WordPress SEO Tutorial (From Beginner To Advanced Guide) – 2021
By improving your WordPress SEO you can quickly increase your website traffic and revenue.
The default installation of WordPress has better SEO than other counterparts, but there is a lot you need to do to improve the SEO of WordPress.
In this beginner’s friendly tutorial, I have shared everything you can do to optimizing your website for WordPress SEO.
How do I’m sure of that?
Well, AkshayDigital Agency (this blog) runs on WordPress and we receive more than 1 million page views every month.
However, one thing that you should know, there are rumors that WordPress has the best possible SEO options. But this is not entirely true!
Let me elaborate.
WordPress is not SEO friendly.
At least, the default WordPress installation is not.
If you, like many others, believe that your stock installation of WordPress will get you excellent, or even good rankings on search engines, you are misinformed.
WordPress needs to be SEO optimized for search engine bots to understand your WordPress website and rank you appropriately. Luckily, making your WordPress blog SEO friendly is rather easy with the help of this guide and with combinations of WordPress SEO plugins.
Here, I will outline some of the default settings of WordPress which are not SEO friendly, and what you should do to make it SEO friendly.
Basics of WordPress SEO:
WordPress SEO can be categorized into 3 levels:
- On Page WordPress SEO
- On-Site WordPress SEO
- Off-site WordPress SEO
On page SEO and On-site SEO, are something that you can easily take care of with the help of your content, plugins and a bit of discipline.
Off-Site WordPress SEO consists of generating backlinks to your website. This can be achieved by outreach, broken link building or by utilizing other techniques.
In this guide, we are more focused on On Page and On-Site aspect of SEO.
Let me explain these two with a simple example:
This technique will help you to optimize any post/page on WordPress for a target keyword. This helps search engine understand what your content is about and help you rank for the right keyword. If you like to learn more about this, read our guide on On page SEO.
On-Site SEO:
These are more technical SEO settings where you help search engine bots effectively crawl and index your website. Factors like page speed, Robots.txt, and others play a major role.
Again, if you understand the basics with the help of this WordPress SEO tutorial, you will have no problem optimizing your WordPress website.
Getting the basics right:
Before we move into a more actionable part of our WordPress SEO guide, let us make sure our basics are strong.
Check WordPress visibility settings:
Login to your WordPress admin panel, and head over to settings > Readings, and ensure that “Search Engine Visibility” setting is unchecked.
This is how it should look like:
A lot of times default WordPress installer keep this option checked, and this prevents search engine bots from crawling your website.
WWW Vs. non WWW:
Another important WordPress SEO question asked by a lot of users is, to use WWW (https://domain.com) or non-WWW (https://www.domain.com) at the time of WordPress installation.
Search engine treats WWW and non-WWW as two different websites, so you need to pick one and stick to it. This could be configured at the time of setting up WordPress, by going to Settings > General.
As of 2021, there is no SEO benefit of choosing either of them. However, I recommend using the non-www version, as the shorter version of URLs is better for sharing on social media or elsewhere..
WordPress SEO plugin:
There are many WordPress SEO plugins out there for various purpose. For example:
- Overall SEO: Yoast SEO, RankMath, All in one SEO
- Internal link SEO: Linkwhisper
Personally, I’m a huge fan of Yoast SEO plugin which constantly adds new SEO features, and is free, and reliable. Be it a usual content based website or an e-commerce based website, Yoast SEO helps you in optimizing your website for SEO.
16 Ways To Boost WordPress site SEO
1. Add your WordPress Website to Search console
Google search console is a free SEO tool by Google that you should use from day one. Even if you don’t know how to use it, you should add your website to Google search console.
This will help you to collect all important data and as you move forward with your WordPress SEO learnings, this data will help you in faster optimization of your WordPress website.
Here is a detailed tutorial on how to submit your website to Google search console.
2. Implement WordPress Sitemap
Let’s start with Sitemap, which is an XML file containing an index of all important link (Posts, Pages, Tags, categories) of your WordPress website. This sitemap file will help search engine bots like Google bots to effectively find all the pages of your website.
There are many WordPress Sitemap plugins out there, but I prefer using Yoast SEO Sitemap feature which is one of the oldest and reliable ones out there. All you need to do is install and activate the plugin and go to plugin settings and generate a sitemap for your blog.
By default, your sitemap link will be http://domain.com/sitemap.xml (Ex. sitemap)
Now, go to Google search console and Bing Webmaster tool, submit and verify your site and submit a sitemap. This will help them to crawl and index all internal pages of your Blog.
- Bonus tip: Also add a Sitemap link at the footer of your WordPress website and also in the Robots.txt of your Blog.
3. WordPress Permalink (Search friendly URL’s)
The WordPress default permalink is not SEO friendly, and you need to change that as well.
The SEO friendly URL is one which is easy to read. Example:
By improving your WordPress SEO you can quickly increase your website traffic and revenue.
The default installation of WordPress has better SEO than other counterparts, but there is a lot you need to do to improve the SEO of WordPress.
In this beginner’s friendly tutorial, I have shared everything you can do to optimizing your website for WordPress SEO.
How do I’m sure of that?
Well, ShoutMeLoud (this blog) runs on WordPress and we receive more than 1 million page views every month.
However, one thing that you should know, there are rumors that WordPress has the best possible SEO options. But this is not entirely true!
Let me elaborate.
WordPress is not SEO friendly.
At least, the default WordPress installation is not.
If you, like many others, believe that your stock installation of WordPress will get you excellent, or even good rankings on search engines, you are misinformed.
WordPress needs to be SEO optimized for search engine bots to understand your WordPress website and rank you appropriately. Luckily, making your WordPress blog SEO friendly is rather easy with the help of this guide and with combinations of WordPress SEO plugins.
Here, I will outline some of the default settings of WordPress which are not SEO friendly, and what you should do to make it SEO friendly.
Page Contents
Basics of WordPress SEO:
WordPress SEO can be categorized into 3 levels:
- On Page WordPress SEO
- On-Site WordPress SEO
- Off-site WordPress SEO
On page SEO and On-site SEO, are something that you can easily take care of with the help of your content, plugins and a bit of discipline.
Off-Site WordPress SEO consists of generating backlinks to your website. This can be achieved by outreach, broken link building or by utilizing other techniques.
In this guide, we are more focused on On Page and On-Site aspect of SEO.
Let me explain these two with a simple example:
This technique will help you to optimize any post/page on WordPress for a target keyword. This helps search engine understand what your content is about and help you rank for the right keyword. If you like to learn more about this, read our guide on On page SEO.
On-Site SEO:
These are more technical SEO settings where you help search engine bots effectively crawl and index your website. Factors like page speed, Robots.txt, and others play a major role.
Again, if you understand the basics with the help of this WordPress SEO tutorial, you will have no problem optimizing your WordPress website.
Getting the basics right:
Before we move into a more actionable part of our WordPress SEO guide, let us make sure our basics are strong.
Check WordPress visibility settings:
Login to your WordPress admin panel, and head over to settings > Readings, and ensure that “Search Engine Visibility” setting is unchecked.
This is how it should look like:
A lot of times default WordPress installer keep this option checked, and this prevents search engine bots from crawling your website.
WWW Vs. non WWW:
Another important WordPress SEO question asked by a lot of users is, to use WWW (https://domain.com) or non-WWW (https://www.domain.com) at the time of WordPress installation.
Search engine treats WWW and non-WWW as two different websites, so you need to pick one and stick to it. This could be configured at the time of setting up WordPress, by going to Settings > General.
As of 2021, there is no SEO benefit of choosing either of them. However, I recommend using the non-www version, as the shorter version of URLs is better for sharing on social media or elsewhere..
WordPress SEO plugin:
There are many WordPress SEO plugins out there for various purpose. For example:
- Overall SEO: Yoast SEO, RankMath, All in one SEO
- Internal link SEO: Linkwhisper
Personally, I’m a huge fan of Yoast SEO plugin which constantly adds new SEO features, and is free, and reliable. Be it a usual content based website or an e-commerce based website, Yoast SEO helps you in optimizing your website for SEO.
- Read: How to setup Yoast SEO
16 Ways To Boost WordPress site SEO
1. Add your WordPress Website to Search console
Google search console is a free SEO tool by Google that you should use from day one. Even if you don’t know how to use it, you should add your website to Google search console.
This will help you to collect all important data and as you move forward with your WordPress SEO learnings, this data will help you in faster optimization of your WordPress website.
Here is a detailed tutorial on how to submit your website to Google search console.
2. Implement WordPress Sitemap
Let’s start with Sitemap, which is an XML file containing an index of all important link (Posts, Pages, Tags, categories) of your WordPress website. This sitemap file will help search engine bots like Google bots to effectively find all the pages of your website.
There are many WordPress Sitemap plugins out there, but I prefer using Yoast SEO Sitemap feature which is one of the oldest and reliable ones out there. All you need to do is install and activate the plugin and go to plugin settings and generate a sitemap for your blog.
By default, your sitemap link will be http://domain.com/sitemap.xml (Ex. sitemap)
Now, go to Google search console and Bing Webmaster tool, submit and verify your site and submit a sitemap. This will help them to crawl and index all internal pages of your Blog.
- Bonus tip: Also add a Sitemap link at the footer of your WordPress website and also in the Robots.txt of your Blog.
3. WordPress Permalink (Search friendly URL’s)
The WordPress default permalink is not SEO friendly, and you need to change that as well.
The SEO friendly URL is one which is easy to read. Example:
Whereas non-friendly URL’s uses the numbers and it’s hard for a normal user to understand the content.
Here is an example of non friendly URL’s:
You should always use a search engine friendly URL structure.
If you have read my WordPress essential setup guide, you might avoid making this mistake. But if you are still doing this, it’s time to change your permalink structure to a more search engine friendly version.
4. Implement Breadcrumbs navigation
Breadcrumb is an important aspect of On-page SEO, and in 2021, Google shows breadcrumbs in SERP. I have seen significant traffic improvement, after implementing Breadcrumbs in WordPress.
There are different kinds of breadcrumbs, and you should enable it according to the WordPress website you have.
For example, a WordPress based blog would like to show the category in the breadcrumbs’ path. A Woo-commerce based website could use Location-based Breadcrumbs.
Apart from SEO, Breadcrumbs also help in:
- Reducing bounce rate
- Improved user experience
- Better search engine visibility
Now, moving on to the next WordPress SEO tip…
5. Optimize blog post and pages for target Keyword:
This is a critical aspect of WordPress SEO, and if you do it right, you will be able to drive a significant amount of traffic in no time.
In this, you first perform keyword research (See next point for this), and then optimize your homepage, posts or pages for the target keyword. This process is also popularly known as On page SEO.
Read my below guide to make most out of it:
- How to write SEO friendly content
6. Perform Keyword research for your WordPress Website
Keyword research is the process of finding profitable and strategic keywords for your WordPress website. SEO optimization of WordPress is useless without performing keyword research.
7. Use Focus Keyword
Focus keyword is a feature offered by all the popular On-page SEO plugins of WordPress like Yoast SEO. This feature is an easy way to see, if your article is optimized for your target keyword or not.
To use this, simply add the focus keyword in your plugin setting in the post editor section. (See the screenshot below)
Once you have added the focus keyphrase, the plugin will automatically suggest if following:
- Keyword density
- Outbound Link
- Internal Links
- Keyphrase in Introduction
- Keyphrase distribution
And a few more, are in the correct proportion or need attention. (See the below screenshot)
If anything is in Red or orange, it means, it needs your attention. You can mix this plugin (Yoast SEO) with SEO writing assistant to get the maximum value.
8. Regularly clean broken links:
Broken links are the dead end for search engine bots and add the negative score to your overall search engine optimization effort. Broken links can be easily taken care in WordPress using plugins like:
- Broken link checker
- WP Link status
You should periodically scan your WordPress website for any broken links and fix it with new links. The above two plugins will help you do the same.
9. Improve Internal Linking in WordPress:
This is one under-utilized technique to improve WordPress SEO. Internal linking is the process of linking from one page of your website to another.
If you could combine this with anchor text technique to implement internal linking in WordPress, it could do wonder for improving your website ranking.
Internal linking helps in the following ways:
- Adds On Page SEO benefits
- Passes on link juice from one page to another
- Helps search engine better crawl your website
If you are doing SEO of a new WordPress website, you could manually add internal-links.
10. Use Structured data markup:
Structured data helps the search engine understand more about the data of your content. For example, you can markup a blog post as an article, an event type as an event page and add data like event start date/end date, and this shows in SERPs.
Similarly, for review articles, you can show the star rating in the search engine.
IMHO structured data is the most underutilized WordPress SEO technique that you can use to outperform your competitors.
