34 Best WordPress SEO Tips for Beginners

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essential in this competitive market. You can easily beat your competitors and steal their traffic using proper SEO techniques and our best WordPress SEO tips. In addition, these best WordPress SEO tips will improve website ranking and take your content to the first page of Google search results.

Also, if your site is on WordPress, you should focus on improving WordPress SEO by implementing the best WordPress SEO tips. However, WordPress is an SEO-friendly CMS, but you can make it even more SEO-friendly. Today, this WordPress SEO tutorial will tell you the best WordPress SEO tips to help make your WordPress website SEO-friendly.

If you have a WordPress website, you know how important it can be to optimize your website for search engines. An SEO-friendly website is more likely to be found on the first page of search results. See the detailed infographic below:

WordPress is a great CMS to use for SEO. WordPress outperforms the rest of the web builders that offer great SEO features. Many SEOs use WordPress exclusively to build websites. It’s simple: they are easier for search engines to find.

SEO has changed dramatically over the past few years but it's just as important as ever.

Best WordPress SEO Tips

• It is low cost compared to paid traffic sources.
• It provides actionable data for a long-term strategy.
• Organic search is one of the biggest channels of traffic.

SEO has been the buzzword in the online world. Every business wants to rank higher and appear on the first Google SERPs. Sometimes, however, we get too involved in search engine optimization. 

WordPress has hundreds of helpful SEO plugins which often take care of the basic things. However, you can use many other tips and tricks to make a significant difference.

You may also like to read:

• How Easy to Make Money With Shareasale Affiliate Program
• 13 Best Anti-Spam Plugins for WordPress
• 14 Most Important SEO KPIs to Track Performance of SEO Strategy
• Killer Ways to Monetize a Blog to Make Money Blogging
• Best AI Image Generators for Great Image Results

Why is SEO important? Best WordPress SEO Tips Checklist:

Our today’s article best WordPress SEO tips for beginners will provide a guideline of SEO best practices and simple techniques that are easy to forget.

1. SEO helps increase website traffic: Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques help to improve a website's visibility and rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs). This, in turn, increases the chance of getting more traffic to the site.

2. Helps build brand credibility: People trust your brand more when your website ranks higher in search engine results. A top SERP ranking tells people you're an authority and your content is valuable.

3. Better user experience: SEO optimization not only improves the ranking of a website but also focuses on providing a better user experience by improving website speed, optimizing images, providing relevant and high-quality content, and more.

4. Cost-effective marketing: SEO is a cost-effective marketing strategy as it brings organic traffic to your website without spending money on advertising.

5. Competitor analysis: By analyzing your competitor's website, you can gain insights on improving your content, keyword optimization, or website structure.

6. Local SEO attracts targeted traffic: Local SEO optimization helps your website rank higher for location-based searches, driving targeted traffic.

WordPress SEO tips checklist:

If used correctly, these techniques can make a huge difference in how your website ranks on Google.

Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide and Best WordPress SEO Tips for Beginners

Search engines are the most significant source of traffic. Therefore optimizing your content according to the search engine is very important. If you do not optimize your content correctly, your article search will not appear in the result.

Therefore any website owner must make your website search engine friendly.

Using a good WordPress SEO plugin, you can take your site to the next level. Many great SEO plugins are available for WordPress.

WordPress is swarming with many SEO plugins, but few overpower others.

Yoast SEO: In this recent times, Yoast has gained a lot of popularity. It helps you in many ways, like focusing on the best SEO keywords and writing the meta description, titles, and tags. It also analyzes every page based on the updated algorithm.

Rank Math: In a quick time, Rank math has gained so much popularity. Rank math focuses on on On-page SEO. When you start writing for your page/blog, it will tell you the keywords needed to be inserted. Once you do that, it will be checked by Rank math, underlining the things that need to be changed. It is also used to create an XML sitemap, Google Analytics integration, and track the ranking of keywords.

All in One SEO: More than 2 million websites prefer the All in One SEO Plugin. It can easily optimize the website, add meta description and title tag, quickly implement Google AMP SEO and automatically generate a sitemap and generate it to popular search engines.
But make sure you don’t go crazy about adding plugins because it will slow down your website speed.

Simply put, it helps optimize your content according to the search engine. These plugins also allow you to optimize the Meta description and title.

Key Features and Best WordPress SEO Tips:

• Content and SEO analysis.
• You can easily create XML Sitemaps.
• Can connect with Google Search Console.
• Breadcrumbs can add.
• Canonical URLs are set to avoid duplicate content.
• Bulk editor (can edit .htaccess file and Robots.txt file)

A vital tip for WordPress SEO is creating the correct permalink. Permalinks are an essential part of your site. They are the address of your site and blogs. If you do not optimize your permalinks, you might create broken links on your site. It can have severe effects on ranking and search appearance.

Always use the SEO-friendly permalink structure for your posts and pages so that it can better define your posts and pages. In addition, it helps in getting a better rank in search results.

Here is how to check and update your WordPress site’s permalink structure.

You need to visit the Settings » Permalinks page. Select the post name option and click the Save Changes button to store your settings.

There are certain things to be noted while creating permalinks.

• Always use a short yet informative form of permalinks.
• Do not add numbers or dates to the links.
• Make the link understandable for the user.
• Make it unique for every article that you create.

Google Search Console is a great tool that Google has created. It helps you track how your site is performing on Google. Apart from this, it also tells about the errors in your site.

It comes with many features to track your site:

• Search analytic
• Submit a sitemap
• Fix website errors
• Messages from the Google Search team
• Google Index

A sitemap is a list of your website URLs. It tells search engines about all pages and posts on your website. Sitemaps will guide Google and other search engine bots in taking proper pathways to your website. A sitemap helps search engine bots crawl a website, thus helping you rank higher. So, it is evident just how important creating a sitemap for your website is.

An XML sitemap offers a standardized way of listing posts and pages, making them discoverable for search engines. Here’s a straightforward example, a sitemap with a single URL:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>https://onlineinformationhub.com/increase-organic-traffic-to-your-website/</loc> <lastmod>(Date Comes Here)</lastmod> </url> </urlset>

The sitemap also helps Google crawlers crawl your website and understand its relevance to user searches. The search engine's crawlers will still crawl your website even when you do not have a sitemap. But when you use a sitemap, you show Google how to crawl your website, like giving it a proper pathway.

However, Sitemap does not improve your search ranking, but it allows search engines to crawl your website better.

Best WordPress SEO Tips

Having a sitemap will also give precedence and value to the more important pages of your website over others. Besides, a sitemap can also organize a large website better. It can highlight the website's purpose and speed up the crawling process for Google.

Content Delivery Network (CDN) boosts your website performance. CDN creates the cache file of your site and stores it on your server. When a visitor performs requests for a page, the visitor's closest server provides content for the requests.

It will reduce the load on your server, and your WordPress site is fast loading. You can use MaxCDN and Cloudflare on your site to get the benefits of CDN service.

It is crucial to select the best WordPress theme to improve WordPress SEO. Remember that all WordPress themes are not SEO optimized and not well coded. If you choose the wrong theme for your WordPress site, it affects your loading speed and SEO.

In addition, it is also compatible with third-party SEO plugins that can help make your website SEO friendly.

Social share buttons for any site or blog are crucial. Add a social share button below the content to make your content shareable. Adding social sharing buttons lets visitors quickly share blog posts on social media sites.

But you also have to pay attention to the performance of your site. So always use well-coded and lightweight social share plugins on your site.

Google takes security very seriously. If your site has a security issue, Google will immediately reduce your ranking. It would be best if you kept an eye on this.

Besides, you can use the most trusted WordPress security plugins, Wordfence and Sucuri.

Google offers a high ranking to fast-loading sites. If your site loading is slow, Google will lower your rank in search results. Therefore, consider your website's loading speed to get a good position on Google. If your site is fast loading in a Google search result, it will rank better.

Some Quick Tips for Improving Website Speed

• Upgrade to PHP 8.2
• Optimize your image's size
• Keep only useful plugins
• Remove unwanted media
• Optimize and minify your CSS and JS Files
• Use a good cache plugin
• Minimize redirects

Broken links There are links on your site that do not exist, and when visitors click on them, they show a 404 page not found error.

It dramatically influences your WordPress SEO and user experience. You can quickly fix broken links from your site using the Broken Link Checker plugin.

Spam comments take up extra space on your WordPress hosting, which increases the size of your database and it can affect your website loading speed.

You can use Antispam WordPress Plugins to deal with these spam comments. These plugins automatically block spam comments on your site.

You can use Titan Anti-spam & Security plugin. If a user posts a comment, the plugin's background check marks spam comments as spam and hides them on a site. It will help to improve user experience and increase engagement.

If your WordPress site is not mobile-friendly, it will not perform well in Google search results because more than half of the search is done by mobile. That is why Google better ranks mobile-optimized sites to Improve Mobile User Experience.

However, all WordPress themes come with responsive design. But it is your responsibility to check whether your site is responsive. For this, you can use the mobile-friendly testing tool.

When the Search engine bot crawls your site, they follow the Robots.txt file, which part of the site you want to index and which part of the block.

Therefore, if you misconfigure the Robots.txt file, it can harm your website ranking.

Plugins help to increase the site's functionality, but if you use more plugins on your site, it affects your website. So you should delete unwanted plugins on your site which are useless.

Note: Inactive plugins and themes can cause security vulnerabilities and also affect your WordPress site performance.

Best WordPress SEO Tips

Also, delete unwanted media and inactive themes which are useless on your site because the unwanted media takes extra space on your WordPress site and enhances your WordPress database size.

You can reduce the web page size and perform better by compressing images.

Many images compressing plugins are available on WordPress.org. Just have to choose the best image optimization plugin.

Image Optimizer plugins automatically reduce the image size when you upload images to your content.

You can significantly improve your site's performance by Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It will reduce your web page's size and make your site blazing fast.

Even Google recommends minifying javascript and CSS files from the site.

WordPress uses the database to store information. If you do not optimize the database of the WordPress site regularly, it can affect the formats on your website.

There are several plugins to optimize the database. We use the WP-Optimize plugin to optimize the database on our blog. Also, do not forget to delete the unwanted table from your database.

Images take a lot of time to load compared to other elements. If you use many lots of images for your article, it increases your page load time.

In this situation, the lazy load plugin handles the page loading speed.

GZIP Compression compresses your webpage size and makes your site fast.

The two most popular caching plugins – are WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache, which allow you to GZIP compression.

Make your site simple and clean because Google does not like decorating sites. Also, visitors will feel uncomfortable on your site.

Keep the background colour of your site white. So that your site looks clean and simple and readers can easily read your article.

Meta Description is vital in increasing your content's click-through rate (CTR). 

You can write custom meta descriptions using Yoast SEO and can optimize to get higher CTR. But do not forget to add keywords to your meta descriptions.

If you do not optimize title tags correctly, you lose the opportunity to increase your content's potential.

Titles are limited by pixels, meaning Google will only show the first 600 pixels. Many SEO plugins use character counts, which is a close approximation.

Best WordPress SEO Tips

When search engines crawl your content, they first see title tags and meta descriptions. If you optimize it correctly, you can boost your content ranking. Always try to start the title with the main keywords.

The heading of your website plays a vital role in SEO too. It gives a context of what your website is all about to your users and search engines.

H1 tags boost your ranking. But do not fill the entire content with the H1 tag. These heading tags in HTML help understand the structure of the page. When you use appropriate headings, it improves the user experience for the visitors. It also helps your website rank on search engines’ result pages.

Use the main keywords on the heading of your website. Then add variants of keywords in the subsequent subheadings. But make sure that the inclusion of the keywords is natural and well-fitting.

Adding several subheadings to the website's content will structure the website. And this structure makes reading through the web pages easier for visitors. You must have noticed different heading levels, from Heading 1 to 6. It would be best if you decided on the headings you use based on the importance and context of the content.

Google can not read the image. It reads the image based on the alt tag.

It is the reason why you always give your images the correct name. In addition, you should also look at Alt tags. Optimized images help you get a good rank in image searches.

You must secure your website. When your website is secured, google and the user will trust you and feel relief that their information is safe, and without any worry, they can engage with your website. To make your website secure, you need to follow these steps.

• Your current host should support HTTPS and SSL.
• Purchase an SSL certificate or get it from let’s encrypt.
• Install the certificate.
• Check if it’s working.
• Redirect all your files from HTTP to HTTPS.

If you use HTTPS on your site, it boosts your ranking. It uses Google as a ranking factor. Google announced years ago that HTTPS is a ranking signal. If you run your site on HTTP, redirect it to HTTPS.

Many websites will claim to be HTTPS secured, but if they are not, Google will give you a warning before you enter.

Best WordPress SEO Tips

But it would be best if you did the redirection correctly, or it might otherwise affect your site's ranking and traffic badly. Even your traffic may be zero overnight.

Recommended for you:

• GreenGeeks Review: Deep Details, Pricing, and Features
• 14 Best High-Paying Google AdSense Alternatives
• How to Make Your Computer or Laptop Faster
• Ninja Forms Review: Features and Pricing with Pros & Cons
• TermsFeed Review with TermsFeed Pricing Details

Breadcrumb helps users know where they are on your site and helps search engines understand the structure data of your site.

Google states: Google Search uses Breadcrumb Markup to categorize the information from pages on the search results page.

WordPress uses PHP to run a website that makes more load on the server.

But when you use the caching plugin, it generates static HTML files. It reduces the number of requests between the server and the user's browser and improves loading speed. You can use the most famous cache plugin, W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.

SEO ultimately depends on keyword research. It helps you to understand what people are searching for and what they want to read.

Google Keyword Planner is the best keyword research tool developed by Google. You can use it to find the best keywords for any topic. The tool lets you view keyword competition, monthly searches, CPC, etc.

If you use low-quality hosting to create your WordPress site, then it will badly affect your WordPress SEO. The main reason is that your website will be mostly downtime and load very slowly, affecting your website ranking and SEO.

However, many web hosting companies promise to be the best. Therefore, choosing the best WordPress hosting service is daunting, especially if you are a beginner.

On WordPress, you can use the additional links option to internally link your page to your pages and posts on other parts of your site. It will help increase your chances of conversion and give your site more relevance.

Internal linking makes your post more relevant to search engines and visitors. In addition, visitors spend more time on your site, which reduces the bounce rate. In addition, Google treats content as quality content.

Internal linking helps retain users on your site longer. The authority of the links you add increases marginally if they are relevant and valuable to your content. You can add CTAs (calls to action) as a part of internal linking. It will help in generating leads and getting conversions.

This technique works like an internal link. External links make your content more valuable. But you should trust the linking site. Otherwise, your site may be penalized.

This technique refers to your content as trustworthy and informative in Google's eyes.

Backlinks are an ancient Google ranking factor. But backlinks should be from relevant, dependable, and well-ranked websites. If you make poor and low-quality backlinks, it can hurt your WordPress SEO badly.

Remember, do not buy backlinks for your site; otherwise, you may have to face Google Penalty because such backlinks include low-quality and pornographic links.

If you monetize your site by affiliate links for revenue, use the Nofollow tag for them. It will help boost your WordPress SEO.

Finally, say that quality content is the king of SEO. Even with these best WordPress SEO tips, you will get a positive result if you write good content on your website and optimize it well.

Apart from this, you also have to pay attention to the length of the content. Long content gets a good rank in Google search results. If you write content on your blog, then it should be at least 1000 to 2000 words.

Final Words on Best WordPress SEO Tips

So these are some of the best WordPress SEO tips you can implement on your WordPress site and take your site to the next level.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about increasing website traffic through organic search engine results. A well-executed and thorough SEO strategy can help you boost your online presence and increase click-through and conversion rates.

These changes and the best WordPress SEO tips for beginners we've provided won't work like magic. But still, don't be surprised if they move your pages from Google's second page to page one in a matter of weeks, especially if you have a more significant site with lots of pages and good domain authority.