When you are building a website online, SEO is a topic that is going to come up. Whether you are a web developer, web designer or you are simply trying to make your first website, you are going to hear this term.
SEO stands for search engine optimization and means exactly what it says. It is the act of optimizing your website for the search engines. If you are learning how to optimize WordPress for SEO, you are going to have an easier time than if you were having to code and work with other more complicated sites. WordPress has been one of the most popular CMS options since it came out.
We are referring to the WordPress.org self-hosted CMS throughout this article and not the hosted WordPress.com version. The two platforms are very different and the main differences being the .org version allows for total control over your website and content while the .com version does not.
Why Is SEO Important for WordPress?
When you want to rank in the search engines, SEO is important for any website whether you are on the WordPress platform or not. When you are using WordPress, you simply have more options that make it easier for you to optimize your site than if you were on other platforms.
SEO allows you to show up higher in the search results of Google and that means that you could get more traffic from people that are searching for what you have to offer. If you learn how to do SEO on your site and get great results that could mean that you have an increase in the amount of opt-ins you get for your email list, increase in your leads and an increase in sales.
When you are working on your SEO, it is important to learn the best practices and “white hat” tactics and never engage in “black hat” tactics that could harm your site and even get it banned from the search engines. Instead of engaging in questionable techniques it is better to work with reputable companies and plugins like the ones below.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO has fast become one of the most popular plugins for SEO. There is a free version that you can use or you can upgrade to the pro version for extra features. Essentially what Yoast does is helps guide you through the SEO process.
Whether you are a SEO newbie or you are a seasoned veteran of SEO, it is helpful to have this guide post that will keep you on track with checklists and recommendations. You even get a grade for how readable your content is and how well your content is optimized so you can understand how well your content is optimized.
2. SEMRush
SEMRush is a powerful SEO research tool that will allow you to do things like research your competitors backlinks, see what keywords they are ranking for and basically pick through their entire site. You can do the same thing for your site as well so you can learn more about things that you can optimize on your site for better performance.
If you want to learn what keywords you should target or what sites are good for hosting backlinks. this is a great resource to have. The user interface is easy to understand and you can export reports from your dashboard into excel so you can view them later.
3. Broken Link Checker
If you have broken links on your site, this will give your users a bad experience and could cause problems for your site. Broken links can hurt your SEO and since it is such a simple fix, there is no reason to deal with broken links.
Since the Broken Link Checker plugin is totally free, the only reason you might not want to keep it running is that it is resource intensive so that could cause problems with the server. Make sure that you aren’t checking for broken links too often. The default setting is 72 hours so you probably want to increase that to a longer time period.
4. Rel NoFollow Checkbox
If you are going to be linking out to affiliate links or if you are will be writing about sites that you don’t want to endorse, you want to use nofollow links. Having a no follow link basically means that you aren’t “voting” for that site through SEO.
If you need to create nofollow links, it is much easier to do it when you check the Rel NoFollow Checkbox since you can check the box when you are inserting the link and it will make it a no follow link for you instead of having to write out the code. This is important to do because you can hurt your SEO if you are follow linking out to affiliate offers or ads.
Conclusion
Learning how optimize your site for SEO is a worthwhile task since it can provide so many benefits in terms of traffic. It makes your site easy to find for the people that are looking for it which makes it a win for you and a win for your guests.
When you use the plugins above, it will make things much easier for you and you will be able to perform your SEO tasks quickly and without frustration instead of taking hours on one SEO task.
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