Here are seven reasons why you should implement WordPress to improve the SEO of your website.
WordPress (WP) is a free open source, fully customizable and SEO-friendly platform with high scalability. As well as the numerous SEO benefits of WordPress, it has great design templates and plugins available to increase the functionality of your website. It is also a really easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS) so you can effortlessly and painlessly update your content. Here are seven benefits of selecting the WordPress platform.
Open source software
WordPress is open source software which means that it is free to download and there is a large community of third-party developers and programmers always working on adding SEO WordPress plugins to enhance the application. One of our favorite SEO plugins is the All in One SEO Pack which allows you to customize the meta tags from each post and page, create canonical URLs and fine tune navigational links.
Easy to use content management system (CMS)
You may have heard the marketing adage that ‘content is king’ but if you need to put in a call to your web developer each and every time you want to change material on your site, it can get very costly. The WordPress CMS has a very similar layout to Microsoft Word and it doesn’t take people long to familiarize themselves with the application and start using it to make changes to their site.
Permalinks
One of the main WordPress SEO features is the ability to customize the URL for every page and the flexibility it provides with respect to the URL structure – using keyword-rich URL’s will add weight to your Search Engine ranking. You can alter the structure of permalinks and add keywords you want to focus on for each post you make. Easy to remember URLS are also helpful for visitors to remember pages they have visited on your site.
SEO-friendly website architecture
With WordPress, it is easy to create both pages and posts on your website and then organize them into different keyword-rich categories which helps Search Engines to index your content. You can easily change your posts to pages or vice versa, as well as move them into a different category or even multiple categories. It’s also easy to interlink in between any pages and posts and you can specify a different URL for your categories.
Meta title and description tags customization
With the help of SEO plugins such as the All In One SEO Pack, you can easily customize your title tags and descriptions. The title tag is an important on-site factor which tells Search Engines what the page is about and is also what is displayed on results pages. Title tags should normally be about 65-70 characters. You can also write a suggested description for your page/post for Search Engines which appears under the title in the search results in most cases. The description is usually best to be around 150-160 characters as this is the length that the Search Engines display.
Anchor text customization
Another important aspect of WordPress SEO is the ability to customize internal anchor text links with keyword-rich text. The anchor text is the visible, clickable words in a hyperlink. The text in these hyperlinks helps Search Engine spiders figure out what the ‘linked to’ page is about and rank the page for a relevant keyword. You can use the anchor text for links within your site as well as other external sites.
Optimizing images
With the insert image button in WordPress, you can easily upload and optimize images by adding ALT (alternative) tags. The ALT tag text will appear when the image does not render properly onscreen. It also serves another purpose – Search Engines cannot read an image and rely on the ALT text to understand what the image is about. The text should reflect the keyword theme and content on the page so as to help Search Engines can determine relevancy.
The technical platform you choose for your site may be the defining factor in your SEO campaign. Some of the most important technical restrictions and challenges in the SEO process can be caused by the Content Management System not being ideally Search Engine-friendly. If you are planning on building or redesigning your website contact our SEO experts at seoWorks about the benefits of WordPress for SEO-friendly sites as well as other CMS systems we recommend.
