WordPress, is one of the best, most, popular and widely used CMS technology in creating websites. It has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by millions of people every day. But, it will not be the best if not comes to SEO. To complete our effort behind the site, spend some more time on WordPress SEO in improving our site ranking.
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer. Search Engine Optimization is a methodology of strategies and techniques that used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo. Yoast SEO is the best plugin to achieve all these in WordPress.
URLs URL>> Permalink structure : The default permalink structure for WordPress is ?p=<postid> . Change it to /%postname%/. To include category, we can use custom structure and is better to include /%category%/%postname%/.
URL >> Stop words : Try to remove words like “a”, ”and”, ”the” from your permalinks. Fortunately, the yoast SEO ver 1.1.6 will automatically remove those words from permalinks. Ensure that the redirection is rightly done even after changing the permalink.
URL >> To SSL or not to SSL : A completely SSL site looks more trustworthy than a non-SSL one. In 2004, google announced that they’d give ranking benefits to HTTPS/SSL sites.
Optimize titles for SEO : the <title> tag is one of the most important factors for ranking. It is the first line, people see in search results followed by a url and meta description combined with a date.
Image optimization Using proper ‘alt’ attributes for image is to check the page analysis functionality of SEO plugin.
XML sitemaps To tell search engines that site has been updated, we can use XML site maps. Yoast SEO supports site maps and enable it through Settings→ XML sitemaps. When a new page or post is published, xml sitemaps are automatically submitted to search engines and find new contents.
Breadcrumbs Breadcrumbs are the links usually appear above the title post. They allow
Headings
Clean up the code All CSS and JS scripts should move to external files. This will ensure that users can cache those files on first load and search engines don’t have to download them every time
Aim for speed Focus on three things to increase the speed of WordPress sites.
No indexing Make sure to prevent indexing of archive pages. Do this on SEO→ titles & metas. We can find the below details under Other tab.
Note that we have completely disabled the date based archives. Any date based link will redirect to homepage due to this setting. Also the subpages of archive pages can be prevented from indexing through SEO→ Titles & Metas → General Tab.
Disable unnecessary archives Use wordpress SEO to disable author archives in case of single author blogs. If not, anybody could link to them and break the SEO.
Canonical In 2009, the major search engines introduced the rel=”canonical” element. This is a utility to help fight duplicate content. WordPress has built-in support for canonical link elements in single posts or pages. But it has an issue that it doesn’t output canonical links on any other pages. With Yoast SEO enabled, we will automatically get canonical link elements for every page types in WordPress.
Pages instead of posts : If we create posts, there is a possibility that users may place comments on it. . Comments destroy our carefully constructed keyword density. That is why we write our important articles/blogs into pages. Linking to related posts : To support search engines to get older contents easier, go for related post plugin. These plugins search through posts database and find posts with same subject and add links to these posts. Over use of tags : It is a bad concept that increasing the use of tags will increase the SEO. It just relates some contents or posts to each other. Don’t prefer tags to rank your site.
We are all expecting a better search rank to our websites as the search traffic is a proven driver in growth of business, here our websites. This article will guide you to ensure the presence of your wordpress website in the e-world in all aspects with the support of Yoast SEO.
Reference : https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo/
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