choose a host that offers managed WordPress hosting services, so they handle maintenance tasks like updating software and security patches for you automatically. In addition, you will need to make sure that your site loads fast, preferably within 2-3 seconds, and doesn’t bog down on mobile devices. 

10. Make It Mobile-friendly

Mobile devices are more popular than ever before, with over 1 billion people using them on a daily basis. That number is expected to rise even more in upcoming years, so it’s important that your site can be viewed on a plethora of mobile devices, tablets, as well as computers. Apart from this, it’s not enough that you have a responsive-friendly website; Google penalizes websites that are not mobile-friendly. So, you need to make sure your WordPress theme is optimized for mobile devices and THAT your website looks good on all types of devices, including smartphones, iPhones, and other handheld devices. Doing so will impact your WordPress SEO efforts positively and allow your users to enjoy an enhanced experience when visiting your site from their mobile devices.

11. Add your Website to Google Search Console

This is an absolutely essential step in the process. If you want to take advantage of Google’s free website analytics tool, you need to submit your site to Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). This is a simple process that enables you to see how many people are visiting your site and what they’re doing while they’re there. Most importantly, it allows you to monitor search engine traffic and ensure that your pages are returning in search results.

The first step is to create an account with Google Search Console by following this link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/signup/. Once you’ve created an account and verified that your site isn’t already registered, click on the “add a property” button at the top right of the page and enter your website’s URL in the form provided. You will then be asked to verify ownership of the site by clicking on a link in an email sent by Google. Once that is done, click on “submit” at the bottom of the page, and you’re done!

Well, you’ve made it to the end of this ultimate WordPress SEO guide for beginners. It’s evident that SEO permeates nearly every facet of every website. The good news is that it’s quite easy to learn, as long as you’re willing to put in a bit of work and keep up with trends and changes. On-page optimization, content creation, mobile usability, and analytic tools—each one of these will help you get a leg up on larger competitors who are less inclined to invest time and effort into search engine optimization.

Do you have any questions related to SEO or want to know how to take your WordPress SEO skills to the next level? If so, feel free to drop us a line, and we would be happy to help you.