WordPress is one of the world’s most popular content management (CMS) systems, with over 400 million people visiting WordPress sites each month and over 34% of the web being powered by WordPress as of 2019. One of the critical reasons for this popularity, other than ease of use, security, and flexibility is it’s out-of-the-box SEO friendliness. Below, we explore a few of the key reasons WordPress is such a good choice for the SEO conscious.
SEO friendly permalink flexibility
Typically, a database-driven website such as WordPress will have a rather technical looking URL naming model, known as permalinks, that is not exactly search engine friendly. Ideally, you want your pages to carry your keywords as Google will be able to use this to infer page relevancy for search queries.
In WordPress, it’s very easy to transform a URL that is neither search engine crawler friendly nor a particularly compelling link to click on from something that might look like: http://yoursite/p?=15 to http://yoursite/keyword-rich-url. Now you have something that describes what your page is about and is a far more compelling argument for Google to rank you well for your target search terms.
Using plugins to make SEO easy
One of the huge benefits of using WordPress is the huge repository of plugins available to support many of the otherwise ‘developer only’ tasks involved in website management. SEO is no exception, and there are many SEO plugins to help you make your SEO tasks a doddle. A great example of this is Yoast, a developer that offers a suite of useful SEO plugins.
For example, updating your metadata is a critically important SEO task made easy using WordPress and a plugin. Metadata is the code that sits in the header part of your website code and offers vital information about the content of your site. The title tag is an important ranking factor that also becomes the clickable link in a search engine, and Google lends a lot of ranking weight to keywords in a title tag (especially the words towards the start of that title tag), so it’s vitally important that it is carefully crafted. The description tag can lend itself to the brief copy that sits under a clickable google search result and can be a key driver in click through rates. You don’t have to go it alone; you could engage the help of a specialist WordPress agency London.
Sitemaps and redirects
XML sitemaps are automatically generated by WordPress, and with the help of a plugin, it can be really easy to ensure that Google has an updated copy of your sitemap. Google uses sitemaps to crawl the pages on your website and index them correctly. Any changes to the structure of your website should be reflected in your sitemap, and WordPress makes this otherwise laborious task a lot simpler.
When you need to change the location of a URL, you should always remember to do a 404 redirect; this is a simple instruction to Google to show that a page has permanently changed location, and without it, you can lose out on traffic to the page from a previously indexed version. This is another task made easy with the help of WordPress and a helpful plugin.
WordPress is the perfect platform for keeping your SEO tasks not only effective but easy to do, saving you precious time and costly developer fees.
