Configure your WordPress Site for SEO

WordPress has evolved greatly from its origin as a powerful blogging platform to an effective CMS for websites. WordPress has some first-class SEO attributes and works well even if you don’t do anything about search engine optimization. However, there are some tweaks that you can use to enhance the SEO of your WordPress site. A few minor things and you are on your way to achieving an improved search engine ranking!

 

Configure your Permalinks

 

The permalinks can be configured in WordPress under the ‘Settings’ tab. Permalinks can be used to configure your URL structure for any content in your blog or WordPress site. By editing the default URL structure of your WordPress site, you benefit from the presence of keywords in your content’s URL.

 

Keywords play a crucial role in the search engine ranking of your site, and including these on the site URLs can boost your rankings considerably. Many SEO experts believe that including a single-level URL is ideal for search engine ranking. You can easily achieve this via the Custom Structure option in your WordPress permalinks panel.

 

Title tags structure

 

The title tags play a vital role in SEO. It is essential to have a unique <title> tag for all your web pages. The title tags are what influence the users to click on a search result and you should make sure that your title tag contains relevant keywords so that you can easily drive traffic to your site.

 

The default setting in WordPress is to include your blog title ahead of your post title. This is not very desirable in terms of SEO. The <title> tag should always contain your post title ahead of your blog title. Any SEO plugin can help you edit your title tags on your WordPress site.

 

Meta tags structure

 

Metatags are nothing but short explanations about a particular webpage. The meta tag usually does not exceed 150 words and should contain relevant keywords. This helps in boosting your ranking to a certain extent.

 

WordPress does not furnish any provision to create custom description tags for your web pages. But it can be easily accomplished with the help of an SEO plugin. The meta tags structure is not quite significant for Google as the search engine does not give prominence to meta tags in search results as they have been extensively abused by site owners. However, using a high-quality and precise meta tag can help drive more traffic to your site as the users find relevant content and this, in turn, can boost your rankings as Google considers traffic density for its rankings. Also, there are many other search engines that still continue to rank websites based on meta tags.

 

Noindex to remove duplicate pages from getting listed

 

Duplicate pages can damage your rankings considerably. The problem with WordPress is that it incorporates different links to navigate between your content. This might lead to the creation of duplicate pages, which can hamper your search engine rankings.

 

This problem can be solved by using No-Index options. They inform the search engines to omit certain pages from the search results. Doing this can help reduce the ill effects of duplicate pages.

 

ZK is an expert associated with WebTrafficROI, an information vault for bloggers, entrepreneurs, companies and small business owners seeking to derive maximum results from their web activities and drive online business growth.