WordPress Websites and SEO
October 20, 2014
There are many reasons to choose WordPress as your website builder. It’s easy to use, expandable and updated often. My favourite reason for using WordPress though is it’s out-of-box SEO ready.
Google (and search engines alike) can easily find and index your WordPress website because:
- Permalinks allow your sites to have clean URL’s
- Auto-completes your meta data
- Proper headings hierarchy
- Image ALT tag control
Permalinks allow your sites to have clean URL’s
Clean URL’s are important because it looks nicer to the end-user, and it can provide vital key terms to Google. So what is a clean URL?
Have you ever visited a website and the link looked like www.example.com/index.php?category=food&item=2382? That doesn’t look like the kind of URL you would ever remember.
What if the URL looked like www.example.com/food/sushi? That’s a lot more memorable by using English words, no numbers and no strange symbols.
Out of the box, WordPress has a great feature called “Permalinks” that will allow you to rewrite those ugly looking URL’s to the clean URL’s that are SEO friendly.
Auto-completes your meta data
There is special data that should developed into every website that the regular user does not see. This ‘meta data’ is meant specifically for search engines, providing them with more information about your website. WordPress websites will by default add this meta data, and it can be modified by you under the “General” tab in the “Admin Dashboard” area to change the title and description meta data.
Proper headings hierarchy
Search engines like Google weigh the content on your website differently. Larger text contain more importance than smaller text. Text ‘above the fold’ is more important than text ‘below the fold’. And of course, the more important the text, the more times your website will appear in Google when a user’s search contains that text.
Some of the most important content on your website is your “H” tags – H1, which is your most important heading, H2, which is your second most important heading, and so on!
Image ALT tag control
Have you ever wondered how Google knows that a picture of a car is a car? Or when you search for a cat and Google displays a bunch of cat photos?
Attached to every image is a hidden piece of text that are meant to give search engines some information about that image – this is called the ALT tag.
WordPress automatically sets the name of your image as the alt tag, but you can change the ALT tag to whatever content you would like my going to the WordPress Media Library.