When building a website using WordPress, you might want to install lots of plugins to achieve your SEO dreams. However, WordPress already has some SEO tools built in that you can use right from the start to increase your site’s visibility. Here are the first couple easy things you can do to immediately get started with your optimization.
Is your site visible?
First, check that your site can be seen by search engines. WordPress allows you to turn off this feature so you can edit your site without search engine interference. Just go to your site admin, then Settings > Reading, and uncheck the box.
Are your blog posts optimized?
WordPress has some handy features for blog posts that allow you to add a post to different categories and add tags to your post. This lets you organize what you’re writing and makes indexing your site easier for search engines. Writing a short excerpt and adding an image also adds necessary readability and visual elements to your post.
What about internal linking?
Using links is one of the most important SEO tricks, and WordPress lets you do this without any plugins! If you’re writing text content, then you can easily add links to other pages and blog posts on your website. This helps to increase views on your page and how much overall time users spend on your site.
And your images?
Don’t forget about your images! Having large and low-quality images can slow down your website’s load time and no one wants that. Instead, make sure that your images are good quality and can still load at bigger sizes when you upload them. Adding alt tags and descriptions to your pictures adds another layer of SEO by helping search engines know what your content is about and helping users with visual impairments. These options will all show up when you upload pictures.
Conclusion
These are just a few short and simple things you can do to quickly start optimizing your website. SEO may seem intimidating at first, but if you take it one step at a time, then your website will gain views in no time!
4 Responses
This is a really interesting blog post! It’s especially helpful for people new to SEO who are reading elsewhere that they need to use plug-ins.
This was really helpful! I’m new to WordPress, so these tips will definitely help me in the making of my website!
These tips were very insightful! WordPress is such a great program with so much provided, so it’s great learning more that can be done through it!
This is very interesting and helpful! I love how you broke these down into simple and doable things that anyone can apply to their websites. I also love how you mentioned images and design!