Important SEO checklist for WordPress sites

Have you chosen the platform of WordPress as your CMS of your website? The most obvious reason can be that WordPress as a choice be its SEO friendliness. Rather than to look for the other things, WordPress in itself provides a lot of powerful features on their home page that the platform is proud of being SEO friendly.

Yes, though it is true that WordPress sites are SEO friendly but building a website on the SEO platform is not enough only. Apart from the powerful SEO features, one has to understand the tactics for SEO and how to implement the right strategies to get higher rankings with the search result page. SEO might take some time to show results, but here comes WordPress for your help. It becomes easier for beginners to grow traffic from Google when they use the CMS as their platform.

Here is the complete guide that helps you to put a check on the checklist for the WordPress site. These tips will help you to optimize your website and enjoy SEO successfully.

Before we move on with the SEO checklist for the WordPress sites, let us have a brief look at WordPress and WordPress SEO.

WordPress has become the most popular CMS that holds more than 35% of the websites present on the internet. Most of the reputed websites like the TechCrunch, BBC America etc are designed and developed on the WordPress platform.

The platform has become so popular because:

• Simple and easy to use
• Flexible and adaptable
• Open source and powerful community
• Strong security layers
• Regular updates to increase features

WordPress SEO

Though CMS is a powerful platform that makes it easier to implement SEO strategies. But WordPress on its own is not the option available for the solid SEO strategy but this can help you to understand where to put efforts to rank your website on Google.

SEO gets technical and the search engine algorithm always keeps on changing. As the WordPress SEO tactics are strong but that means that one has to use other tactics as well. Good content, backlinks and the site optimization are yet to be taken care of for your website.

Let us begin with the Basic SEO checklist for the WordPress websites that is used by best San Diego SEO Expert. Before you start with the SEO techniques, make sure that these techniques have a direct effect on the rakings of the website.

1. Install Yoast SEO- This is the free plugin that is made for WordPress and a few of the other Free CMS platforms. This is one of the most powerful plugins that perform multiple functions and helps in the higher rankings for a website. This creates the sitemaps, optimize the metadata and apply no-index attributes for the specific areas of the website and a lot of more other things. Thus, making it easier for implementing the SEO techniques and gives you higher ranking results. In case if you are using WordPress, then you can find out the SEO plugin for your platform easily from the plugins section of your website.
2. Create Sitemap- With the help of sitemaps, search engines get to know where they can find the important content on your site. This is then crawled and indexed by the search engines. Simply with the Yoast, you can make the sitemap of your website. For the other platforms, you can find a lot of sitemap generators around.
3. Create and add robots.txt file- This file is the plain text file and commands the search engines where they can go on the site and this includes a link to the sitemap that is followed by some of the directives. This commands the search engine not to crawl or index the content of the web pages with these directives. SEO Yoast helps you to create the robots.txt file and even works for the non WordPress users.
4. Google Analytics – This is the free tool by Google that gives complete information about the website. It lets you know about how many people visited your site and what time most people visit and much more. Google Analytics is an important tool that helps you to know about the deeper insights of the website.
5. Set up search console- For all the webmasters, setting up the Google search console is one of the most powerful tools. It gives you all the information about the performance of a website. It helps you to improvise the SEO strategy for your website and gives you the loophole about the strategies that you have been using.
6. Optimizing URL- WordPress structures of the website but these settings are not SEO friendly, permalinks can help you to do that. With the proper use of the keywords in the post, URL is important when you are doing SEO of WordPress site
7. On page SEO optimization- This is what that is something really required for a WordPress website. Optimizing the site whether it is CMS based or on any other platform or language, it is important that it is optimized with a proper strategy. Make sure that you are using the Content headers from H1 to H6 as a critical part of your SEO strategy. It is a good practice to use the keywords in the headings at least in the H1. Also, check for the theme handles of the headings as well.
8. Improve the site speed- This is another important thing that one must keep a check on when they are looking for the SEO. It is important to have a faster loading speed for a website. For the ranking factors, speed is an important tool for Google. The user conversions and experience are much affected by the Page loading speed that directly impacts the SEO for a website.
9. Set up a preferred domain- Choosing the right domain is important for a website, make sure that you select domain properly and your site is accessible with that domain. When you are launching a new website, then make sure that you are replacing the existing site but you have to use the same version of the domain that you have used in the past.
10. Find the primary keyword to target- Keywords have always been the best and one of the most important strategies for the website. It is a good practice that each page or post on the website is targeting at least one main primary keyword. With the help of the right tools like the keyword planner by Google, you can choose the right keyword for your website and start optimizing it accordingly.
11. Find the long tail keyword variations- For searching a single service or product, people use different terms and ways. 15% of Google searches are always new, which means they have never been searched before. This is why it becomes important to optimize the long tail keywords.
12. Custom URL for pages and posts- Sometimes, you can get lengthy and truncate URL with the WordPress. The best part with WordPress is that you can customize the URL as per the requirement. It is a good practice to put the primary keyword in the URL. Chose the custom permalink for the page and modify it as per your SEO requirements for that particular page.
13. Unique Title tags and meta descriptions- Title tags give information about the page and the website to the search engine. Thus, it is one of the most important ranking factors. With the Yoast SEO, one can automatically set the title tag and also you have the ability to overwrite it as per the requirement
14. Internal Linking- It is important to use the internal linking within your content. This helps in the creation of the relevancy between the different pages of a website. It makes it easier to navigate the website. With WordPress adding the internal links is much easier and all you need is to highlight the text that you want to link and then click on the link button that is present in the toolbar.
15. Optimized File names for images- Images are an important part of the content. At least one image on the page is required for the rankings. It is easy to simply upload a picture on WordPress sites. The only thing to do is to alter the names of the images once they have been uploaded on the website.
16. Adding alt text to the images- Make sure that alt text is always added to the images to all the images uploaded on the Website. These help to give a context and description of the images to the search engines. Adding alt text in WordPress is easier with WordPress.
17. Cache plug in installation- This is required for improving the speed of the site and site’s performance. Using a cache plugin to cache your posts and the pages as the static files are considered an important strategy for a website ranking.
18. Using long tail variations: Throughout the content, just simply sprinkle the long-tail keywords on the webpage and this becomes an important factor for providing the high rankings on the website.
19. Put a check on the content- Content is one of the major strategies that is used for the SEO of a website. Write a classy and interesting introduction that grabs the attention of the users and is informative enough. Focus on the readability of the content and make sure that the content is evenly distributed with the keywords.
20. Identify the crawl errors- This means that Google is not able to view your content on your website and this means that the site will not be ranked. Using the Google search consoles can help you to find about the crawl errors.

These are some of the most important and best SEO tools that you must employ for better SEO of your website. Apart from this, there are a lot of things as well that can help you to get the better rankings, As SEO is a dynamic process, it is advised for the webmasters to have a look on how the things are changing and optimize their websites accordingly. In this article, we have tried to cover the most important checklist for the SEO of a website that has been developed with the help of WordPress.