Starting a new WordPress website? Getting your WordPress optimization right will help you get ranked in the search engines, as well as make your site easier to use overall.
These are the most important things to pay attention to when you’re optimizing your WordPress SEO.
Set the Title Format
By default, WordPress has your site name in front of the post title. For example:
*Your Site Name Here* | *Post Title Here*
However, for search engine purposes, it’s much better to have your title first. This puts your keywords closer to the beginning. It also makes it easier for people to see what the post is about in a search query result listing.
Set Your Permalink Structure
Your permalinks structure determines how WordPress sets your URLs. WordPress out of the box uses the date and post ID number, which means nothing to people and nothing to search engines.
Instead, it’s best to use your post title or a shortened version of your post title. This allows you to get your keywords in your URL. It’s also more user friendly for humans.
NoFollow Archives and Tags
The archive pages and tags pages should be NoFollowed. Why?
Because each of these pages contains only duplicate content from the rest of your site. They really don’t add any value to your website and could be perceived by Google as duplicate content.
While it probably won’t do major damage, it’s better policy to NoFollow these pages.
Category pages might also be NoFollowed, depending on whether or not you’ve made real pages out of categories. If your category page is just like the archive page, then NoFollow it. If your category page is actually a useful page, then don’t.
Use a Caching System
WordPress is a system that dynamically generates web content every time a page loads. That means that every time someone visits your site, WordPress “builds” the website from scratch on the server then sends it to the user.
This takes a lot of time, especially since the user has to download all the content again every time they load your website.
Caching helps get around this. By caching content, small amounts of your site are stored on their hard drive. Next time your site loads, they load it in part from your server and in part from their computer.
This helps SEO as well, because faster loading pages get a boost from Google.
Interlink Your Content
Don’t let your content stand alone. Instead, try to embed links in every single one of your articles pointing to other pieces of content.
You can do this within the actual article itself, or you can do a “related posts” at the bottom of the article. For maximum effectiveness, do both.
These are some of the most powerful ways to set up your WordPress blog to achieve maximum rankings. Setting up WordPress SEO optimization can be done in a couple hours.
