It’s the world’s most popular way to build a website or blog – and WordPress offers a huge range of options for anyone developing an online presence. But when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), are you pushing WordPress to reach its full potential?

Among the myriad tools that can be used to customise WordPress into virtually anything, you’ll find a wide variety of ways to maximise SEO. From simple content tweaks to specialised SEO plugins like Yoast and All in One SEO, the WordPress content management system lets you take SEO as far as you want it to go. Keep reading to discover how to get the most out of your WordPress website and propel it up search engine rankings, such as by optimising your content and choosing the best WordPress Hosting for your website.

Not familiar with SEO? Make sure you read our beginner’s guide to SEO first to understand the basics before working on improving your site’s rankings.

Why is WordPress SEO important?

SEO plays a huge role for websites that want to draw organic traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. WordPress hosts a massive amount of websites online making SEO a top priority for site owners. Optimising a WordPress site for search engines opens up many chances, including a better online presence more qualified visitors higher conversion rates, brand recognition, engagement, leads, and in the end – higher revenue.

What's more, search engines are always changing their algorithms and ranking factors. If you don't pay attention to WordPress SEO (and SEO as a whole), it can hurt how well your website does. Search engines like websites that are easy to use, load fast, and have good relevant content. If you don't make your WordPress site better in these ways, you might end up lower in search results, meaning less traffic and fewer chances to grow.

Is WordPress good for SEO?

WordPress didn’t win its place as the world’s favourite CMS by accident. Though much of its success owes to its accessibility, it doesn’t mean it skimps on important features like SEO compatibility.

Even compared to its more advanced competitors, WordPress remains one of the best content management systems for SEO. On top of its out-of-the-box optimisation, one of the best things about the WordPress CMS is the range of options it gives you for implementing and optimising SEO yourself.

Although WordPress creates SEO-friendly code and provides a great range of SEO features, this doesn’t mean that you don’t need to do anything to optimise your site’s SEO. Optimising your website is essential for climbing up the rankings and therefore becoming more visible to online visitors, making them more likely to visit your website and convert – whether you want them to sign up to a mailing list, subscribe to your newsletter, download an ebook or make a purchase through your ecommerce website. 

How to improve WordPress SEO

So, how should you go about optimising your WordPress website? In addition to a range of fantastic plugins and features, there are many best practices you can implement yourself to push your website up the search engine rankings. Here are our 17 top tips:

1. WordPress SEO: it’s all about the content

First and foremost, high-quality content is vital for SEO. By ensuring your content is relevant, informative and up to date, you’ll build the foundations of a successful SEO strategy.

Engaged visitors stick around for longer and tell their friends, meaning increased traffic and more inbound links – and everything feeds back to Google to push your site up through the rankings.

But what makes good content? It’s important to appeal to Google’s SEO algorithms, but above all, your content needs to be informative, engaging and accessible for your readers. Are you answering people’s queries directly, clearly and concisely? If not, you may need to rethink your writing strategy.

In addition to writing good content, you should remember to update previous content on a regular basis. This will give you an opportunity to update old, thin content (i.e. content that doesn’t provide a lot of value to the reader and lacks depth, structure or quality) and add any new information that may now be relevant. Plus, Google likes to see content that’s been recently updated, as this shows it’s more likely to be relevant to current searchers. Therefore, sticking to a consistent content upload and improvement schedule will help you appeal to both readers and search engines, giving you a boost in terms of SEO.

2. Do your keyword research

Before web users can love your content, they need to find it. One of the primary ways to help search engines highlight your site is to ensure it features the keywords that users are searching for.

Don’t just guess when it comes to keywords – use real data to inform your writing and new content ideas. For these content ideas, Google Trends can help with popular topics that people are searching for. For more in-depth SEO research, a free keyword tool such as keywordtool.io is very helpful for finding the most popular keywords for your chosen subject, or you can use a paid tool like Semrush or Ahrefs.

As long as you use relevant keywords – and don’t spam the reader by stuffing your content full of repetitive and obvious search terms – Google will reward your WordPress site in the rankings. This means that when people type the keywords you’ve been using into a search engine, your content is more likely to feature on the first page, giving your website traffic a boost.

Search engines assign each page on your website a score called page authority, and more authoritative pages rank better in search results. One of the best ways to improve page authority is to get more links to your website through link building, but not all links are created equal.

The best links you can get are backlinks from other authoritative sites – backlinks (or inbound links) refer to any link from one website to another. Buying links is a black hat SEO technique and therefore not within Google’s guidelines, but a safer way to get links is to either earn them or ask for them. 

The first step is to create engaging and relevant content within your niche, and then either hope that your post is interesting enough to get attention from others in your industry (who’ll then link to your page), or you can ask relevant sites and publications to link to your post if you think they would be interested in it. Thought leadership pieces, ‘skyscraper’ content, infographics, new data, and newsjacking content are all more likely to earn links naturally from authoritative voices in your industry, or to generate positive results if you reach out to bloggers, journalists and relevant publications with them.

Internal linking

Although they’re not as valuable for page authority and SEO as backlinks, internal links are still important for your overall SEO strategy. When uploading new content, we would recommend always linking to at least three other existing blog posts on your website, in addition to any relevant commercial pages. Adding links will make your content seem more authoritative, and these links will also direct more traffic to other posts and commercial pages on your site. More traffic means better rankings, so don’t forget to implement a consistent link structure for your WordPress website.

4. Add XML sitemaps

In addition to keywords and links, there are a wide range of SEO ranking factors that are simple to improve on WordPress thanks to the platform’s accessibility, and the massive selection of tools available.

Google likes XML sitemaps – these files give the search engine a handy list of all the pages on your site, making it easier for them to be indexed. Adding an XML sitemap won’t directly affect your rankings, but since it makes it easier for Google to crawl and index your site (which are essential for being featured in search engine results at all), it’s still an important part of your overall SEO strategy.

Don’t worry if you have no idea how to create an XML sitemap. Helpfully, plugins that generate XML sitemaps are readily available, such as Google XML Sitemaps, so with WordPress, you won’t need to make your own from scratch.

While links are usually good for SEO, broken ones are definitely not. Not only are broken links frustrating for users, but they can negatively impact your SEO because Google won’t be able to crawl and index your website properly. If a website has a lot of pages that Google can’t index, this will lower the website’s quality according to Google and lead to lower rankings.

Luckily, you don’t have to check for broken links manually because there are WordPress plugins that do this for you. You can use the Broken Link Checker plugin to monitor all the links on your WordPress site and get instant notifications if any of them stop working. 

Remember that linking between sites is a great way of increasing your authority on Google’s rankings, as it shows your content is being referred to on multiple posts. For that reason, linking to other pages of your site when they’re relevant can also help to boost your SEO – as long as those links aren’t broken, of course!

6. Install a WordPress SEO plugin

With WordPress, there’s pretty much a plugin for everything. So, in addition to installing XML sitemap plugins and broken link plugins, why not use an all-in-one SEO plugin that makes it so much easier for you to optimise your website? These SEO plugins typically help you conduct keyword analysis, optimise meta titles and descriptions, and integrate with other popular plugins like WooCommerce, which is one of the most popular ecommerce plugins on the market. 

There’s a few different WordPress SEO plugins to choose from, but let’s start with one of the most well known: Yoast.

What is Yoast?

Yoast is the number one WordPress SEO plugin. Much of its success comes from its accessibility; it’s free, easy to install and relatively straightforward to use, even for SEO novices. And Yoast comes with a range of powerful SEO features, including:

  • Keyword analysis
  • XML sitemap generation
  • Automatic metadata creation
  • Snippet previewing
  • Duplicate content flagging
  • Configuration of .htaccess file without FTP

There’s also a paid version of Yoast that adds premium features such as expanded keyword analysis and internal link suggestions.

Yoast vs All in One SEO

Alongside Yoast, the other big SEO plugin for WordPress is All in One SEO. Its feature set includes:

  • XML sitemap generation
  • Google Analytics integration
  • SEO support for custom post types
  • Advanced canonical URLs
  • Automatic or manual metadata creation
  • Free WooCommerce integration
  • Social media integration
  • Internal link assistant
  • Rich snippets schema markup

While All in One SEO offers much of the same functionality as Yoast, there are significant differences between the two. So what’s the best SEO plugin for WordPress?

Yoast is easier to get started with, and offers advanced features if you need them. This means that for SEO beginners, Yoast is generally the recommended choice – but for anyone more confident with SEO, it really comes down to personal preference.

Some users simply prefer the interface of All in One SEO. The free WooCommerce integration (usually only included with premium plugins) is also a major draw for businesses running online shops with the WooCommerce plugin – so if you plan to build an online store, All in One SEO is definitely a solid choice.

All in One SEO is also seen as a more lightweight option, as some of the more advanced features are not included or enabled by default. This makes it easier if you’re looking for a simpler SEO solution, but it still gives the option of using more advanced tools if you choose to enable them.

Overall, it mostly comes down to personal preference, as all major WordPress SEO plugins will come with similar features like automatic metadata generation, allowing you to optimise your meta titles and descriptions with relevant keywords – which is important for SEO.

7. Install SEO-friendly WordPress themes

The massive range of WordPress themes provides the platform with even more customisation options. But while a large selection of themes are available for free, the best WordPress themes for SEO often come with a premium price tag.

If you’re really serious about SEO, it’s worth considering a paid WordPress theme. With a premium theme, you can rely on a high standard of HTML and CSS coding, browser compatibility and mobile optimisation – all things that Google rewards in the rankings.

You can find premium SEO themes optimised by specialised developers, who will also provide ongoing support and regular updates to ensure your WordPress site remains at the forefront of SEO-friendly design.

8. Structure your site to be easily crawled

When choosing a theme, you should also be mindful of how a site’s structure can affect SEO. When indexing websites, Google prefers clearly structured content that makes use of taxonomy features like categories and tags, which we’ll discuss in more detail later.

Internal links are also appreciated by Google; it’s a good idea to link back to relevant older content whenever possible. This makes it easier for Google to crawl and index (and therefore rank) your website. A clear and easy-to-follow URL or permalink structure is also essential, so make sure you create a strategy for your URLs ahead of time (e.g. with clear categories and keywords).

9. Optimise performance for SEO benefits

Another key SEO ranking factor is website performance. Google will always favour fast-loading websites, so it’s important to ensure your site is fully optimised.

We also previously covered some of the best tools for speeding up WordPress. These include plugins that optimise image size such as Smush – enabling faster performance without compromising image quality.

Caching can also speed up your website. WordPress caching works by serving users with static HTML files instead of PHP script, and can deliver major performance boosts by enabling your web pages to respond to user requests much more quickly. Caching plugins like WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache offer a simple way to implement caching yourself.

Database optimisation plugins such as Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions are also well worth a look if you’re running a large database that needs regular clear-outs to ensure snappy performance.

10. Use Google Search Console 

But how do you know if your website’s performance needs to be improved? The best way to gather data about your website is to use Google Search Console, which provides you with valuable insights such as page speed, the search terms people use to find your website, and how often your web pages are clicked. Google Search Console will also alert you to issues like duplicate content or web pages that Google is currently unable to crawl or index.

By using this fantastic tool, you can figure out what‘s currently working well for your website and what isn’t, enabling you to adjust your SEO strategy accordingly. To get started, add your sitemap to Google Search Console and wait for your stats to appear.

11. Use categories and tags properly

WordPress allows you to assign categories and tags to all of your blog posts, making it easier for both people and search engines to find your content and understand your website structure. However, if you’ve never used WordPress before, these categories and tags can be a bit confusing.

Think of categories as a table of contents and tags as the words you’d find in the index section of a textbook. Categories assign a general topic to better categorise your content (e.g. food, sport, news, fashion), whereas tags can be more specific keywords found within your blog post that fit under this category (such as ‘shoes’ for fashion). Proper use of categories and tags is essential for aiding user and search engine browsing of your website, and this is a key SEO factor.

12. Use SEO-friendly URL structures

To improve WordPress SEO, you need to pay attention to all aspects of your website – even the URLs. We’ve already briefly touched on this, but remember that SEO-friendly URLs or permalinks always follow a consistent, easy-to-follow structure and clearly explain what the web page is about, as this is helpful for both humans and search engines. 

The permalinks of individual posts and pages are not optimised by default, but you can set up your own custom permalink structure in the WordPress dashboard under Settings > Permalinks. Always aim to include relevant keywords in each URL, as this makes it more likely for your web page to rank well for relevant search terms your audience is using – which you can check on Google Search Console and keyword research tools.

It’s a great idea to decide on an SEO-friendly URL structure before building your website, but if you’ve realised that your existing website has bad URLs (e.g. unclear or containing numbers), it’s best to get a professional’s help to change your permalink structure. This is because changing established permalinks (such as on a website that’s been running for more than 6 months) could mean that you lose your current SEO rankings. You’ll also need help with setting up proper redirects so you don’t lose traffic. 

13. Add schema markup to get rich snippets

Have you noticed that some search engine results display more data than others? For example, if you search for local restaurants, some website listings will include extra information like review counts, star ratings and events. You may have also noticed that Google sometimes pulls an answer from one of the top results and displays it at the top of the page when you search a particular question or topic. Naturally, since these results or ‘rich snippets’ take up more real estate on the results page, they can attract more visitors.

So how do you get rich snippets on search engine results pages? You need to use schema markup or structured data on your website, which is a special type of HTML code you can add to your web pages. This code tells search engines more about your web page, such as what type of page it is (e.g. blog post, product page, news article). Schema markup can be specific to different types of web pages, such as product makeup that gives search engines more information to display about your product in rich snippets, like product images, ratings, prices and reviews.

Don’t know how to code? All you need is a WordPress SEO plugin like All in One SEO to help you add schema markup to your web pages. Your SEO plugin will add these settings to your page editor, and all you need to do is customise the handy schema templates.

14. Optimise WordPress comments

User engagement is great for traffic and SEO, but sometimes user comments on your web pages can be harmful too. If spammers flood your comment sections with dodgy links and duplicate content, this can send the wrong signals to Google and lower your SEO rankings.

Moderating the comments yourself may be a viable solution with a small website, but if you can’t keep up with the spam, you can use helpful plugins like Akismet to automatically identify and filter suspicious comments for you. 

15. Optimise images

Adding images to your website is a great way to make it more engaging and visually appealing to visitors, but too many images can also slow down your page loading speeds – which, as we’ve established, is bad for SEO. Apart from simply cutting down the number of images on your web pages, one way to deal with this is to optimise your images. For example, you can use Adobe Photoshop to export images with smaller file sizes, or you can use tools like JPEGmini that compress your images without compromising on quality.

When adding images, don’t forget to add alt text to each one via WordPress. This helps visually impaired users and search engines better understand what each image is showing, which is important for both SEO and accessibility. 

16. Improve site security

As well as favouring fast-loading websites, Google gives better rankings to websites with robust security measures. This is because these websites can be trusted to protect user data, so Google feels safer recommending these sites. If malware is found on a website, Google will completely blacklist it from search engine results.

There are plenty of security best practices you can follow, including installing antivirus software, scanning regularly for malware, configuring firewalls, and backing up your data on a regular basis in case you experience a data breach – find out more about these common-sense website security measures in our blog post on the 5 top tips to keep your site safe. There are also plenty of WordPress-specific security guidelines you can follow, such as installing security plugins and always using the latest version of WordPress, which you can find out more about in our guide to WordPress site security.

One of the most important security tips for SEO is to get an SSL certificate for your website. Websites with SSL certificates can be identified by the ‘https’ in their URLs and the padlock icon displayed in the address bar. Having these certificates means your site establishes secure connections with users’ browsers, allowing visitors to submit sensitive information (like passwords) and payment data safely. Websites with SSL certificates are therefore regarded as much more trustworthy by both users and search engines – in fact, not having an SSL certificate can be very damaging for your SEO rankings.

17. Choose the best WordPress hosting provider

Finally, website performance, and by extension SEO, is greatly influenced by your choice of web hosting provider. There are many different providers and types of web hosting to choose from, so make sure you do your research to find out what type of hosting would best suit your website and which providers offer the features you’re interested in within your budget.

Fasthosts WordPress Hosting is built to run WordPress at its absolute best. WordPress hosting is a type of web hosting that’s specifically optimised for WordPress websites, so it’ll help you get the best performance (and therefore rankings) possible for your website. Plus, with our WordPress hosting, you can add plugins to your install before you start, so they’re ready to go straight away once you build a website.

Ready to get started? Check out our range of WordPress Hosting plans, starting from as little as £6 per month for our basic package. You’ll get access to everything you need to build an SEO-friendly website, including curated plugins, customisable themes, on-screen guidance and scalable performance. Contact us today to find out more!