8 wordpress SEO tips for beginners.
When embarking on learning SEO many beginners find the wealth of information out there daunting and aren't sure where to start to optimise their website. Wordpress is widely known way to build a new website with relatively little technical understanding. Google seems to like wordpress as its platform is built to let the search engines know what your site is relevant for. Alternatively if you need traffic to your website straight away then you can do this through a Pay Per Click Agency
If you want to find out more about what makes wordpress a search engine friendly CMS there is a lot of information out there to find, although this blog post will discuss the plugins available to boost your seo.
1.All in One SEO
You can control the title tag, meta description, and excerpts that help with relevance. You can change the settings on new pages and posts.
2.Redirection
If you happen to change on old post or upgrade your version of wordpress it can break your existing permalink structure. When you move your blog or website to a new hosting provider you can often break links and providing a permanent redirect to guide the search engines and ensure your rankings aren't affected too badly. The main purpose of the redirect is to direct your visitors to new pages so they don't leave your site after visiting a dead link with no valuable content on it.
3.Robots.txt
If all your pages created are available to the user (and not behind any login page for example) then they make up the authority of your website. Not all of the pages created over the lifetime of your website are valuable to building up your authority and using the robots meta plugin allows you to block webpages you don't want to contribute to your site. This can also help build up the page rank of your more valuable pages.
4. SEO smart links
One of the main factors of on-page SEO is internal linking. When you link to a key page on the site multiple times the more important it becomes part of your overall content. Your internal links are an indication of how structured your site is. The smart links plugin helps you by specifying a keyword and turning that keyword in to a link, and in future every time the keyword is entered in to your site a link will appear.
5. Image optimisation
Its important to remember that due to google indexing all types of content, to ensure your name and tag your other media such as images. SEO friendly images helps you do this by tagging your images easily.
6. Permalinks moved permanently
Similar to redirect plugin this allows you to change your URL's as your site evolves. Normally if you change your URL's, it could result in google not indexing your new web page and a subsequent drop in rankings and traffic. This redirects your permalinks permanently. If you have another content management system that doesn't have this then you may want to speak with an SEO Services Company who can help guide you through the process.
7. Nofollow plugin
Quite often many people wont change the default setting of wordpress comments which is set to nofollow, meaning it wont pass any page rank to the user who is leaving a comment. Now you can select which pages carry the follow attribute meaning that new bloggers can get valuable exposure.
8.SEO slugs
When creating blog posts its common that the title will carry some 'stop words' such as in the title “how do you go about gaining back links”. The most relevant part of this title is “gaining back links” which is what we should include in our URL. This plugin helps remove stop words from your URL's to help you rank better.