Is WordPress Good for SEO?

WordPress is a trusted, SEO-friendly content management system (CMS) and website developer that allows businesses to create unique websites beyond the limited scope of drag-and-drop website builders. As open-source software, it doesn't have any platform-specific limitations, and with thousands of themes and plugins, you can create any type of website, even a massive eCommerce store!

WordPress’ primary mandate is to make website building easy without coding knowledge, while its major pull factor is how well its websites rank on Google. This is largely due to its plug-ins which automate many optimization processes.

Additionally, the platform automatically alerts Google each time a website is updated, so the search engine can crawl and index fresh pages and move them up SERPs.

In this SEO optimization guide, we’ll explain exactly how the platform works and provide top WordPress tips to ensure your SEO attracts organic traffic and drives sales.

What Is WordPress?

What is WordPress image

WordPress is the simplest and most popular way to create your own website or blog. Over 43.1% of all websites on the Internet are powered by WordPress. That means more than one in four websites you visit are likely created in WordPress.

WordPress is an open-source content management system that anyone can use or modify for free. A content management system makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website without needing to know anything about programming. This makes WordPress accessible to anyone, even people who aren’t developers.

What Is a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress theme is a group of files (graphics, style sheets, and code) that dictates the overall appearance of your website. It’s not the same as a template that only affects the layout of single pages.

A theme provides the design framework of your website and includes a color scheme, page layouts (templates), widget locations, font styles, and additional aesthetic details. There are currently over 31,000 WordPress themes to choose from, including premium options.

What Is a WordPress Plugin?

A WordPress plugin is a piece of software that “plugs into” your WordPress site and adds new functionality, features, or integrations. Plugins play a major role in building search-engine-friendly websites because they make it easy to add features without having any coding knowledge.

Currently, there are over 55,000 plugins written by third-party developers. Most eCommerce websites use plugins to optimize SEO, improve security and enhance user experience. Popular plugins include Yoast SEO, Jetpack, Akismet, WooCommerce, and All in One SEO, which we’ll get into soon.

What Is the Difference Between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?

WordPress actually refers to two different things: a content management system (CMS) and a web hosting service, respectively known as WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

  • WordPress.org is a self-hosted platform, which means you must purchase a web hosting plan and install WordPress on your own web server. It’s not as easy as WordPress.com, but it will give you a site that is 100% yours.
  • WordPress.com is a web hosting service for WordPress sites. Without having to install and set up the WordPress software yourself, WordPress.com offers a simple method to create and manage a website.

Typically, when someone refers to “WordPress,” they mean the self-hosted version that may be found at WordPress.org. If you want to have complete control over your website, self-hosted WordPress.org is the best option. You can get started with self-hosted WordPress by purchasing web hosting and a domain name.

WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com: Which Is Better for My Website?

WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com: which is better

Broadly speaking, you should use WordPress.com if you want to set up a website quickly, are fine with less flexibility, and are willing to pay for additional support. However, if you aim to build a highly customized website and don’t mind shopping around for the best hosting then WordPress.org is the way to go.

WordPress.com prices range from $4—$45 per month and are billed annually, whereas WordPress.org is free. However, you can’t really build a WordPress.org website without paying for hosting, and other software integrations that make a website fully functional. This can add up to anything from $200 to $800, and more.

WordPress Hosting Options

Because WordPress is a self-hosted website builder, you will need to find the right hosting for your business needs. The platform recommends using Bluehost because it’s an official WordPress partner; however, you’re not obligated to.

Plenty of business owners don’t know that hosting affects WordPress SEO. Generally, there are two types: self-managed hosting and fully managed hosting.

Self-Hosting

As the name suggests, self-managed hosting means you have to handle the ongoing maintenance of your website. Proficiency in web hosting administration tasks like installing and troubleshooting software and configuring server security falls under your purview. Website owners generally choose this option because it’s the cheapest, but it only really works if you have the time and knowledge to deal with the admin.

Fully Managed Hosting

With fully managed hosting, the web-hosting provider is responsible for maintaining the physical server, network, infrastructure, and most of the software maintenance. The hosting provider also provides 24/7 support. Obviously, fully managed hosting comes with an expensive price tag, but it’s the most hands-off and perfect for site owners who don’t want to bother with server issues.

How Does WordPress Affect SEO?

When it comes to building a website, it’s not so much about how WordPress affects SEO, but rather how easy the platform makes it to structure, manage, and publish content in an SEO-friendly way. Hence, why it’s considered the best CMS for search engine optimization.

The wide variety of WordPress plugins makes it easy for website owners to create attractive permalinks, manage metadata, optimize media, and integrate other SEO software management tools. And it’s not just for standard business websites.

WordPress has an eCommerce plugin called WooCommerce for creating and managing an online store. It comes with several vital features like inventory and tax management, secure payments, and shipping integration.

The Benefits of a WordPress for SEO

WordPress advantages

WordPress is one of the most popular CMSs in the world, and it powers millions of websites and blogs. One of the most significant SEO benefits of using WordPress is that there are a lot of plugins and themes available. These plugins and themes can help you to optimize your website for search engines. There are also a lot of tutorials and articles available online that can help you to learn how to optimize your website for search engines.

Over the years, it’s developed advanced SEO optimizations making it fast, mobile-friendly, secure, and easy to use. WordPress is a top-ranking CMS that dominates Google’s SERPs with 2.28 billion results for the following reasons:

Increased Affordability

One of the main benefits of WordPress is that it is much more affordable than traditional website design and development services. With WordPress, you can easily create a professional-looking website without having to spend a lot of money.

For example, custom websites built by agencies or freelancers cost between $12,000 to $150,000, whereas a WordPress website ranges from $500 to $3,000 to as high as $30,000, or more, which is still considerably cheaper.

Additionally, WordPress is very easy to use and you can easily add new features to your website without having to hire a web developer.

A Better User Experience

UX design, front-end, and back-end development; these terms can befuddle those unfamiliar with website development. Yet, a WordPress site can be installed and up and running in a matter of minutes. All you need is a domain name and a web hosting account.

The intuitive WordPress dashboard has all the features required to create and publish web pages right away. Because of its plug-and-play process, if there is a functionality you require for your site, chances are a WordPress plugin already exists that can do it.

Limitless Scalability

Choosing a scalable platform gives website owners the flexibility to adapt, both in terms of website architecture and coping with increased traffic. Right out the box, WordPress sites are capable of handling unexpected and sustained traffic spikes.

With plugins and custom coding, WordPress provides a simultaneously flexible and robust framework for enterprises to build a solid website architecture. It’s also beneficial for administrators because they have complete control over what gets added to the platform.

Easy Meta Tag Management

All search engines, including Google, can’t technically see website images. Instead, they rely on alt text to provide an accurate description. Alt text provides a semantic meaning and is an SEO best practice because it gives search engines detailed information to accurately rank websites.

WordPress’s media library interface allows website administrators to add alt text to all images at once or those on a particular page. Similarly, best SEO plugins, like Meta Tags Manager offer a simple, lightweight plugin that lets you effortlessly manage meta tags (the title tag and meta description) so your website stands out in search engine results pages.

Optimized for Mobile

According to Search Engine Land, more than 60% of global search engine queries occur on mobile. The ubiquitousness of smartphones requires your website to be mobile-friendly. This ensures a positive user experience on all mobile devices.

For example, a pop-up that works on a desktop may become annoying screen clutter on a mobile screen. Thankfully, all themes in WordPress’s Theme Directory are mobile responsive. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about optimizing for mobile, so long as you leverage the platform’s SEO-friendly capabilities.

Customizable URLs

With WordPress, you can create clean URLs that perform better in search, appear more trustworthy to web crawlers, and are likelier to be shared by WordPress users. It’s commonly agreed the best permalink structures have the page title in the URL (with keywords when possible), which is easy to implement on WordPress.

Clean URLs are the building blocks of SEO, and, when optimized, can increase website traffic. To set up clean permalinks (URLs) on your WordPress site, simply go to Settings > Permalinks. There you will see numerous options to choose from, including your post’s name and custom optimization, which is handy for eCommerce stores with large inventories.

Added Functionality With Plugins

WordPress has many impressive plugins, including ones specifically designed to improve SEO. For example, MonsterInsights allows website owners to track analytics from their dashboard. Others like the Yoast SEO plugin enable the easy setup of meta description, plus checking keyword relevance, for instance.

To date, there are over 55,000 plugins ranging from analytics to contact forms, social media share buttons, and SEO tools. With WordPress, it’s possible to create an entire website without prior coding knowledge. The available plugins allow you to create virtually any kind of website, from portfolios to directories.

Compatibility With Other Search Engines

WordPress’s websites have inherently simple frameworks that allow web crawlers to easily index and rank pages. You can also use plugins to create structured schema markups, i.e., code utilized that helps search engines understand the context of your site’s content, so they can rank it accordingly.

Structured data can be automatically added to your site using a plugin like Yoast SEO. Plus, website owners can outperform their competitors in search engine result pages with additional plugins such as Schema Pro and All in One Schema Rich Snippets.

Ranking high in search engine results is important, but what makes people click through is the content provided by rich snippets. These enhanced search engine results produce more details than average links and include images, ratings, authors, dates, locations, reviews, and more.

Social Media Integration

Most websites for that matter, act as information hubs. Due to social media campaigns, users interact with brands on various platforms. When you add social media icons to your website, you make it part of a chain of shared connections and increase user engagement.

Not only does WordPress have customized on-site social media buttons that let readers share content, but WordPress plugins also leverage the power of social networks to drive traffic to your website.

Therefore, connecting your website to your social media accounts ensures new website content is automatically published on your socials. A strong content marketing strategy will always direct traffic to your website, especially if you create user-friendly marketing assets.

Strong Community Support

Since plenty of developers use WordPress, and because it’s open-source, the platform has excellent community support. Website builders often have powerful capabilities but lack strong support systems, so websites seldom reach their full potential. Not so with WordPress.

WordPress’s community is an invaluable resource for troubleshooting your site and learning how to navigate the platform. Even if you’re not a professional developer, you’ll find answers to your questions on its forums, blog posts, videos, and other media.

SEO-Friendly Themes

What makes WordPress great is that its SEO-friendly themes (over 31,000) come with search engine optimization foundations, like meta and header tags, Schema, and mobile optimizations already in place.

Themes let you control something as vast as your site’s layout, or as minute as your internal linking colors. They add beauty and style to your website, allowing you to design special navigational menus and headers, along with overall niche designs.

Fast-Loading Times

Since 2010, Google has used site speed as one of its signals to rank pages, so naturally, WordPress priorities technical SEO best practices. Optimized pages should take no longer than two seconds to load—webpages exceeding this timeframe are prioritized lower.

The plugin WP Fastest Cache generates HTML copies of your web pages that are faster than default WordPress PHP scripts. So, while you’re not automatically guaranteed fast-loading webpages with WordPress, there are solutions to ensure your website is technically optimized.

SEO-Optimized Images

Besides the ability to add alt-text to images, WordPress also automatically compresses images up to 90% of their original size to increase website performance and enhance your SEO efforts. Images consume more bytes than any other part of a website (as much as 40%). Therefore, their size and complexity heavily influence a site’s SEO performance.

When an image’s size is reduced without compromising quality, page load times improve as well as user experience. Luckily, WordPress takes care of this for you. Plugins like Imagify are also handy optimization tools should you require customization and want to stop WordPress from applying automatic image compression.

Overall SEO-Friendliness

The former head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has publicly said that websites built with WordPress can rank higher in SERPs because the platform takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues.

Aside from themes and basic WordPress features, there is a myriad of WordPress plugins available to enhance SEO performance. They enhance key features of the SEO algorithm, can help manage robots.txt files, generate sitemaps, and much more.

How to Set Up a WordPress Website

How to set up a WordPress website

Every day, thousands of eCommerce businesses choose WordPress to power their eCommerce websites. While WordPress is free, we’d recommend opting for the eCommerce plan, billed at $45 per month, as it has the functionality to fully support eCommerce stores.

You can set up a website by following these eight steps:

  1. Get a domain name
  2. Sign up for a hosting provider
  3. Install WordPress
  4. Choose a theme
  5. Add content
  6. Customize your website
  7. Install plugins
  8. Monitor and update

Obviously, each step is more detailed, but there’s no need to panic. WordPress’s Official Support offers concise and detailed resources to walk you through the entire process.

A plug-in pro-tip: Not all plug-ins are created equally. Having too many can lead to security breaches, site crashes, and dismal loading speeds. There’s no hard-and-fast rule capping the number of plug-ins you should have; however, as a guide, we recommend your selection is based on SEO best practices.

WordPress SEO Tips

If you want to improve your website’s search appearance, you have to invest in search engine optimization, namely on-page, off-page, technical, and local SEO. A targeted SEO strategy builds long-term equity for your brand and ensures a favorable placement in Google search results.

On-Page SEO: Optimizing Pages and Posts

On-page SEO refers to all the measures taken directly within your website to improve its search engine rank. Examples of this include optimizing helpful content and improving meta description and title tag.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the starting point for any internet marketing campaign. It entails discovering popular words and phrases (target keywords) your audience types into search engines when searching online.

These keywords heavily impact how your WordPress site’s pages are organized and shaped (information architecture) and how you talk about your business online. Conducting keyword research helps you develop a detailed understanding of your potential customers, what they’re searching for, the problems they’re looking to solve, and how you—your products and services—can meet their needs.

You can’t write effective web copy or develop content marketing campaigns without doing keyword research as it informs your entire internet marketing strategy.

Add Alt Tags to Images

Alt tags are metadata that offer descriptions of web images for search engines and visually impaired screen readers. Whenever you upload an image to your WordPress site, it should always be accompanied by alt text.

You can add alt text to any image on WordPress under “Image settings” on “blocks.” A plugin like Alt Text Tool also makes it easy to find images that need to be optimized. The prescribed way to write alt text is to sufficiently describe what an image is about without keyword stuffing.

If you close your eyes and have someone read the text to you, you should be able to imagine a reasonably accurate version of the image. The idea is to be descriptive and precise. For example:

  • Poor alt text: dog bed
  • Improved alt text: green dog bed pillow

In the improved version, you can tell the dog bed is green and that it’s a pillow and not a bassinet-style bed.

Optimize Image File Names

You know when you upload an image taken on a camera, it usually has a file name like SCN00076.jpg? Well, a recent Backlinko study found these filenames have an effect on WordPress SEO.

To quote Google:

“The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is a lot more informative than IMG00023.JPG. Descriptive filenames can also be useful to users: If we’re unable to find suitable text in the page on which we found the image, we’ll use the filename as the image’s snippet in our search results.”

While this probably won’t happen if you follow SEO best practices and use alt tags, it’s smart to cover your bases and write detailed image descriptions. Like alt tags, keep file names descriptive and simple.

Optimize Page Headings

Headers are an essential part of your overall SEO strategy. Search engines use headers to quickly crawl through a page and determine how to rank your site’s content. They also help people read more efficiently by breaking up the content of your pages into subheadings.

  • H1 tags are used to indicate the main theme or title of a piece of content and provide context for users and search engines.
  • H2 and H3 tags are typically used as subheadings.
  • H4, H5, and H6 tags are used to further structure content within subheadings.

The main heading of a web page is always the H1 tag. It is the most important in terms of contextualizing the content. As such, H1 should always give users an idea of what the page is about, and there should only be one per page.

It was once believed that placing keywords in headings improved SEO, however, Google’s John Mueller has stated this SEO belief has been over-emphasized and that placing headings in keywords will not necessarily make your web page rank higher.

Instead, headings are useful for communicating what your content is about to search engines. That’s not to say you shouldn’t place keywords in headings; you still can, so long as they make contextual sense.

Use Internal Links to Connect Pages

4 types of internal links

An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Internal linking plays an important part in your site’s SEO because it lets Google find, index, and understand all the pages on your WordPress site.

Using links strategically sends page authority to important pages. In SEO, page authority is the value a search engine assigns a web page. The higher the value, the more likely the search engine will return a web page early in organic search results.

Adding internal links along with descriptive anchor text allows you to create a website hierarchy, drive organic traffic through your entire website, as well as encourage visitors to linger on your pages.

There are four different types of internal links you can use:

  • Navigation links: These are the most common types of internal links. They create a structure for your website and guide visitors through the content. Navigation links are usually on every page of your website.
  • Taxonomy and categorical links: Website taxonomy is related to how your website’s URLs are organized to reflect the content within specific site pages. These links join common topics like blog categories and parent services pages, for example.
  • Editorial links: These links are included within the body copy of your website and encourage visitors to explore your content. For instance, you might have a blog post about personal injury law that links to another blog post on your website specifically dealing with personal injury at the workplace, and so on.
  • Footer or site-wide links: Also called boilerplate links, footer links appear at the bottom of nearly every page of a website. They typically include contact information, social media information, and occasionally FAQs.

Craft Unique Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Title tags are the title of the pages users see in search engine results. They create first impressions and can encourage or deter people from clicking on your web page.

A good SEO title tag should include a primary keyword and compel search engine users to find out more. Yoast SEO, for example, sets the title tag for your page with your heading, but you can overwrite this to include keyword variations.

The title page and page title may be the same, but not always. Creating unique title pages is important because it prevents traffic cannibalization.

This is when two pages with the same domain rank for the same keyword and steal organic traffic from each other. The more unique your titles are the less likely this will happen.

Then, when it comes to writing meta descriptions, it’s best to keep them under 150 characters. Meta descriptions are short summaries explaining what a page is about—almost like a pitch to convince readers to click on your website.

Even though meta-descriptions do not factor in directly ranking in search engine results, they do impact click-through rates. Ultimately, the more clicks your webpage receives, the higher it ranks.

Craft Key Pages with WordPress SEO in Mind

According to Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guideline, the search engine’s E-A-T principle has become a focus for SEOs. The idea is that a page’s search engine rank is determined by expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Therefore, at the very least, your site should have the following pages:

  • An about page: This should provide basic information about your company and what you have to offer customers. Think about it as an explanation of how your company came to be and why it exists.
  • A contact page: Display your business contact details. Some websites include these in their website footers, so users can find them immediately if they have a need.
  • A disclosure page: If you provide any advice or incorporate affiliate links or collect data; you need a disclosure page. It’s common for websites to have a link in their footer that’s accessible from every website page, as this avoids duplicate content.

Besides these pages, you’ll also want to add social proof. Website visitors like knowing that others advocate for your product and services. You can either showcase review ratings or testimonial quotes, depending on your business.

For instance, fashion retailers will often have star reviews on product pages, whereas law firms prefer sharing client testimonials as they reveal more about the firm’s work ethic and services.

Optimize your website, boost your business. Simple as that
Optimize your website, boost your business. Simple as that

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Technical SEO: Optimizing Your Website for Indexing and Crawling

Technical SEO refers to the process of making your website easier for search engines to crawl and index. The goal is to make your website faster and easier to navigate and understand by humans and especially search engine bots.

Create a Logical Information Hierarchy

A well-built website structure saves visitors time and speeds up Google searches. While most WordPress themes take care of website structure relatively well, they still enable a fair amount of customization, which can affect information hierarchy.

Therefore, a clear and concise structure is not only vital for user experience but also SEO. It’s important to make your main navigation and subcategories clear and understandable. For instance, when a search spider lands on category pages, it should understand all the content on the page belongs to the same topic as well as what that topic is.

Your website’s URL structure should also be organized according to your site hierarchy. Use real words (not symbols) and appropriate keyword coverage.

Furthermore, make sure the most important pages aren’t buried too deep within the site, i.e., whichever page you want to reach is no more than three clicks away from the homepage.

Create an XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that features a text map of your website. It’s incredibly useful if your WordPress site is new because it probably won’t have any backlinks, which makes it harder for search engines to discover all its pages.

Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of free plugins available for this job. Just ensure they are set to update periodically, so your sitemap is always current as you add new posts and pages.

Even though WordPress generates a basic sitemap on its own, this includes everything you might have no-indexed, which can cause crawling errors on your site. There’s also no way to customize this default map unless you’re familiar with PHP code. For this reason, it’s best to use All in One SEO for this task.

Set Custom URLs for Pages and Posts

WordPress defaults to using the URL of your website, which can end up being too long or truncated on search engines. However, if you use pretty permalinks, you’ll improve WordPress SEO and user experience.

Search engines find out what your posts and pages are about by “reading” their URLs. If the content of the permalink relates to the content of your post, it helps search engines legitimately understand what your post is about and sort of acts like a double verification.

For example, a URL like www.cakes.com/?p93 is really vague, whereas if it’s www.cakes.com/about-us, you can immediately tell it’s the about us page. You can also use a focus keyword in a URL if applicable.

Manage Redirects

If you remove pages on your website or implement changes that make content temporarily unavailable you should set up redirects to forward them to the appropriate URL. Broken links and 404 errors create an unpleasant user experience and make your website appear unprofessional.

And the thing is, while customers rarely land on them, bots index every single page unless you’ve told them not to; thus, they’ll discover all your broken links, which does not bode well for the overall rating of your website.

The WordPress SEO plugin All in One SEO offers a powerful redirection add-on that makes it easy to find broken links on your website and set up 301 redirections to fix them.

Check Your Website Visibility Settings

WordPress provides developers with a search engine visibility option. You can discourage search engines from indexing your website, especially if your website is being built, and you don’t want Google to index incomplete pages.

It’s quite common to forget about this block once a website is launched. To check your site’s visibility settings, go to Settings > Reading. You’ll find a checkbox at the bottom of the page that you should deactivate.

Implement Structured Data

Structured data refers to the process of marking up the content on your pages to better explain it to search engine crawlers. Bots don’t see online information the same way humans do. Structured data adds context to your content and data.

It helps Google understand your data, making it more likely that you’ll not only rank higher in search engine results but also increase click-through rates. There are different types of Schema markup (ways to structure data) like star ratings, products, and local listings, etc., and you’ll have to decide what works best.

The main benefits of structured data are:

  1. SERPs accuracy: The better search engines understand your content, the greater the possibility your pages will show up in relevant search queries. When a search engine accurately matches your content to a user’s intent, that person will likely click on your website in search engine results. This increases the chances of conversion.
  2. Rich snippets: Search engines display structured data as rich snippets. These specialized SERPs results include more information about a page, such as an image, review scores, shopping results, and so on. Because these snippets are more compelling and informative, users are more likely to click on them.

Optimize Ad Density

Ad density optimization

Users and search engines don’t like too many ads, especially when they take up too much space and distract from the page at hand. According to the Coalition for Better ads:

“Ad density is determined by summing the heights of all ads within the main content portion of a mobile page, then dividing by the total height of the main content portion of the page. For mobile devices, ad density cannot be higher than 30%. Meaning, ads that take up more than 30% of the vertical height of a page are intrusive.”

Ads that are 30% dense (or higher) make it hard for users to focus on the text they want to read, which can be extremely frustrating, leading to increased bounce rates and negative user experiences. In most cases, WordPress themes are designed with ad density in mind, and common sense prevails, but if you’re unsure, get a professional opinion.

Ads are only measured against your content, not the viewpoint, headers, footers, and navigation. If Google crawls your site and finds you fail their ad standard, they will sanction your website and give you a 30-day grace period to bring your website up to standard.

Popular WordPress SEO Plugins

Part of what makes a WordPress website so appealing is its ease of use and the fact that plugins give you full control over how you want your website to run. While you don’t need plugins to create a WordPress site, you will require them for optimization purposes.

It’s impossible to run a successful WordPress website without them. Plugins automate what tasks that an SEO specialist or a website builder would traditionally undertake. They save time and make website optimization a tonne easier.

Free vs. Paid WordPress Plugins

You can typically find themes and plugins for free. However, the premium versions provide better features and guaranteed support. It’s a good idea to do a bit of research and decide which plugins will deliver the best ROI and boost your visibility in organic rankings.

Let’s look more closely at the plugins we recommend, so you can leverage their full potential to best optimize your WordPress site.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

Used by over 3 million website owners, All in one SEO is WordPress’s original SEO plugin used to improve SEO. Aside from onsite optimization options, AIOSEO offers advanced SEO suggestions to boost your rankings and traffic.

It takes everything you could possibly need for SEO and packs it into one application. AIOSEO’s Set-up Wizard automatically selects the best SEO settings for your WordPress site. In less than 10 minutes, you can have your website set up based on your business’s unique profile.

Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO plugin is specifically designed to improve your website’s on-page SEO, i.e., keywords, meta descriptions, links, and images. Among its many impressive features, what makes Yoast SEO stand out is its built-in readability score analysis, which shows how easy it is for your users and search engines to understand your web content.

With Yoast SEO premium, you can even optimize your detailed article with synonyms and related key phrases. It also comes with SEMRush integration that helps find related keywords with decent search volume and provides website owners with valuable search trend data.

ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel is a great WordPress SEO plugin used to resize and compress images of all file formats, including JPG/JPEG, PNG, GIF, and PDF. This plugin uses minimal resources and works well with any shared cloud, VPS, or dedicated web hosting.

With ShortPixel, you can choose between Lossy, Glossy, and Lossless compression modes. If you’re unsure, you can use its testing links to help you decide. Upon uploading your compressed images, the plugin also reveals how much space you’ve saved.

Hummingbird

Hummingbird is a WordPress caching plugin that deals specifically with speed optimization. It scans your website, identifies files that are slowing it down, and provides tips to ensure your WordPress site runs at top speed.

The biggest advantage of Hummingbird is that it’s easy to use and provides granular control of exactly which pages are cached. Although this comes with a longer setup process, it’s well worth the time, especially if you have a large eCommerce website.

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best Analytics plugin for WordPress because it allows you to connect to Google Analytics with the click of a button. With MonsterInsights, you can set up event tracking, outbound link tracking, form tracking, and more.

Essentially, it gives you access to the most significant metrics in your WordPress dashboard. Therefore, you monitor and optimize campaigns from within your dashboard without having to log into other accounts.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console helps website owners monitor and troubleshoot issues related to how search engines crawl and index their websites. It’s a free platform that lets you view referring domains, mobile site performance, rich search results, and highest-traffic queries and pages.

While Analytics monitors user behavior, Google Search Console focuses on how search engines view and rank your websites. You can resolve server errors, site load issues, and security issues to ensure your website is technically sound.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free plugin that takes all of WordPress’ strength and stability and puts it to work for small to large-sized online merchants. It’s a flexible and dependable eCommerce platform that allows store owners to create responsive and high-performing online shops within budget.

Just like WordPress, it’s easy for beginners to use because you don’t need any coding knowledge. Case in point: WooCommerce powers 30% of all online stores!

WooCommerce streamlines the website building process, enabling you to turn your existing WordPress site into an online store in minutes. Its integrations also make configuring and running your store much easier.

While its default settings are pretty decent, you can customize your store to match your precise needs.

Get in touch to see how our SEO solutions can take your business to the next level
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Partner With an Award-Winning Digital Agency

Intuitive, simple, and effective; there’s a lot to favor about WordPress, over and above its incredible eCommerce SEO abilities. If you’re a website owner interested in using this search engine-friendly CMS platform but have no idea how to optimize it, our experts can help.

Comrade is an eCommerce digital marketing agency offering effective WordPress SEO and WooCommerce development services. On average, our clients experience a 55% average increase in transactions when implementing our high-performance digital marketing and SEO strategies. Contact us to find out how can improve your site’s SEO.

About the Author
Stan co-founded Comrade Digital Marketing and serves as its marketing strategist and IT expert recruiter.
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Stan Bogdashin

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