Experts keep talking about how WordPress is always search-engine-friendly. For the average blokes out there, it might be a little baffling to understand how a CMS platform cum website builder can be SEO friendly after all. Although, that is the only reason WordPress now rules about 28% of the entire internet and most newbies only want WordPress to power their sites. Most themes are compatible with SEO plugins like the All in One SEO pack, Ultimate SEO or Yoast SEO Plugin. It makes the sites search engine friendly, probably more than a non-template site with a flurry of “SEO-friendly” codes.
WordPress may be the leader of all CMS platforms and website builders, but there is nothing miraculous about the out of the box SEO settings. For those who are already gasping in surprise, think about this – not all sites which use WP are equally visible or profitable. The admins have to put in considerable amounts of effort to optimize the final site for their target search engines.
Where do we start optimizing?
Most sites usually start with using plugins for search engine optimization. That is not enough says our Singapore SEO expert. When a website wants more than the basics, it needs to work on the title tags, meta tags, permalinks, key-phrases, keyword research and image optimization. These are also somewhat necessary in the world of search engine optimization. So we thought of moving onto things that are a little more advanced and undoubtedly more impressive.
Introduce NoFollow tags
Nofollow tags make sure that search engine bots do not follow or crawl these pages. The Nofollow sculpting process is about diverting the link juice to pages that truly need it. For example – you may have a contact form on each page of your site. If you do not add a Nofollow attribute, the contact form will get a lot more attention than the main pages. Do you really want that? Add Nofollow attributes to the About Us page, RSS Feed, comment sections and category links. It will send a do not follow the signal to the bots immediately. It is a wonderful way to economize the crawl budget of a website domain. Bloggers, online entrepreneurs and company site owners have been using the NoFollow attribute dominantly to remove the “Hello World” (WP default first post) and tweak the permalinks to point away from a potential 404.
Noindex Archive, Category, Pagination or Tag Pages
These might be great for your users, but it is hell for most search engines. Search engine bots can keep bumping from one page to the next, and back to the page where it started time and again. Most search engines do NOT need to crawl each page for finding your blogs, posts, and products. Crawling one page just once is enough for Indexing your page on Google. Try using one of the WordPress recommended SEO plugins for this. They have a visual dashboard, which enables you to block certain archives, category tags, and tagged pages from crawling repeatedly.
Turn off your comments pages
Do you need paginated comments on your posts? Unless you are a page speed fiend or you get thousands of comments per post, you do not really need paginated comments. The problem started with WordPress 2.7, where the default option is switching on paginated comments. Go to Settings and Discussion. It will show you the duplicate pages on your site, which shows little to no unique content and hogs the crawl budget.
Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is a Mecca for all SEO experts and WordPress site owners, who want to do better than the average Jack in the Google search results pages. If you want to know more about ways to get organic traffic, Webmaster Tools should be your old haunt. It will tell you about all the key phrases you are ranking for and the distribution of your keyword use. It will also notify you of broken links, 404s, and other redirects. GWT is ideal for keeping an eye on your site and finding out if you are facing hacking attacks at any point in time.
Get an XML sitemap plug-in
An .XML sitemap is now mandatory for any website owner or admin. Providing your CMS with a plug-in always helps in the sitemap generation process. A plug-in will help you keep your sitemap updated, and it will automatically create new sitemaps for Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Possibly the biggest advantage of working with WordPress is its user-friendly nature. Since it is an open source platform, you will find thousands of users talking about their experience, troubleshooting methods and latest updates to plugins, templates and security patches from time to time.
Author Bio: Brad Smith has been working in the SEO domain for the last ten years. He has been around during the most significant algorithm changes that shook the world of digital marketing time and again. This Singapore SEO expert is one of the best when it comes to e-commerce optimization on WordPress.
