WordPress is one of the best, if not the best content management systems when it comes to performing Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Even though WordPress is great for SEO right out the box it isn’t a bad idea to spend some time optimizing things yourself. Proper optimization of your site will help you improve your rankings, gain more subscribers (if you want subscribers) and have a better website in general.
Coming at SEO for the first time might seem like an extremely daunting task, but luckily it’s never been easier for the average person to perform SEO on their WordPress install. There are a plethora of SEO related plugins that remove a lot of the technical aspect of SEO and replace it with user friendly and easy to understand concepts and interfaces. Our personal favorite plugin is YoastSEO made by Yoast.
The description for their plugin reads:
Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast SEO plugin.
WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO, this was true when Joost wrote his original WordPress SEO article in 2008 (and updated every few months) and it’s still true today, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this Yoast SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. Yoast SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.
The plugin promises to be able to take your SEO even further and it provides exactly that service. We like the plugin because it’s easy to understand, well documented, and the user interface allows you to easily understand what you’re trying to focus on when it comes to SEO. If you’ve heard enough and are ready to get the plugin you can either install it yourself from their WordPress repository, or if you are one of our clients you can contact support@vitaleffect.com and we would be happy to set the plugin up for you – free of charge.
So now you have the plugin installed and you’re wondering what to do with it. Luckily Yoast provide a great tutorial that shows you the basics of WordPress SEO using the tools provided by their plugin as well as the default tools provided by WordPress. You can find that tutorial here. It’s a pretty long article but feel free to take it at your own pace – you can definitely change only a few things at a time and over the course of a couple weeks optimize your site. If you are an existing client and you would like Vital Effect to optimize your site for you, simply contact us at support@vitaleffect.com and we can figure out a plan to suite your needs.
Once you have everything up and running you’re WordPress site will be a well oiled machine. On top of performing SEO on your current content you should make sure you have a blog and social media integration if you don’t already. These things will really help your search engine results – especially the blog – because search engines love sites that have dynamic and constantly changing content. The more dynamic the site the higher your rankings will go. Good luck!
