How To Improve SEO: WordPress Edition

We all know that WordPress is the most often used CMS out there — and it’s not without a reason.

For one, it’s open-source, meaning that you don’t have to pay WordPress a subscription fee for using it. Instead, you simply take care of the hosting and things like an SSL certificate to launch your website.

For two, it offers wide customization options, proper mobile optimization, and a multitude of plugins, which help pave a smooth path for all your SEO efforts.

More than 40% of the web stands on WordPress, which means you also get a very big community and ultimately a solid support system for any potential issues with updates, your SEO questions, or anything WordPress-related really.

In this guide, we cover all the tips and tricks and best practices for optimizing a WordPress website for SEO, from pre-launching, to publishing content, all the way to post publishing.

And don’t worry, we won’t be explaining what Search Engine Optimization is or why it is important. 🙄 We believe that if you’re looking for ways to improve SEO on your website, you definitely grasp those basic concepts already.

Let’s get right to business.

Pre-Launch

Although the divine judgment of Google is unknown, you can still do your best and stick to the best practices to make sure you reach that sacred top 10. After all, whom of us goes to the second page of results to find what we need?

And we’ll start with the things you can do even before you officially launch your WordPress website.

The Right Name

The very first thing you can do is choose the right domain name.

And the best you can do is go for a short and sweet domain name, preferably under 12 characters.

The domain name is one of the first things Google robots and human users see in the search engine results — so make it meaningful.

It should capture the essence of your website’s content, preferably including a focus keyword in there as well.

Another tip is making the domain name as simple as they make them. This one’s not really for the sake of SEO optimization, but rather getting potential users to grasp what your website is all about from first glance. Especially since UX and SEO seem to be blending more and more with each Google update.

So try to avoid any unnecessary foreign or made up words in your domain name, but also stay away from the temptation to add numbers, hyphens, or special characters.

According to research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, simpler domain names, like the ones without hyphens, avoided traffic penalties, while each new character added to a domain name past the seventh one resulted in an additional 2% traffic reduction. 

The Right Place

The second crucial part to take care of is finding the right hosting provider.

Here, pay particular attention to other customers’ reviews on the hosting’s speed loading times, security matters, servers’ location, the level of support, and type of hosting you wish to go with.

All of the mentioned factors do affect your future SEO efforts, so pick wisely.

Logical Information Architecture

The very next thing you’d want to do is work on the Information Architecture of your website.

Information Architecture (IA) is exactly what you think it is — structuring the information on your website in a way that will be easily understandable to users, but also Google robots crawling your website.

But how can you do it?

The easiest way to start structuring your website is to take a good ol’ pen and paper and simply draw it up.

First, think of the content you want your website to have and then pair that with your website’s target audience and their needs.

Think of what they might be looking for on your website and try to make their journey through each page as seamless as possible. The best you can do is draw a map of your website’s content and decide how it can be interlinked before actually setting it up on WordPress.

Now, don’t focus on the ideal journey only.

Every page users visit on your website should have an easy exit plan and ways to reach other relevant content. So think of it as creating a layout of the museum or an emergency exit plan from a building. It has to be readable and easy to navigate no matter the starting point.

According to Interaction Design Foundation  “A methodical and comprehensive approach to structuring information is needed to make it findable and understandable irrespective of the context, channel, or medium employed by the user.”

After all, your users won’t be exploring your website from the home page, and going through each element of the menu, one by one. Prepare for chaos, rage clicking, and lack of time we all suffer from.

Having figured out your strategy for the content you want your website to have, you can now start implementing it.

Working with an installed WordPress, you can implement that content in a myriad of ways. Some prefer using Elementor thanks to its WYSIWYG live preview, others go for a ready-made theme that they can easily customize, while the rest create their website completely from scratch.

One way of making sure the Information Architecture is just as you planned is by customizing the menu settings of your website.

To do that, go to your website’s WordPress Dashboard and then choose “Appearance” from the left-side menu — then, select “Menus” from the drop-down options.

There, you can create new menu items, work on your menu’s structure, change the elements’ location, customize the displayed name, and so much more.

On-Launch

You’ve now successfully come up with a short and sweet domain name that captures the essence of your website’s content, chosen the best hosting server, thought of the website’s content and made sure the Information Architecture has been thought through.

Putting that into life, you can now actually make your website go live and start filling it out with content.

And to make sure that content ranks well, take a peek at the best practices you should follow here.

Visibility Settings

Our first tip covers an obvious, yet easy to miss important setting, which remains hidden within your WordPress account — namely, search engine visibility.

Going to your dashboard, and then selecting “Reading” on the Settings side menu, reveals the search engine visibility setting in the form of a single box to tick. The thing is, you want this box to remain unticked.

You may have ticked it when you were working on your website before officially launching it to the public or you may have clicked it accidentally when playing around with the settings in WordPress. Either way, peek in there and make sure that this setting is not ticked.

Ticking the search engine visibility option in your WordPress settings actually encourages search engines NOT to index your website. So make sure it’s disabled.

URL Structure

Similarly to logically displaying all the content on your website using Information Architecture, it’s equally important to set a logical and intuitive for the user (and robots) URL structure.

To do that, head to your WordPress dashboard, choose Settings from the left-hand side menu and go for the “Permalinks” option.

There, you’ll find the different options you can choose for your URL structure, from plain with letters and numbers after the slash, through displaying a date, to including the post’s name.

The best you can go for to improve your SEO efforts is to choose the “post name” option. Then, you’re able to easily incorporate your focus keywords into the URL structure with each new post.

Anyone should be able to quickly recognize what your website, each page and each post, is all about. Naming your posts https://mydomainname/%d389ppp.com won’t do much for easy recognition.

Sitemap For Indexing

Speaking of Google robots.

No SEO results will happen if Google doesn’t index your website. And a good way to make sure that does happen is by creating a sitemap of your website and uploading that to Google.

A sitemap is basically a file comprising your website’s content that you then share with Google so that their robots can properly crawl it. The file can come in multiple forms, but Google states that their search engine does not have a preference as to which could be read better.

You can choose to upload a text-based sitemap if you aim at the most simple version of such a file. It’s the easiest to maintain, especially for large websites with a lot of content, but its main drawback is that it’s limited to HTML and text-based content only.

Another choice is going for a RSS, mRSS, and Atom 1.0 sitemaps, which is most often automatically generated by popular CMS, including WordPress. It can provide information to Google about any videos uploaded to your website, but it won’t deal with images or news content. If you want to work with it manually, it can be a bit cumbersome.

The third and final option is to go for an XML sitemap, which again is quite often automatically generated by CMS systems and various sitemap plugins. This is the most diverse and inclusive sitemap type since it provides Google with information on text-based content on your website, but also any video, image, or news content just as well.

According to Google’s docs, XML sitemaps also provide information on the localized versions of your website and actually give Google the most information on the URLs of your website.

If we had to pick at something it would be again the fact that if you were to work with an XML sitemap manually, it could be quite difficult. It’s also not the easiest to update, especially if your website is big or its URLs change often.

But just as we briefly mentioned, you can most-likely either automatically generate your sitemap using WordPress or by choosing an appropriate plugin to do it for you.

Now, a sitemap is especially important if:

• Your website is brand new and has few or no external links pointing to it — a sitemap in that case will help Google in discovering your website and its content much quicker.

• Your website is big, that is over 500 pages you want for Google to index — in that case, crawling the website may take Google quite a bit of time, provided your internal linking game is top tier, if not — even longer. Uploading a sitemap shortens that process and ensures a better success rate with indexing the pages you want to be indexed.

• Your website includes a lot of media or news content — in that case, Google may need a bit of assistance in recognizing all the files you want to be displayed in the search results.

You may skip the process of uploading a sitemap of your website if you can give your right arm for the internal linking you’ve set up, you already have quite a few external links pointing to your site, or your website is rather small. In all those cases, Google should be able to crawl your website and index it accordingly.

Yet, we feel like it’s never a bad idea to take the additional step of uploading a sitemap of your WordPress website to Google, just to be on the safe side.

And how to find your website’s sitemap if it’s supposed to be automatically generated?

Nothing simpler!

All you have to do is head to yourdomain/wp-sitemap.xml. Under that link, you’ll easily find your sitemap.

Then, simply head to your Google Search Console account, choose “Sitemaps” under the Indexing category on the left-side menu. From there, you can add your sitemap by simply pasting the URL of your sitemap and confirming by clicking the “Submit” button.

Author Pages

If you’re into SEO in any shape or form, you must have heard about the E-E-A-T, formerly E-A-T, principle. But if you haven’t — E-E-A-T comes down to Experience-Expertise-Authority-Trust, which your content must be soaked in.

The first two Es relate directly to the author’s experience and expertise within the topics they create content on.

And one of the best ways to ensure Google has a way of recognizing the experience and expertise of your authors is to set up author pages.

To do that, you can use WordPress SEO plugins, like SeedProd or WPUserManager, but you can also go all out and design and implement a custom page. The method is completely up to you.

Whatever it is, make sure that you include a few essential elements, including:

• Author’s name, preferably with a link to their LinkedIn profile and/or other platforms, like Medium,

• Author’s profile picture so that Google can connect the image with the name,

• Author’s bio, which should fit within 2-3 sentences. A common practice is to write the author’s bio using third-person language. Make sure to incorporate information on what the author is writing about and what’s their expertise to further highlight that information for Google’s robots,

• Recent posts — make sure that the author page lists examples or recent posts and articles this specific author has written to further prove their experience in writing on a selected topic.

Adding & Optimizing Content

Moving on to actually adding & optimizing existing content to improve SEO on a WordPress website, we’re going to share our beloved tactics for that part of doing SEO.

Beware, we have a lot of them in our sleeve.

Topical Authority & Semantic SEO

One of the best and newest ways to improve your website’s search engine visibility is to indulge in the intricate world of semantic SEO and topical authority. We’ve brushed a bit on topical authority already when speaking of E-E-A-T and the importance of author pages.

But besides just setting up author pages, you have to make sure that each article and blog post you create remains within the topic and context of your website.

For example, if you’re running a blog for your SaaS product that helps with project management — the content you’re producing should remain within the project management realm.

Going with the example of project management, you can create an educational pillar that hits the top of your marketing funnel, teaching your potential clients everything about efficient project management. From how to handle the mess on your Google drive to task management, symptom-based articles to help people realize they may need help with their project management, or introducing the idea and benefits of using project management tools, like yours.

But you may as well hit the bottom of the funnel and create expert articles, comparing the best tools for project management, helping users choose the best option.

After aligning your content pillars with the topic of your website, it’s time to actually create that content, which is where semantic SEO steps in.

But let’s start from scratch — with keyword research, which you can do either manually or with any popular SEO tool, including Ahrefs, Semrush, Mangools, or any other.

Here, depending on your starting point — you can either go for the Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) technique paired with the avalanche technique for choosing the difficulty of your keywords or use the KGR but pair it with demanding, high-volume keywords to gain better results.

The avalanche technique is the best option for beginners and any websites starting fresh because you’re going for small search keywords, which means you have a higher possibility of success in reaching the top 10, especially if the KGR score is also low. Then, you slowly increase the search volume you want to attack.

The KGR technique implies looking further than just the search volume and instead pairing that with the total number of “allintitle” results on the web, actually checking how many times each topic has been covered. If it’s over-done, you may want to give it up.

To measure KGR, simply divide the number of allintitle results by the number of search volume for each keyword. A good KGR score lies below 1.0.

Having your keywords researched, you can actually start writing your content pieces.

To make sure your content ranks well, you have to put in quite a bit of effort to understand the user’s intent for the search query you’re writing for and then write a genuinely informative and useful copy. Generating mediocre, paraphrased content using ChatGPT and stuffing your focus keyword inside will no longer do.

If you’re not about manual work and have some spare finances in your budget, you can invest in SurferSEO. Founded in 2017, SurferSEO is a tool that helps out with creating SEO-optimized content, including easing the process of taking care of semantic SEO.

Going into its content editor we can type in our focus keyword and SurferSEO will do all the basic research for us. Scanning the top results for that keyword, SurferSEO comprises the most essential information you’d normally have to extract manually.

You can learn more about the words, phrases, and keywords used by your competitors in their articles, see how many words they’ve written on the topic, their Surfer score, the top questions, and more.

This gives you an easy way to overview the top 10 results, decide whether or not they fit the search intent for your focus keyword, and scan through them to see how your expertise can broaden the topic further and give users even more valuable information.

Something we appreciate when using SurferSEO, besides the essential information on the top results, are the NLP keywords listed for our topic.

NLP — Natural Language Processing is in the simplest of terms the process in which computers learn how to understand human language. Google as a search engine or ChatGPT as a Large Language Model are both great examples of computers learning how human language operates based on large datasets and statistical probability.

NLP is crucial for SEO optimization now since Google wants to provide all the best experience for its users. Each new update further proves that intent. Well, all besides adding the AI results at the top, recently. 🤨

Anyway, writing with the NLP and semantic SEO in mind, we have to perceive our writing as more than just a list of keywords to input. We should take into account the search intent, exhaust each topic we write for, and provide valuable information for it.

That way, most of the NLP terms should slide in naturally since we’re covering the topic from front to back.

Headings

Make sure the headings of each article or landing page you put out are logical and allow the reader to swiftly skim through the whole text without too much effort.

We all know our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter as we consume 6-second videos on TikTok and Instagram. Pairing that with our ever-so-busy lives, the never-ending to-do lists and things to get done, we want to find the answers to our questions as fast as possible.

Structuring the content in the right way helps your users get their answers out quickly, but it also helps Google robots crawl each piece of content and decide its relevance. Ultimately, helping improve your SEO efforts as well.

Meta Title

Obviously, your SEO efforts should not end on just appearing in the top 10.

People who stumble upon your website among others in the search results will have to make their choice of which one they actually want to click on and visit.

That’s why you should take quite a bit of time to come up with a clickable, yet not clickbait title. Any experienced content writer will admit that crafting a few meaningful words that raise either conversions or clicks are much more difficult to come up with than writing a whole paragraph.

Don’t leave such an important aspect of your SEO efforts up to faith, unnecessarily generating that content. You may come across such functionalities in SEO plugins, but don’t be tempted.

Now, besides luring potential customers or users into your article or website, you have to make sure that your meta title includes your focus keyword.

Another important part of it is making sure that the title is not too long so that it appears properly in search engines and is not cut off in any way.

A good way of visualizing how your metadata displays in the search results is using a tool that showcases exactly what you need. 

Meta Description

Given you’re not new to SEO, but simply wish to improve it, we won’t be explaining the definition of a meta description, but share the practices we find to work best.

The first one’s pretty basic, but it has to be said. Don’t make your meta description too long. Your meta description should be no more than 160 characters. Why? Because Google simply doesn’t display longer descriptions. Theoretically, you can make your meta description as long as you want, but it just won’t be displayed in the search.

Next, besides just length, you should also take care of the content of your meta description. Don’t make it vague, don’t make it all fluff. Instead, be very specific as to what your article is all about.

Remember to include your focus keyword in there as well.

A meta description we’re going to go with for this article is: “How to improve SEO: WordPress edition — from search visibility, through sitemaps, to optimizing content.”

And of course, Google still may choose a different snippet of text to appear as your meta description, but if you are specific and descriptive enough you have the power to control the narrative and increase that click-through-rate.

Alt Text For Images

Adding the alt text for images may seem like a simple deal, yet it’s very often overlooked. Some either make their alt text way too short and not at all descriptive, while others just stuff it with their keywords.

To achieve the perfect balance between those two states, make sure that your alt text is actually descriptive as to what the image is presenting. Feel free to go into detail and insert your focus keyword here and there, in the most natural way possible, whenever it actually fits the context.

Imagining we’d purposefully use a stock image to break down the text in this article, whose focus keyword is how to improve SEO WordPress, an example alt text could be:

How to improve SEO on WordPress? One of the ways is using tools like Google Search Console to check on the data of our website. Here we can see a man typing on a keyboard of a laptop, whose screen shows a bunch of data presented on Google Search Console.

Optimizing Images

For images, besides just the alt text we’ve already mentioned, it’s also crucial to properly optimize them.

First, make sure that the image clearly presents what you need it to present. Feel free to edit your images to show close ups of any intended area, add arrows or frames, or add text.

Next, you have to make sure that your images are not taking up too much space. We highly recommend compressing each image. Here, we use TinyPNG and love it.

Finally, uploading your images to WordPress is also another discipline on its own. 

And that’s because the name of the file will also be visible to Google. So instead of naming your images something completely random, it’s best to name them with your focus keyword instead.

Internal Links

Going to internal links, they’re extremely important when it comes to Information Architecture, which we’ve mentioned at the beginning of this article.

A strong internal link net leads the crawl bots and users to easily navigate your website and discover all of its content.

Link to other articles or pages on your website whenever relevant.

Outbound Links

Although internal links are extremely important, don’t make your website a closed bubble.

Outbound links are a way for Google to recognize that you’ve been willing to take the time to actually do some deep research for your article and are linking trustworthy resources when it’s needed.

Make sure some of them are actually do-follow so that the crawl robots can clearly see that you’re linking somewhere trustworthy externally.

Table of Contents

Last but not least, make sure that your articles do include a Table of Contents. This one is yet again beneficial for both the robots and the people behind the screens.

Post-Launch

After taking all the steps to optimize your website during the process of creating it, all the way through filling it out with properly optimized content, it’s time to relax.

Okay, we’re joking. It’s time to work some more.

Post launching the content on your website, you still have to take a few steps to monitor the results you’re achieving, acquire some high-quality backlinks to your content to help increase the trust Google has for your website, and update any corner content.

We’ll get into each area of action separately below.

Enjoy!

Backlinks

Acquiring high-quality backlinks to your website is a book-worthy topic on its own. 

There are dozens of different techniques you can go for — from creating valuable content and hoping for the sheer streak of miracle that other websites will link to it on their own, to doing link exchanges with other content creators to giving up and just paying for new links.

You also may have heard that Google doesn’t focus on your backlink profile anymore and that acquiring backlinks is no longer vital to reach the best results in SEO. Well, as much as we’d love to say that a good backlink profile doesn’t matter in 

 the eyes of Google, it still very much does.

For explaining a bit more on why exactly, let’s go back in time to the very beginnings of the World Wide Web and the Internet.

The baby steps of the Internet go back to it first serving as a security measure of an interconnected, yet distributed computer network for the Department of Defense in the United States. The concept was further developed and researched by multiple countries, organizations, and researchers.

One of those research ventures, led by a British scientist Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, in Switzerland (we know, this mix is crazier than a candy salad), resulted in creation of the World Wide Web.

And the way WWW worked initially was entirely different from what we see now. 

Most importantly there was no search bar to type your questions into. You had to know the exact URL of the website you wanted to visit and you could jump into other websites by clicking on the websites linked on the websites you originally visited. Just like in that one Wikipedia challenge.

Meaning, the Web was connected solely by external linking. And although it’s not the only way for Google or users to find your website now — Google and the WWW is still a network of interconnected links.

And your job is making sure that your website is interconnected with reputable and trustworthy websites, because of something called the link juice. When other websites share a do-follow link to your website, they’re also sharing some of their authority with you. Same goes for spammy websites, they in turn share the bad influence with you.

That’s why it’s crucial to get links from websites with higher DR than yours, that fit into the same topical category as your website, that share valuable content, that concentrate on one theme rather than being a “lifestyle” blog covering everything from crypto to CBD and travel tips.

Okay, but how do you actually acquire good quality links if you can be punished by Google for purchasing them?

We’ve mentioned some of the ways at the beginning of this paragraph, but we’ll dive deep into link exchanges specifically since we find them to work best.

Link exchanges are exactly what they sound like — you simply exchange links with other websites.

To do that, create a list of websites you feel like fit topically within your website and reach out to the authors directly, pitching your idea.

Avoid spammy looking link exchange proposals we know all too well, “hi Sir, your beautifully decorated website [insert website’s URL here]…” — unless you want to land directly in the SPAM folder or that company’s Slack’s off-top channel.

If you catch the other creators’ attention and get possible websites you can place your link into, the next step is evaluating them. We find Ahrefs fit for the task the most since it’s very abundant in the filters and metrics it offers.

Paste in the website you want to give a check into Ahrefs and first check the basics:

• The DR score (ideally, it’ll be significantly higher than that of your website’s),
• Look out for any weird fluctuations in the DR score — you want the DR score rising in a stable manner,
• The backlinks filtered by “Dofollow”, “One link per domain”, and sorted by DR score (look out for any spammy-looking backlinks and take a peek if there are any trustworthy websites you’d love to get link juice passed to your website).

Make sure there’s not too many backlinks in their profile, for example anything in millions is already too much. You can also check the volume of that website’s traffic, as well as traffic’s location.

Apart from doing a background check in Ahrefs, make sure to also go to Majestic and check the website’s spam score — anything over 1% is not good.

Applying those tips you should be able to slowly build a strong backlink profile filled with high-quality links.

Monitor & Take Action

You also have to track your results to be able to draw the necessary conclusions from your strategies.

Make sure to follow the progress of your website’s search engine rankings using tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Semrush, Mangools, or other, and apply any necessary changes to your SEO strategy.

Update Cornerstone Content

Last, but not least — even though you’ve already worn out your finger writing all your content, published it, and have been enjoying a nice warm spot in the top 10 for the related search query, you can’t just sit on the laurels.

Once every quarter or whenever relevant, update the important content on your website — whether adding fresh pieces of information, updating data, or giving a whole new perspective.

If you’re not going to update that content, others will write it from scratch adding the new information your article or page is missing and outrank you in the top search engine results pages.

But besides just cornerstone or pillar content, you should also take the time to update any content that ranks high or brings in a lot of conversions on your website. These pieces may be valuable so it’s best to keep them updated.

Tools

Last, but certainly not least, we have to mention one way to ease your work with SEO.

Because making a list of all the things you need to do to keep your SEO efforts alive and well is like unrolling a 5-foot long paper — this may seem pretty overwhelming, prompting you to just wrap this never-ending to-do list over your neck.

But it doesn’t have to be that.

Not if you use proper SEO tools.

From Ahrefs, Mangools or Semrush to easily track your keywords, look over your backlinks, do your keyword research, through Yoast SEO or RankMath for a good WordPress SEO plugin that makes the process of optimizing new content a breeze every single time, to SurferSEO to help you with your research & writing process, and more.

And if you are looking for the best WordPress SEO plugin, don’t hesitate to give our in-depth article a read, where we compare Yoast SEO, RankMath, and SEO Framework to find the best SEO plugin for your WordPress website.

How To Improve SEO: WordPress Edition — Final Thoughts

We believe we’ve yapped quite a bit in this article already.

To wrap it all up, we’ll just remind you that SEO is a very broad area to take care of and search engines can be unpredictable.

Try as you might, applying SEO best practices and WordPress SEO tips your website may still hang out in the abyss of Google.

Sometimes it’s your technical SEO taking the hit if you’re not meeting the core web vitals, other times it’s your content, sometimes lack of high-quality backlinks, and some find out the niche they’re in is simply too competitive to even be doing SEO in the first place.

Luckily, WordPress is a benevolent CMS when it comes to SEO, so we hope it will be just as gracious to your website.

Rank high!

Frequently Asked Questions: How To Improve SEO: WordPress Edition