WordPress is clearly the most popular way to manage content in the world.
It’s free of charge. Use of it is free. Most importantly, it is good for SEO.
But using WordPress alone won’t get your website to the top of Google’s search results. You still have to follow SEO best practices and give your visitors something of real value.
This article explains how to improve your WordPress Site Ranking. The WordPress SEO guide will talk about the best ways to do things and give you tips on how to do them.
How to make your WordPress site friendly for search engines
The first step is to set up the settings for the WordPress website. It’s important to set up the WordPress site correctly so that search engines can find it.
Pay attention to the following settings for WordPress and other parts of your website:
1. Check the settings for your WordPress site’s visibility
The first step is to check the settings for how people can see the WordPress site.
There is a feature in WordPress that stops search engines from indexing the site. By default, this setting should be turned off, but you should check to make sure.
2. Give search engines a sitemap of your website
Even though search engines automatically index websites, sending them a sitemap will help them include correct and up-to-date information on SERPs.
A WordPress sitemap is a list of all of a website’s public URLs. There are two kinds of sitemaps for WordPress: XML and HTML.
You should tell the search engines about the XML sitemap. It shows how important the pages are and how they connect to each other. This information about the site’s structure makes it easier for crawlers to find specific content.
First, you need to use a WordPress SEO plugin to make the XML sitemap.
3. Put an SSL Certificate in place
SSL is a security technology that makes sure the connection between a website and a browser is encrypted. SSL encryption keeps sensitive information on a website from being seen by people who shouldn’t be able to see it.
With an SSL-certified domain, your WordPress site will be safer and rank higher on search engines.
4. Decide Between www and non-www
The next step in making your WordPress site SEO-friendly is to decide if you’ll use the www site URL. Google thinks of www and non-www as two different URLs, so choosing one format for your domain can help you move up in the rankings.
5. Setup a Permalink Structure
A permalink is a permanent URL structure for a web page. A clean permalink structure makes it easier for users and search engines to find their way around your WordPress site, which is good for its SEO.
Also, URLs are often shown on search engine results pages. Visitors are more likely to trust permalinks that are clean and easy to read than ones with random letters and numbers.
6. Utilize Structured Data
Structured data is a standard way to give information and organize the content of a page. It describes the content using schema markups, which turn your content into code.
Structured data helps search engines like Google figure out what a page or post is about. It can also change how a snippet of content looks on SERPs.
When search engines read this code, they show rich results above the normal results. By showing up in rich results, you can get more clicks and more attention.
The Recipes snippets are a good example of a rich set of results. If a recipe page has valid structured data, it can show up as an interesting search result with more information, like the rating, time needed, and ingredients.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization helps your website show up higher on SERPs. It includes a number of tasks, from on-page optimization, like improving the user experience and making good content, to off-page optimization, like building links and guest posting.