In this blog, we are going to explore WordPress SEO tips for beginners to make sure that you know the basic principles as a starter. The word SEO consists of the initials of the phrase “Search Engine Optimization.” Its equivalent is expressed as search engine optimization. If we examine how SEO works, it is a study that makes internet projects suitable for search engines with certain rules and thus ensures that sites rise to the top in search engines. With SEO, websites become more visible in all search engines, especially Google, and increase their traffic.
Why Do Businesses Need It?
With an optimized website, you increase your chances of reaching your target audience. When potential consumer uses a search engine and actively searches for products and services related to the products you offer, they are more likely to come across your website organically.
Organic traffic, unlike paid traffic, makes your brand appear more credible than your competitors and helps you attract potential consumers. Businesses that want to build a successful brand and reach more consumers need to improve their SEO to increase organic traffic.
WordPress SEO tips for beginners from A to Z.
Optimize your SEO title
Watch the length of your SEO title: The optimum length for SEO titles is usually considered to be less than 60 characters, but it's worth a little experimentation as search engines will sometimes give you more title fields. Anything over 60 characters is usually truncated, though. This is a very important WordPress SEO tip for beginners. However, don't worry, as Yoast SEO will help you to see when your title is too long.
Front-load your keyword: Placing your keyword phrase as close as possible to the beginning of your SEO title will show both search engines and readers the most important topic your article covers.
Avoid all caps: Besides shouting, basically in Internet language, all caps can confuse search engines and reduce the number of characters you can use.
Don't Use Too Many Keywords: Keywords that fill your SEO title; It can cause you to be penalized by search engines. (your rank will be lower). It also results in low click-through rates, leading to a poor user experience for searchers.
Write for your readers: Your SEO title should be meaningful to your readers first and foremost, not just for search engines.
An optimized SEO title goes a long way in boosting your on-page SEO game, as search engines will use it to determine if your blog post is relevant to a researcher's query.
A great SEO title will also help you get more clicks as it shows the true value of your post – so take some time!
Look for an SEO-Friendly Theme
With so many WordPress themes to choose from, it can be difficult to decide. When narrowing down a design, you should choose one with SEO-friendly features. A lightweight theme without heavy scripts and plugins will help your site stay at a fast pace.
You should also choose the one that is compatible with mobile phones. After all, over 84 percent of adults own a smartphone. To make sure the theme is SEO friendly, you can test it with Google's Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool.
​Choose a Readable Permalink​
SEO-friendly URLs contain words that clearly describe the content of the page and are easy to read by humans and search engines alike. An SEO-friendly URL structure should be as follows:
- With this URL structure, the user can easily predict which page he will go to and what he will encounter just by looking at the URL. A URL structure that is not SEO friendly looks like this;
https://www.example.com/data/1071
- With this URL structure, the user will not be able to guess the content of the link from the numbers that are not related to the content by looking at the link. Using SEO-friendly permalink structure increases your chances of getting better positions in search results.
Follow the steps below to set the permalink structure of your WordPress website SEO-friendly:
Go to the WordPress Admin Panel > Settings > Permalinks and select the article name section.
Note: We recommend that you set the permalink settings while setting up your site. You may encounter errors in your indexed content and social media shares when you make changes in this area.
Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider
This is a rarely mentioned WordPress SEO tip for beginners but is very crucial for the performance of your site. You should try to host your site with a reliable hosting service company. It is important to choose a hosting company that will not give you trouble in terms of site speed, uptime, and security.
Site speed has a direct impact on the SEO performance of your professional services WordPress site. In addition, both poor uptime and security vulnerabilities can cause site quality issues. If you don't want to deal with performance issues, you shouldn't think about going for the cheapest option.
WordPress itself recommends three different hosting providers. If you're not sure where to start, just consider the options WordPress offers.
Verify your site in Google Search Console
Integrating your WordPress site with Google Search Console is one of the actionable WordPress SEO tips for beginners. If you haven't done so before, you need to verify your site with Google Search Console. You may never have done this before. This is a pretty simple step. All you have to do is use one of the Google Search Console verification methods.
Follow the listed verification steps and choose the “HTML Tag” method. From there, follow the path All in One SEO Pack > General Settings > Webmaster Verification to enter the settings of the All in One SEO Pack plugin. Then enter the HTML tag in the “Google Search Console” box.
After verifying your site, you need to submit your sitemap. To do this, you must go to the sitemaps section in Google Search Console. Generates an XML sitemap by default with All in
One SEO Pack. You can find it in the relevant section of your site (such as https://www.booknetic.com/sitemap.xml).
You can submit your sitemap to the relevant section in Google Search Console.
The relevant part will appear in Google Search Console as follows:
Focus on Speed
Among WordPress SEO tips for beginners, speed optimization plays a hidden but also crucial role. If your site is not fast and doesn't operate in line with speed requirements, then following all the other SEO tips may become meaningless eventually. The number of articles that search engines index and highlight per day is related to how fast these pages are loaded. You can apply these 3 tricks to increase speed in WordPress:
Optimize your theme so that it does not overload the database. Install a cache plugin. If you have technical knowledge, you can use W3 Total Cache. Otherwise, you can use WP Fastest Cache or WP Super Cache. If your server uses Litespeed Web Server software, you should definitely take a look at the Litespeed Cache plugin.
Cache plugins also work much better when combined with a KeyCDN – MaxCDN style CDN.
Noindex and Archive Pages
By using Yoast SEO, you can ensure that the archive pages that you do not use on your site are not indexed by search engines. For this, follow the SEO > Titles and Metas > Archives menu from the admin panel.
Here, if you select the 'Disabled' button under the 'Date archives settings' tab, you can completely disable the archives that you do not use. With this setting, all date-based links will point directly to your homepage. You can leave the author archives untouched, but in this case, under the 'Other' tab, you must mark the 'Subpages of the archives' section as 'noindex'.
Linking to Related Articles
Internal linking is very important for Google to understand your site structure. Thus, you will not only show other relevant pages under the article but also set up a link structure for other articles. The more links there are on a post or page, the more attention the search engines will pay to it.
Just as we have made referrals to our other blogs in this article, you should set up an internal link network on your site. If you have the premium version of Yoast SEO, you can use the internal linking tool for this purpose.
Include External and Internal Links
Here are the three most important rules to follow when adding external links to your blog posts:
- If possible, avoid linking directly to a competing website (with a lot of crossovers on content topics)
- Never link to a competing blog post targeting the same keyword phrase you want your article to rank for
- Don't link externally (or internally) to anchor text that you don't want a competitor's blog post to rank for in organic search
And when you link to other websites, be sure to prioritize the following external links:
- Reputable websites. Linking to a reputable website is a great way to "touch" their authority. It indicates to search engines that the content on your page can also be trusted.
- Latest posts. As much as possible, try to link to a page that has a published (or updated) date in the last few years.
- original sources. When citing a statistic or fact, be sure to link to the original source whenever possible
Adding relevant, value-adding external links to your blog posts; helps build trust among both your readers and search engines; It's a great way to solidify your article's on-page SEO.
Use Headings to Your Advantage in On-Page SEO
Using heading in HTML tags is among the high-priority WordPress tips for beginners that can increase the ranking ability of blog posts. It is another on-page SEO factor. Two tips for optimizing your header usage throughout your blog layout:
Use HTML tags: HTML tags (H1, H2, H3, H4 or H5, etc.) help search engines more easily understand the structure and purpose of your blog post.
Include your keywords in titles: Whenever possible, include your target keyword phrase and its variations in a wide variety of title sizes throughout your blog post.
Don't treat your titles as an afterthought. Keep in mind that every aspect of your post can be optimized for on-page SEO friendliness, and titles play a vital role in boosting the overall on-page SEO of your articles. Use free SEO tools to improve your site rankings.
Use Yoast SEO
WordPress allows us to adjust SEO settings without coding with the Yoast SEO plugin. As one of the best SEO plugins, it also makes site-wide and specific redirects to your pages and posts.
To install Yoast SEO, After following the Plugins > Add New steps, type “Yoast SEO” in the search section. After selecting the “Install Now” option, you can activate it and complete the installation easily.
You can adjust site-wide SEO settings from the plugin settings. First, click on general settings and make sure all features are enabled. The fact that these are active means that features such as the XML sitemap you will use for your site, SEO analysis, and the word counter that you will use in pages and articles are turned on.
For SEO, it is very important to follow the webmaster accounts and the statistics that will come from there, analyze and interpret these analyzes correctly and make the necessary moves. Yoast SEO also has a section where you can integrate your webmaster tools. From here, you can connect your administrator accounts, such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to your site.
Keywords and metatags (tags) are the most important points that search engine bots pay attention to when visiting your site and collecting data. These are very important for adding your site to the right category and showing it to the right audience. With Yoast SEO, the "Search Appearance" section is where you will add them by default from across the site. From here, you can add a custom title and description to your pages, posts, or portfolios.
Another important point to consider for general SEO settings is the coordination of your site with social media accounts. Yoast SEO has created a section called social with this in mind. From here, you can link your social media accounts with your site by adding links to your social media accounts.
It is very important that you benefit from Yoast SEO while creating your pages and articles. It has a structure that analyzes the minimum number of words that should be on your page with its analysis tools, allows you to concentrate on the focus words, encourages you to use H1-H6 titles in terms of user experience, and provide links in your article. You can follow the problems on your page or article from the Yoast tool at the bottom.
Again, there is a section at the bottom of the page where you can add a title, description, and tag specific to your pages. Here you can adjust the settings related to how your page will appear in searches.
Conclusion
If you are brand-new to WordPress, then you should adapt to its SEO guidelines to rank your website higher on search results. For this purpose, we created an SEO checklist known as WordPress SEO tips for beginners to better assist you in bringing traffic to your website, product page, blog post, etc. Don't forget to integrate Google Search Console to see your site problems with SEO, errors, and ways to solve them. Install the Yoast SEO plugin that will guide you in obeying the SEO rules for content optimization. As a bonus tip by our side: Prepare your content for your audience and potential prospects based on their needs and wants, don't optimize your pages only for SEO as it may lead to unnatural web pages. Keep both of them in the balance! Good Luck!