Optimize a WordPress site for search engines

SEO literally means “search engine optimizationOptimization means making a system—in this case, a website—excellent so that it works well within a specific environment, in our case, Google, the leading search engine. Optimization efforts aim to achieve higher rankings in Google's indexes.

There Google results page It typically consists of 10 addresses, plus a local business box, an image embed, and, if the topic is highly topical, results from Google News. However you look at it, front-page spots are limited, so to get there, your site needs to be optimized to the max.

Many people think that SEO is pure manipulation: "making Google believe" or "fooling" a site by making it appear authoritative when it isn't. In reality, with the latest algorithm updates, which as we know are named after some particular animals (Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon), Google rewards quality. Quality of content and optimization.

Only a truly optimized site can rank. WordPress It's an extremely popular content management system (CMS). Its popularity is due to its ease of use, its constant updates, and its large community of developers and graphic designers, which now allows for extensive customization.

WordPress is a great system for creating a website, managing a blog, producing content, and marketing your business online. It's used by sites like CNN, Panorama, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Bloomberg, Sony, Disney, Microsoft, Beyoncé, the Times, Facebook Newsroom, Katy Perry, Mercedes Benz, and more.

It's a platform that works, but in its basic version, as installed, it causes quite a few optimization headaches. It's no coincidence that plugins have been developed that partially solve these problems. In the following guide, we'll tell you what optimizations you need to implement, which plugins to use, and how to "fix" your WordPress installation to get a 100% optimized site.

Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines

Optimizing a website requires skills and technical knowledge that plugins cannot fully address. Being complementary tools, they must fit within a comprehensive project. optimization which aims to eliminate all those factors that prevent correct indexing.

1. Verify that the site is indexable.

WordPress has a basic option designed to "keep" your site private, meaning it won't be found by search engines. In traditional HTML sites, to prevent Google from indexing your site, simply add the directive Noindex, Nofollow in the Head section. Since WordPress was created to avoid touching the code, there is a checkbox in Settings / Reading. After logging in, go to the section and make sure this box is NOT checked. If it is, uncheck it and save.

2. Using rewritten URLs helps rankings

Still in the Settings section, move to Permalinks. Make sure that the “Permalink” are set as / %postname%/ (article name). Why is it important to rewrite page URLs this way? Because this way we can incorporate the title keywords into the page address.

For example, imagine your website for a gym in Lugano needs to appear in search engines for the keyword "Fitness Lugano." The best thing to do would be to create a page called www.lamiapalestra.ch/fitness-lugano/ (the address is purely fictional). Without the rewritten permalinks, WordPress would have set it to www.lamiapalestra.ch/?p=103, which—you'll agree—isn't exactly optimized.

Having such an optimized structure allows you to directly target keywords with internal pages, rather than the home page. Always remember that for each change, you will have to press the button Save, in blue, evident.

SuggestionThis operation should be done at the beginning, before you've even written a single article. That is, immediately after optimization. This way, you'll avoid Google from (poorly) indexing unrewritten articles. Be careful not to leave them as Permalink The one containing the post date. It's useless even if you're using WordPress exclusively for your blog. And there's a reason.

For Google, an address like /2017/10/05/fitness-lugano/ – which highlights the date on which the article was published – is less optimized than the option / %postname% / (article name), as it considers 5, 10, 2017 as top-level folders. Essentially, we're telling Google that the fitness-gym article is placed inside folder 05, which is a subfolder of 10, which is a subfolder of 2017, which is a subfolder of the domain name (Root). To put it simply: use the “item name” option.

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3. Decide between www and non-www version

A site can be reached from the browser either by typing www or not. It may seem like a trivial matter, but deciding which version to use is fundamental for avoid duplicationThis is because Google treats www and non-www as two distinct versions, with all the consequences that this entails.

This is an often overlooked optimization step, but it's actually crucial. So, go to Settings / General and set your WordPress Address (URL) option by removing or adding the www (always preceded by http://). Do the same for the site address (URL).

WordPress Plugins for SEO

As anticipated in the introduction, WordPress is best optimized when we use Plugins specifically designed for SEOWordPress is spectacular in this regard. Plugins solve so many problems, and if you have one, you can be sure you'll find the right one. In the SEO field, well-developed plugins have established themselves for several years, designed to simplify SEO and, in some cases, aid positioning.

What should an ideal SEO plugin do anyway?

First of all, a plugin should be lightweight and not overload navigation, making it slow. It should never be forgotten that installing too many plugins slows down the system. SEO plugins, by acting on every article/page of the site, write to the heaviest part of the database. MySQL behind how WordPress works. Each optimization adds strings to the database that must be promptly recalled at each page opening.

An SEO Plugin, considering the native WordPress conformation, which is installed without any possibility of optimizing the Meta Tags, should first of all allow you to modify the Title Tag of the page and the Meta DescriptionDuplicate Title Tags and the absence of Meta Description They can affect positioning. Their absence or lack of care would make the site appear less "quality" than we expect it to be, to have a chance of ranking high on Google.

From a more advanced perspective, the SEO plugin should include a sitemap and allow for refined optimizations to avoid duplication. WordPress is a CMS designed to manage a blog, so for each article published, it creates an archive by month, year, author, category, and tag, not to mention the site's layout.

There is a very high probability that parts of the text of an article will be repeated dozens of times, generating textual and Meta-tag duplications. To prevent this, an SEO Plugin should allow you to de-index all those paginations, archiving and categorizations that only create duplicates and which, while being useful to readers, are instead harmful to search engines.

What are the most popular SEO plugins?

To upload an SEO plugin, simply go to Plugin / Add New. Even by choosing among the popular or recommended ones it is easy to come across the two most used plugins YOast SEO and All In One SEO developed by Michael Torbert.

Which of the two do you prefer? There's no point in ranking them. Personally, I use both. The big difference is that Yoast presents itself as a plugin.Content Oriented”, which includes not only all the options for basic and advanced optimizations, but also an analysis of the page content (quite fallacious in my opinion) which checks the presence of keywords, in percentage, in the most relevant textual elements for optimization such as titles, images, bold and in general the density of presence of the keywords. Keyword.

Why is it fallacious? Because it is counterproductive to optimize a web page by focusing solely on one thing. Keyword (Google rewards pages that rank for multiple keywords.) Furthermore, focusing on a keyword risks writing empty, bland text that provides no real information, because our only concern is meeting those presence percentages, which are completely useless if we don't provide quality answers.

That said Yoast For beginners, it's fine, as long as you don't treat it like a bible, because sometimes using an advanced editor plugin like Visual Composer is enough to bypass all keyword-based calculations. Instead, it's good practice to write quality content, using keywords carefully, and focusing on the information you want to provide to users.

All In One SEO doesn't do this analysis, but it seems to be more lightweight. If you use the latter, be sure to add the plugin. Google XML Sitemaps, which generates a Sitemap of all the contents present, with the manual exceptions valid for those contents that you think you should not index.

Yoast SEO plugin
All In One SEO
XMl Sitemap

Use Google Search Console

With the addition of an SEO plugin and the related advanced and basic optimizations (which we will summarize at the end), we move on to analyzing the site's performance on Google. What better tool than Google Search ConsoleThis is a free console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, that helps you present your site's content to Google, allowing for better indexing. Google Search Console allows you to add your previously created sitemap, check the status of any errors in your meta tags, and verify traffic coming from Google (for this purpose, it should be used with Analytics).

So just simply go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=it and add your WordPress site, choosing one of the authentication methods. Once your site is verified, you can go to Crawl/Sitemap to add your Sitemap in XML format, which Google will use to index the desired content. Through this interface, you can remove URLs you don't want displayed in the search engine, using the "URL removal” present under the “Google Index” heading.

Google Search Console can be connected to the two SEO plugins for an inside look at diagnostics. Used wisely, it can provide significant insights.

To eliminate errors resulting from incorrect use of meta tags, simply go to "Search Appearance" and then "HTML Improvements." If there are errors, such as Duplicate title tags or too short descriptionsGoogle will report them to us. We can then intervene on the pages that have these problems, correcting all the errors, thanks to SEO plugins.

Finally, we must choose the preferred version between www and non-www Also taking into account the https and http versions (basically, an https site has three other different versions). At the top right, under the Google account icon, you'll find the gear symbol. By clicking Site Settings, you can choose your preferred domain version. Keep in mind that you must have added all alternative versions first.

The WordPress Optimization Checklist

1. Make sure the Search Engine Visibility box, located under Reading in Settings, is unchecked.
2. Enable Permalinks by choosing the “Post Name” setting, also from the Settings menu.
3. Set the www or non-www version (the default is the former, unless the server has different settings).
4. Install an SEO Plugin and / or a Sitemap Plugin
5. Optimize the Title and Description Tags of each article/page and do so in the future.
6. In the advanced settings of the Plugins set as Noindex the Tags, Categories, Archive pages by month and year, as well as those related to the author, plus the media and slide pages
7. Enter the site on Google Search Console (including the unused version between www and non-www).
8. In Google Search Console, add Sitemaps.
9. Check HTML Enhancements in Search Appearance
10. Choose your preferred version (between www and non-www).