“WordPress is the most efficient platform to launch large-scale SEO campaigns,” says Clayton Curtis, a WordPress designer from Atlanta, GA. “It’s fast, secure, and enables website owners to quickly publish landing pages with little to no technical coding skills”. This flexibility allows for the kind of nimbleness required to market a modern website. Gone are the days of having to FTP in and manually mess with code to change the things you want. This was frustrating for small to medium sized business owners who had to phone their developers just to make the smallest of changes. WP allows for web masters to quickly make adjustments on the fly.
Effective Tips to Improve WordPress for SEO
What Makes WordPress An Optimal Platform for SEO?
WordPress for a number of reasons is currently the king of SEO in regards to Content Management Systems. Here are some reasons why it’s preferred for search engine optimization.
Easily Editable Permalinks
WordPress allows the user to manually edit the name of the URL. After selecting the proper permalink structure in the backend you’re able to edit the name right below the title of the post. This is important from a direct response perspective as well as user experience. A clean, semantic URL structure is considered best practice when launching SEO campaigns. It needs to make sense to the search engines that crawl your site as well as the potential customers who visit it.
SEO Plugins
My favorite WordPress SEO plugin is Yoast. It takes care of everything you need from canonical redirects to easily editable robots.txt commands that you can execute right from the WordPress backend. It kills several birds with one stone and has grown to be the superior plugin for many webmasters who want to gain an SEO advantage over the competition.
Responsive Designs
While this aspect can be tied closely to user experience as well as SEO it’s important to understand the importance of having a website that looks good on different mobile devices. In the past several years there’s been a noticeable shift in how web users consume the internet: everyone’s using their phones to view web pages. You don’t have to be a genius to see that it’s a user experience no-no to make visitors pinch and zoom their way around your website. A responsive site allows you to publish material that’s easily consumable on smaller devices. Many WordPress themes feature responsive designs so you don’t have to worry about adjusting/writing new CSS for the purpose of making your site “mobile friendly”.
Clean Code
While WordPress still has a few quirks that most content management systems have it’s relatively light as far as installations go. It comes in under 5MB total. Other systems like Magento and Drupal are nearly twice as large. Most WP themes feature clean, semantic code as well as straight forward CSS layouts, making customization a breeze. Search engines love fast websites with clean, readable code.
Do It Yourself?
It’s important to hire experienced consultants to help you with rolling out your WordPress website. If you’re going to hire someone to help you make sure to check their past work and talk to their previous customers.
