How To Set Up SEO On WordPress – 7 Points to Consider while Setup

WordPress is one of the most popular & highly used CMS for websites all over the world. According to a report, there are more than 35% of the website on the web which is running in WordPress.

With WordPress, you can easily create the websites & optimize them with their rich content editor feature & page builder.

There are plenty of plugins are available for WordPress which not only helps you set up the website, but you can easily use them to improve your SEO, tracking, collecting leads etc.

Setting up SEO in WordPress is one of the main practice to achieve your long term SEO goals.

Whether you are into a local business or approaching the international market, the basic SEO setup is very important to get rankings & organic traffic from your targeted audience.

In this blog, we will discuss how to set up basic SEO in a WordPress website & what are the points we should consider to do it.

What is WordPress SEO?

Well, WordPress SEO is not different from regular SEO. But setting up SEO in WordPress CMS is one of the easy tasks, compared to the other CMS like Magento, Drupal etc. Thanks to its verity of plugins & customization options, it makes WordPress easy to set up all the SEO stuff.

The best part for WordPress is you don’t need any developer & SEO expert to setup SEO for WordPress as this can be done with little knowledge.

Why SEO is Important?

Setting up SEO is very important if you want to rank higher & looking for online leads & sales.  It helps your website build authority & search visibility if you do SEO activities for your website regularly.

Here are some key settings to look when setting up the SEO for WordPress.

1. Make Your Website Visible to Search Engines

Before you start optimizing your website, you should look if your website is allowed for search engines to crawl & index it.

To do this, follow the below steps:

• Login to your WordPress
• Go to Settings > Reading
• In the bottom screen, uncheck “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” under Search Engine Visibility section

2. Setup SEO Friendly URLs

URLs play a very important role in SEO. If your page URL optimized according to your page/blog post with the keyword to it, then there are high chances to positive get ranking.

Setting up the URL or permalink is done in the Permalink Settings option by following steps:

1.  Go to Settings > Permalink
2. Select the Post name as your default URL structure.

That means whenever you create a new post or a page, the page URLs will automatically be created by the page/post name.

3. Optimize Website Speed

Website speed is one of the key factors for SEO rankings. If your page is optimized then Google will consider your website for rankings.

Apart from the rankings, page speed plays a very important role in bounce rate, page views, & conversions.

In simple words, if your page is not optimized for speed, it will hard to get rankings & win over SEO strategy as it represents a bad user experience.

To find out about the page speed, you can simply use Google’s page speed insights by simply putting the website there & see the score & scope of improvement in both desktop & Mobile Devices.

Once you get the report, you can simply look for the issues provided by page speed checker & fix them.

You can also do this by some plugins which optimize the website speed automatically. These can be a helpful approach if you do not have the technical knowledge or don’t want any help of a developer.

There are a lot of page speed optimization plugins available but Some of the leading plugins are:

1. WP Rocket – Plan starts with $49.
2. WP Fastest Cache – One of the most used plugins, with both free & premium features.
3. WP Super Cache – Another most popular plugin with free & paid subscriptions.

4. Setup The Preferred Domain (www Or non-www)

You should always use only one version for your domain whether it is www or without www. If you do not set up this, search engines will often get confused about your website’s default domains & can outrank you from search engine.

This get is done in General Settings, follow the below steps to set up the preferred domain for your WordPress website:

1. Go to Settings > General
2. In the WordPress Address (URL), enter the URL you wish to use.
3. Also, add the same URL to the Site Address (URL) section.

5. Use Accelerated Mobile Pages

In modern times, there are more users from mobile devices compared to desktop devices. This the percentage of mobile device users are increasing day by day. People use to browse/ search for the websites while they travel, work or away using their mobile devices.

To get these users, your website should be able to load on mobile devices easily.

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages helps the website to load fast in mobile devices.  Glue for Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins for AMP & it makes sure that the metadata for each page implemented correctly.

6. Get SSL Certificate To Your Website

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the advanced encryption technology which helps the website to establish a secure connection with users. It has been noticed that more than 90% results which appear on the first page of search engines are using SSL.

Google considers those websites which use SSL as it builds trust among users & search engines.

You can simply approach your hosting provider to get them installed on your website. This can have some additional fees which change as per the hosting providers.

7. Use SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO

To set up the page titles, descriptions etc. you should use Yoast SEO. There are some more cool SEO plugins are available out there but this one is the best.

You can use this for some important setup like:

1. Setting up Google Search Console, Bing webmaster tools, Yandex webmaster tools, Baidu webmaster tools etc.
2. Setup the page URLs
3. Add standard page title format
4.  Optimize robots.txt
5. Add & optimize XML sitemap

This plugin comes with both free & paid options with basic setup included in free subscriptions.

Conclusion

This is very important to set up the basic SEO for the website before you move forward. Once you have done this, you will see the improvement in your search visibility for your website.

Always remember that you should optimize your website for users. Once you do this Google will automatically start giving traction to your website. Google is very keen to get the right results for users.

If you think there are more points which we can consider in basic SEO setup in WordPress.

If you need any help to set this up, let us know here, we will love to help you.

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