WordPress SEO Tips for Beginners – Getting Started!
Improving your WordPress SEO can seem like a daunting and time consuming endeavour but in reality, getting started is a lot easier than it looks! WordPress is the worlds most popular CMS so understanding how SEO works on the platform is vital. Below are three ‘getting started’ SEO Tips for WordPress to get you going in the right direction.
Whichever plugin you choose (Yoast, Rank Math, All In One) the fundementals remain the same. Here are some WordPress SEO Tips to get you started on your SEO journey, hopefully these nuggets will help you create and deploy more valuable content for your audience. To keep things relevant this topic will cover WordPress specific tips – I’ll cover external apps and tips in a subsequent post.
Right, lets get started!
According to data from W3Techs, WordPress is used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet in 2022. This is an increase from 39.5% in 2021
Hubspot
1 – Install an SEO plugin
Do some research if you like as there are many capable and well supported SEO Plugins available for WordPress – however, over the years I have used Yoast as my primary go-to. In my recent years I have been leveraging WPMUDEV’s own Smartcrawl SEO plugin but for the purposes of this article I would recommened either Yoast or Rank Math to begin.
All of these plugins have a very intuitive and robust setup guide that will get you on the right track for a well optimised SEO website. Setting up is only the beginning though and while the basics can get you on the right track, to fully take advantage of these great plugins you need to have done your Keyword Research – a topic I will be covering shortly in another article so stay tuned.
2 – Optimise Images
Optimise your on-site images for best practise in SEO by adding relevant keyword data to your image ALT Tags. Use compression tools such as Smush to compress your images, serve them over CDN’s and enable lazy loading speading up your website load times.
3 – Boost your WordPress SEO with Speed
Speed is one of the most valuable assets you can have whe it comes to your site performing well from an SEO persective. Granted, good content and a solid understanding of your core keywords is just as important but Google is putting more and more stock in speed and using it as one of it’s major metrics for ranking your content above someone elses in a search result.
Make sure you invest in good hosting and install a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket or Hummingbird from WPMUDEV to best optimise your websites file delivery and caching systems.
That’s it for getting started. In a follow up post I’ll dicuss how to do your keyword research and leverage that data to further optimise your website content.
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