Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website. Sadly most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started.
If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices.
In this guide, we will share the top WordPress SEO tips to help you improve your WordPress SEO and get more organic traffic.
You might have heard experts saying that WordPress is SEO friendly. This is actually why a lot of people choose WordPress to start a blog or a website.
While WordPress makes sure that the code it generates follows the SEO best practices, there is a lot more you need to do if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.
We have a number of actionable steps that you need to take to properly optimize your WordPress SEO.
To make it easy, we have created a table of contents to help you easily navigate through our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Basics of WordPress SEO
- Check your site’s visibility settings
- Using SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress
- WWW vs non-WWW in URLs
The Best WordPress SEO Plugin
- Choosing the Best WordPress SEO plugin
- Add XML sitemaps in WordPress
- Add your site to Google Search Console
- Optimizing your blog posts for SEO
- Doing keyword research for your website
WordPress SEO Best Practices
- Properly using categories and tags in WordPress
- Make internal linking a habit
- Optimize WordPress comments
- NoFollow external links in WordPress
- Full posts vs summaries (excerpts)
Speed and Security for WordPress SEO
- Optimize your site’s speed and performance
- Optimizing images in WordPress for SEO
- Security and safety of your WordPress site
- Start using SSL/HTTPS
Finally, see more SEO tools and resources to take your WordPress SEO even farther.
Introduction
We know the idea of optimizing for WordPress SEO can be intimidating for beginners, especially if you’re not a tech geek.
But don’t worry — it doesn’t have to be complicated. Start here to learn the basics, and then you can start applying them to your own website.
What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a strategy used by website owners to get more traffic by ranking higher in search engines.
Search engine optimization isn’t about tricking Google or gaming the system. It’s simply about creating a website that has optimized code and formatting which makes it easy for search engines to find your website.
When people search the web for the topics you write about, your search-engine-optimized content will appear higher in the search results, and you’ll get more people clicking through to your website.
Why SEO is important
Search engines are often the biggest source of traffic for most websites.
Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to understand and rank pages appropriately in search results. However, those algorithms aren’t perfect — they still need your help to understand what your content is about.
If your content isn’t optimized, then search engines won’t know how to rank it. When people search for the topics you write about, your website won’t appear in the search results, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.
It is really important for all business owners to make their website search engine friendly, so that they can maximize their search traffic.
Basics of WordPress SEO
SEO can get technical, but it doesn’t have to be. Just learning a few basic SEO tips to optimize your site can give you a noticeable boost in your website traffic.
You don’t have to be a tech genius to use the techniques below. If you’re already using WordPress, then you’ve got what it takes!
Let’s get started optimizing your website.
Check Your Site’s Visibility Settings
WordPress comes with a built-in option to hide your website from search engines. The purpose of this option is to give you time to work on your website before it’s ready to go public.
However, sometimes this option can get checked accidentally and it makes your website unavailable to search engines.
If your website is not appearing in search results, then the first thing you need to do is to make sure that this option is unchecked.
Simply log in to the admin area of your WordPress site and visit Settings » Reading page.
You need to scroll down to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ section and make sure that the box next to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ is unchecked.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your changes.
Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress
SEO friendly URLs contain words that clearly explain the content of the page, and they’re easy to read by both humans and search engines.
Some examples of SEO friendly URLs are:
/how-to-install-wordpress/
/common-wordpress-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/
Notice that these URLs are readable and a user can guess what they will see on the page just by looking at the URL text.
So what does a non-SEO friendly URL look like?
/?p=10467
http://example.com/archives/123
Notice that these URLs use numbers unrelated to the content, and a user cannot guess what they will find on the page by looking at the URL.
Using SEO friendly permalink structure improves your chances of getting better positions in search results.
Here is how you can check and update your WordPress site’s permalink structure.
You need to visit the Settings » Permalinks page. Select the post name option and then click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
For more detailed instructions take a look at our guide on what is a SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress.
Note: If your website has been running for more than 6 months, then please don’t change your permalink structure unless you’re using the numbers option. If you’re using Day and Name or Month and Name, continue using that.
By changing your permalink structure on an established site, you will lose all of your social media share count and run the risk of losing your existing SEO ranking.
If you must change your permalink structure, then hire a professional, so they can setup proper redirects. You’ll still lose your social share counts on the pages.
WWW vs non-WWW
If you are just starting out with your website, then you need to choose whether you want to use www (http://www.example.com) or non-www (http://example.com) in your site’s URL.
Search engines consider these to be two different websites, so this means you need to choose one and stick to it.
You can set your preference by visiting the Settings » General page. Add your preferred URL in both the ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ fields.
Despite what someone else might say, from a SEO standpoint there’s no advantage to using one or another.
For more detailed information on this topic, take a look at our guide on www vs non-www – which is better for WordPress SEO.
The Best WordPress SEO plugin
One of the best parts about WordPress is that there’s a plugin for everything, and SEO is no exception. There are thousands of WordPress SEO plugins which makes it harder for beginners to choose the best WordPress SEO plugin.
Instead of installing separate plugins for individual SEO tasks, we will help you choose the best WordPress SEO plugin that does it all, and it’s 100% free.
Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin
When it comes to choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will most likely narrow your choices down to the two most popular solutions: Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack.
They are both effective solutions, and we’ve done a pros and cons comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack.
At WPBeginner, we use Yoast SEO, so in this tutorial we’ll be using Yoast SEO for screenshots and examples.
Regardless, we have a step by step guide on properly setting up each of these plugins:
Add XML Sitemaps in WordPress
An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted file that lists every single page on your website. This makes it easy for search engines to find all of your content.
While adding an XML sitemap does not boost your site’s search rankings, it does help search engines find the pages quickly and start ranking them.
If you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, then it will automatically create an XML sitemap for you. To find your sitemap, just go to this URL (don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name):
http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
We will show you how to submit your XML sitemap to Google in the next step.
Add Your Site to Google Search Console
Google Search Console, also known as Webmaster Tools, is a set of tools offered by Google to give website owners a look at how their content is seen by the search engine.
It provides reports and data to help you understand how your pages appear in search results. You also get to see the actual search terms people are using to find your website, how each page appears in the search results, and how often your pages are clicked.
All this information helps you understand what’s working on your site and what’s not. You can then plan your content strategy accordingly.
Google Search Console also alerts you when there is something wrong with your website, like when search crawlers are unable to access it, find duplicate content, or restricted resources.
We have a step by step guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.
If you’re using Yoast SEO, then follow step 6 in our Yoast SEO setup guide.
If you’re not using Yoast SEO, then you can watch our video that shows an alternative way:
Once you have added your website to Google Search Console, click on the Sitemap from the left menu and then paste the last part of the sitemap URL.
Click on the submit button to save your changes.
Google Search Console will now check your sitemap and use it to improve your website’s crawling.
Once you have successfully added your sitemap, it will appear as pending. It does take Google some time to crawl your website. After a few hours, you would be able to see some stats about your sitemap. It will show you the number of links it found in your sitemap, how many of them got indexed, a ratio of images and web pages, etc.
We recommend that you check your Search Console at least on a monthly basis for gathering insights and see your website’s SEO progress.
Optimizing Your Blog Posts for SEO
Often beginners make the mistake of thinking that installing and activating a WordPress SEO plugin is all that’s needed. SEO is an ongoing process that you must keep up with if you want to see maximum results.
All top SEO plugins allow you to add a title, description, and focus keyword to every blog post and page. It also shows you a preview of what users will see when they Google your website.
We recommend that you optimize your title and description to get maximum clicks.
When writing your blog post, simply scroll down to the SEO section and take full advantage of it.
If you’re wondering how to choose a focus keyword or focus keyphrase, what is a good title, or what is a good meta description, then we have covered it in details in our beginners guide to optimize your blog posts for SEO.
We highly recommend that you read it because on-page SEO is crucial for your success.
Doing Keyword Research for Your Website
Many beginners use their best guesses to figure out what topics people are looking for and what they should add to their blogs and website.
It is like shooting an arrow in the dark. You don’t need to do that when you can use real data to find out what people are looking for.
Keyword research is a research technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover words users enter into search engines to find content, products, and services in your industry.
You can then use those words and phrases into your website to get more search traffic.
There are a ton of keyword research tools (both free and paid) that you can use. We recommend using SEMRush, it helps you discover keywords and even find out the keywords where your competitors are ranking.
For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to do keyword research for your WordPress website.
WordPress SEO Best Practices
If you follow the basics of WordPress SEO and use the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will already be ahead of most websites.
However if you want even better results, then you need to follow the WordPress SEO best practices below.
These aren’t too technical and most won’t even require you to touch any code. But they will make a big difference if you follow them.
Properly Using Categories and Tags in WordPress
WordPress allows you to sort your blog posts into categories and tags. This makes it easy for you to manage your content by topics, and for your users to find the content they’re looking for.
Categories and tags also help search engines understand your website structure and content.
Often beginners get confused on how to best use categories and tags. After explaining this to thousands of readers, here’s how we approach categories and tags.
Categories are meant for broad grouping of your posts. If your blog was a book, then categories will be the table of content.
For example, on a personal blog, you can have categories like music, food, travel, etc. Categories are hierarchical, so you can add child categories to them.
On the other hand, tags are more specific keywords that describe the contents of an individual post. For example, a blog post filed under the food category can have tags like salad, breakfast, pancakes, etc. Think of these as indexes section in a textbook.
For more on this topic, see our guide on categories vs tags and SEO best practices for sorting your content.
By using categories and tags properly, you make it easy for your users to browse your website. Since it’s easy for users, it also makes it easier for search engines to browse your website.
Make Internal Linking a Habit
Search engines assign each page on your website a score (page authority). The recipe of this score is kept secret so that people cannot game the results. However, the most common signals of authority are links.
This is why it’s important that you link to your own content from your other blog posts and pages.
You should make it a habit to interlink your own posts whenever possible. If you have multiple authors, then create a pre-publish blog post checklist that requires them to interlink at least 3 other blog posts.
This will help you boost your pageviews, increases the time users spend on your site, and ultimately will improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.
Optimize WordPress Comments
Comments can be a strong indication of user engagement on your website. Engaged users mean more links back to your site, more traffic, and improved SEO.
However, you need to make sure that your comments are real and not spam. Spammers submit comments with bad links which could affect and even ruin your search rankings.
This is why we recommend everyone to start using Akismet. It is one of the two plugins that come pre-installed with every WordPress site, and it helps you combat comment spam.
If Akismet alone is unable to handle comment spam, then see these tips and tools to combat comment spam in WordPress.
If your blog posts attract a lot of genuine, spam-free comments, then you should pat yourself on the shoulder for building such an engaging website!
However, too many comments on a post can make it load slower which also affects your search engine rankings. (Keep reading below to find out more about how speed affects SEO.)
To prepare your website so that it can handle the burden comments put on your server and speed, you can split comments into multiple pages. See our tutorial on how to paginate comments in WordPress.
(If you’d like to get more comments on your site, check out these 11 ways to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts.)
NoFollow External Links in WordPress
As mentioned above, links help search engines decide which pages are important. When you link to a website, you are passing some of your site’s SEO score to that link. This SEO score is called “link juice.”
For good search rankings, you need to make sure that you are getting more link juice from other websites than you are giving away.
Adding the “nofollow” attribute to external links (links to websites that you don’t own) instructs search engines not to follow those links. This helps you save link juice.
A normal external link looks like this in HTML:
<a href="http://example.com">Example Website</a>
An external link with the nofollow attribute looks like this:
<a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example Website</a>
By default, WordPress does not come with an option to make links nofollow. However, you can still easily do that by manually modifying links.
Simply select the block containing your link and then click on the 3 vertical dots icon present at the top bar.
This will open a menu where you need to click on the ‘Edit as HTML’ option.
You will now see the HTML code of your link. Go ahead to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link element.
If you see the rel=”noopener noreferrer” attribute in the HTML code, then add a space after noreferrer and add nofollow after that.
For more details and alternate methods, see our guide on how to add nofollow links in WordPress.
Full Posts vs Summaries or Excerpts
WordPress displays and links to your posts from a number of pages like home page, category archive, tags archive, date archive, author pages, etc.
By default, it shows the full article content on all these pages. This affects your site’s SEO, as search engines may find it to be duplicate content. Full articles also make your archive pages load slower.
Showing full articles everywhere also affects your page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to read the full article in their feed reader without ever visiting your website.
The easiest way to solve this is by showing summaries or excerpts instead of full articles.
You can do this by going to Settings » Reading and select summary.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to customize WordPress excerpts without coding.
Speed and Security for WordPress SEO
Even if you follow all the WordPress SEO tips and best practices above, if your site is slow or gets taken down by a hacker, your search engine rankings will take a big hit.
Here’s how to prevent your site from losing search engine traffic due to slow performance or lax security.
Optimize Your Site’s Speed and Performance
Research shows that in the internet age, the average human attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish.
Web usability experts believe that users decide whether they want to stay or leave within a few seconds of visiting a website.
That means that as a website owner, you only have a few seconds to present your content and engage users. You don’t want to waste this precious time making your visitor wait for your website to load. Search engines like Google now rank faster websites higher than slow loading websites.
If you need to improve your site’s speed, check out this expert advice on 18 useful tricks to speed up WordPress and boost performance.
Optimizing Images in WordPress for SEO
Images are more engaging than text but they also take more time to load. If you are not careful with image sizes and quality, then they can slow down your website.
You need to make sure that you use images that are optimized to load faster. See our guide on how to speed up WordPress by optimizing images for the web.
Another trick you can use to optimize your images for search engines is to use a descriptive title and alt tags. These tags help search engines understand what your image is about. They also help users with visual impairment as their screen readers can read the alt text to them.
WordPress allows you to easily add title and alt tags when you upload an image.
If you are a photographer or add a lot of images to your WordPress site, then you need to use a gallery plugin.
We recommend using the Envira Gallery. In our speed tests, we found it to be the fastest WordPress gallery plugin. It’s also fully responsive and SEO friendly out of the box.
For more tips, see our complete beginner’s guide to image SEO.
Security and Safety of Your WordPress Site
Each week, Google blacklists around 20,000 websites for malware and around 50,000 for phishing. When a site is blacklisted, it doesn’t show up in any search results at all.
This means that the security of your WordPress site is crucial for good rankings. You don’t want all your hard work on SEO to go to waste if your site is compromised by a hacker.
The good news is that it’s not that difficult to keep your WordPress site safe — see the step by step instructions in our ultimate WordPress security guide.
At WPBeginner, we use Sucuri to protect our website against attacks. To see why we recommend this service, check out our case study of how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months.
Start Using SSL/HTTPS
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a technology that encrypts the connection between a user’s browser and the server they are connecting to. This adds an additional security layer to your WordPress site.
Websites secured with SSL are indicated by a padlock sign in the browser’s address bar. This makes your website more trustworthy, and it is required if you are running an online store with WordPress and processing sensitive payment information.
All top WordPress hosting companies offer free SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt. See our guide on how to get a free SSL certificate for your website for more details.
If you want a premium wildcard SSL certificate or just a regular certificate with security warranty, then we recommend using Domain.com.
Their SSL certificates come with a minimum of $10,000 security warranty and up to $1.75 million security warranty. You also get a TrustLogo site seal to display on your site for added credibility.
More SEO Tools and Resources
Once you get the hang of WordPress SEO best practices, you’ll want to take your skills even further to get ahead of your competition.
We have compiled a list of best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that you should use to boost your SEO. If you’re ready to try some more advanced techniques, you can also check out our archive of WordPress SEO articles.
We hope this article helped you learn how to properly optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Go ahead and implement a few of these WordPress SEO tips, and you should see an increase in your traffic within a few months as the search engines process your changes.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Such an in-depth information. As a new blogger this kind of posts are really encouraging and motivating.
Thank you and regards.
Glad our guide is helpful
Thanks a ton for this really informative and in-depth article. Means a lot to new bloggers such as myself.
You’re welcome
In the section which mentions permalinks, I can’t follow the steps because the option is not available in the admin menu. Is this option only available for WordPress Business Accounts? I’ve got a Premium Account “only”.
Our guides are for WordPress.org, you can see our comparison of the two platforms in our article below:
/beginners-guide/self-hosted-wordpress-org-vs-free-wordpress-com-infograph/
Thankyou for this very wonderful and informative article. As a beginner the informations shared here helped me a lot to gain a much better understanding on WordPress SEO. Thank you and wishing you all the very best in all your future endeavors…
Glad you found our content helpful
Thank you so much it was very helpful.
You’re welcome
Thank you so much! Very usefull
You’re welcome, glad our post was helpful
Nice and handy article. This website has been my key reference for the past 6-years and the contents still looks new.
Glad you continue to find our content helpful
This is awesome
I never knew I could find such a helpful content
Thanks
Glad our guide was helpful
Thanks for this information. It clear and easy to understand.
Glad our guide was helpful
A highly informative article (for a digital dummy like me); thank you!
This post is jam packed with useful pointers. Readers will find valuable info covering many topics.
I used to try learning WordPress from everywhere (I intend to start blogging). That was confusing but since I joined WPBeginner FB page, learning is so much easier (it is like a one-stop learning centre).
Keep up the good work, Team!
Glad you found our content and Facebook group helpful
Very Helpful site
Thank you
Thank you so much! This blog helps me a lot and even sort out the confusions I have till NOW!
You’re welcome
Clear and easy to follow. So helpful. Many thanks.
You’re welcome, glad our guide was helpful
as always great content great knowledge keep it up
Thank you
wpbeginner is just amazing. Very clear concept, use common English words. Never seen this kind of helpful blog.
Glad you found our guide helpful
I love this article, it’s very simple and clear!
SEO was an unknown world to me, with this article, I no longer feel lost! I will apply all of this advice. thank you
You’re welcome, glad our guide could help clear up any confusion
This is an awesome post. I have saved this url for future reference.
Glad you found our post helpful
Thanks so much for all the info has taught me lots.
You’re welcome
Wow… just thank you!
You’re welcome
Really Appreciate Thank you
You’re welcome
It is very helpful. Thanks for sharing
You’re welcome
Very Informative for New blogger its really usefull.
Glad you found our article helpful
Thank your for this great content.
I’ll keep exploring and advertising it!
Cheers
Glad you like our articles and thank you for sharing it to those who may need them
Mannnn. I have learned so much from your website. Let me know how can I ever pay you back. Not with real money of course
Glad our guides have been helpful to you
very good article i read this article this is very useful article for SEO.
Thank you, glad you like our article
Another great article from wpbeginner! Thanks for the guidance, I am currently trying to improve SEO for my website. Two days ago I knew nothing about SEO but this has helped improve my understanding.
You’re welcome, glad you liked our article and hope our guides continue to help you
Awesome and great content . It’s the perfect blog to learn all A-Z about WP.
Loved it .
Thank you, glad you’ve found our content helpful
Hi
What is the difference between https and http and can I just put https in on my settings or do I need a plugin for that
Daleen
You require an SSL certificate for HTTPS, you would want to take a look at our article here:
/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-ssl-and-https-in-wordpress/
How can I do good SEO for my online store website? Kindly guide me in this regard.
Most of the recommendations in this article should still be able to help with a store but we will look into if we can include more specifics for stores in the future.
I srarted my blog but I wasn’t getting traffic and after following you I am getting traffic not that much but yes people are coming.
Glad our guide could help you improve your SEO
If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices.
Thanks for sharing how you feel, we hope our article helps people looking to improve their SEO
Always informative and interesting. My questions are always answered when I come to this site so it has become my go-to when I’m not sure what to do. Thank you!
You’re welcome, glad our articles have been helpful
Thank You For Guiding Us To Start Learning WordPress.
You’re welcome, glad you’ve found our guides helpful
Clear and concise, thank you. Very informative
You’re welcome, glad you liked our article
Very good article. Learnt heaps from it.
Thank you, glad you liked our guide
Professional, concise and clearly written text. And more than useful for me, who has been struggling for a long time to delve into the “little” secrets of WordPress. Thank you Syed for keeping the promise of selflessly sharing your knowledge.
Glad you found our guide helpful
When a blog is mentioned in the various SEO tactics, is it synonymous with website? Or do websites require different applications?
Thank you!
They are roughly the same, the main difference is where the content of the site is located. You would want to take a look at our article here for a more in-depth explanation: /beginners-guide/what-is-a-blog-and-how-is-it-different-from-a-website-explained/
Wonderful experience gathered while I was going through your great article. Keep it up and best of luck at all times.
Glad you enjoyed our tutorial
Thanks a lot, I always used to get confused about WordPress websites due to so many internal content duplicate errors.
I am trying my best to work on those errors too. Though I loved your Article and once again I will start from scratch and hope it will work!
Thanks
You’re welcome, hope our article helps you understand the logic of SEO better
Wow! I love this. But I need more knowledge in optimizing my site speed. Can u you please recommend a post on your website for me?
For speeding up your site, you would want to take a look at our article here: /wordpress-performance-speed/
Hey i just want to thank you alot for this grear article and site overall, over the years ive been into alot of niches all on the internet. Up untill recently i never really saw blogging as something with as much potentional as it might have. Recently i started working on a project and since my seo skills got rusty overtime this was a great article to refresh them, and very specific for wordtpress so with my first project using it i did not have a hard time setting this up as i wouldve had without this.
Goodjob on the creation of this site and the amount of work you actually put in to creating this content which is also free.
Enjoy your day!
Sincerly,
Nando
Thank you, glad you liked our article and glad it could be used as a good refresher
Thank you for all this information. I am sure i’ll keep coming back to it.
You’re welcome, glad you found this content helpful
Thanks for that, Just jumped over from Blogger and I am so glad I did. These tips have helped me loads today , cheers
Glad our guide could be helpful
I’m so excited to be receiving your instructional emails! You have completely dispelled my fear that these things are too “techno” or complex for me to accomplish on my own. Your instructions are so very clear and well-written that I’m having no problem whatsoever in comprehending the steps but also in implementing them! You’ve actually handed me two gifts: 1. The ability to handle all aspects of owning a top notch, successful travel blog, and 2, a completely new and improved level of confidence in my ability to reach my goals. Bravo and Thanks!
You’re welcome, glad our newsletter and articles have been able to help you
Thank you for a very insightful article. I learned a lot and will be visiting your page more often. Keep up the good work.
You’re welcome, glad you liked our article
Thanks for the information about showing summaries vs. full posts.
Question: I am building a portfolio website, not a blogging site.
Does this tip apply to informational pages as well as blogs?
thanks
Yes
Really a great article for beginners with pictures for better understanding.
Glad you liked our article
I love your articles
Thank you
Are sites that don’t blog doomed to invisibility by Google?
No, but without continually updated content it is more difficult to rank highly
Thank you, are you aware of any resources on this particular SEO topic?
not at the moment
This is a Great articles
Thank you