WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for designing and maintaining a website. There are distinct benefits to using WordPress for your business website, one of which is the ease of making your web pages more SEO friendly. With society increasingly depending on search engines to find the businesses and products they need, having a strong presence among search engine results is crucial to your success.
Here are five ways you can use WordPress to make your website more search friendly:
- Optimize the URL – The URL is one of the top features of your website the search engines use to determine relevancy. By optimizing your URLs with your keywords, you can show search engines that your website is relevant to your specific niche.
- Use keywords in titles and meta descriptions – Titles and meta descriptions are what people see when they perform a search. Search engines also frequently use these to find relevant sites for their searchers. By optimizing your title with keywords to be relevant to your clients, you can help show the search engine as well as your customers that you have what they are looking for.
- Increase page loading speeds with apps – Having a fast page load time is important not only for your visitors, but also for SEO. The amount of time it takes for a page to load is another important consideration by search engines. WordPress offers apps, such as Smush.it, to shrink images so that pages load faster.
- Do not block search engines – Some developers use the WordPress feature of blocking search engines from seeing a full website while they are still designing the site. But when your site is finished and ready for visitors, it is important to turn the search engine-blocking feature off. Sounds obvious, but so many small business websites fail to do this, which is costly but easy to fix.
- Encourage comments – Some small businesses turn off comments for fear of a negative remark. But encouraging engagement will bring more people to the site. This can have a direct impact on your SEO as it will add natural keyword frequency to your pages and show the search engine that your website is still current. Having both increased keyword frequency and timely discussion will help boost the site image to search engines as well.
With WordPress, there are a number of tools that you can take advantage of to help you boost your SEO and get more out of this powerful platform.
