

WordPress is inherently SEO friendly and that is why many people choose WordPress when starting a blog or website. The code WordPress is written in is SEO-friendly, but there’s a lot more you need to do if you want to maximize your SEO efforts. You can follow the tips below to properly optimize your WordPress SEO.
Check Your Site's Visibility Settings
WordPress comes with a built-in option to hide your website from search engines. The purpose of this option is for you to spend some time on your site before it becomes public. If your site is ready, you need to scroll down to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ section and make sure the box next to ‘Prevent search engines from indexing this site’ is unchecked.


Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress
SEO-friendly URLs consist of words that clearly describe the content of the page and are easy to read by humans and search engines alike. So you need to visit Settings » Permalinks page and select the post name / post name option and then click the Save button to save your settings.


Use WordPress SEO Plugin
When it comes to choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin, you can narrow your choices down to the two most popular solutions: Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack. Yoast SEO is generally the more preferred option.




Adding XML Sitemaps to WordPress
If you are using the Yoast SEO plugin, it will automatically generate an XML sitemap for you. To find your sitemap, go to this URL (remember to replace cretodesign.com with your own domain):
https://cretodesign.com/sitemap_index.xml
In the next step, we’ll show you how to submit your XML sitemap to Google.
Add Your Site to Google Search Console
In our article here, we explained how you can add your site to Google Search Console. After your site is added, click Sitemap from the left menu and paste the last part of the sitemap URL.


Optimize Blog Posts for SEO
Installing and activating a WordPress SEO plugin is not the only thing to do in the name of SEO. The best SEO plugins dictate that you add a title, description, and focus keyword to every blog post and page. We recommend optimizing your title and description to get maximum clicks.
While writing your blog post, go to the SEO section and see exactly what you are missing.
Do Keyword Research for Your Website
There are a ton of keyword finders (both free and paid) you can use. SEMRush is our choice and helps you find keywords your competitors are listed on on Google.
Handle Categories and Tags Properly in WordPress
Beginners are often unsure of how best to use categories and tags. Categories are for broad grouping of your posts. If your blog is a book, the categories will be the table of contents. On the other hand, tags are more specific keywords that describe the content of a single post.
Make Internal Linking
Search engines assign a score to every page on your website. The recipe for this score is kept confidential so people can’t play with the results. However, internal linking is believed to increase the score.
This process will help you increase your page views, increase the time users spend on your site, and ultimately increase the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.
Optimize Your Site's Speed and Performance
Speed is important to Google. Compress high-size images losslessly with online tools before uploading them and make your pages load faster.
Author