SEO For WordPress Websites: The Most Popular CMS For SEO

There’s no doubt that WordPress is one of the highest recommended CMS for SEO Maybe that’s why it’s so gravy!

With WordPress powering about 23% of the websites on the web today, it’s no wonder that SEO for WordPress is such a popular topic. If I had to bet, I would say 90% of SEO consultants or those learning SEO prefer to use WordPress over any other CMS. Why you might ask? It’s just so powerful and offers almost everything we need to optimize a website quickly and easily.

The top 5 reasons why I love doing SEO for WordPress websites are:

• 1. Easy to setup website theming or siloing with very little customizations.
• 2. Multiple powerful plugins that allow fast editing of meta data and page titles.
• 3. Very fast and easy to optimize for page speed scores.
• 4. Ability to sync with your Google Analytics account quickly and securely.
• 5. Great themes available with clean code and responsive css built-in.

I could go on and on, but I won’t. Instead, I want to discuss the reasons why I love using WordPress for websites, especially for good SEO.

Siloing and Theming

Siloing or theming is the concept of sectioning off your website into separate themes so that search engines and people are able to find information quickly and easily. This is such an important piece of on-site SEO that far too many people overlook and pay no attention to.

With WordPress it’s very easy to handle proper theming with the use of parent and child pages, or categories and posts. We’ll be creating a full overview of theming and siloing in the future, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but compared to many other content management systems, WordPress has the capability with minimal changes to set this up properly from the beginning.

Even if you forgot to theme your website properly at the beginning, you’ll be able to make the necessary changes quickly if you’re using WP.

The Best SEO Plugins For WordPress

I didn’t really want this to be only a Best SEO Plugins for WordPress type post, but I feel that it might turn into that. It’s important to understand what plugins are out there if you want to have the most benefit from using WordPress.

Yoast SEO

We use this plugin for every SEO project we take on. You can pick it up for free here, or here. Personally, this is my go-to in terms of all around SEO plugins. I used All In One SEO for a long time and loved it, but Yoast just quickly outpaced AIO in terms of functionality and performance.

Keep in mind that this isn’t just an “Oh I installed the SEO plugin so now my website SEO is good.” I hear this a lot and just want to squash this right away. This plugin will let you manage your on-site SEO much better than if you had nothing, in fact it’s basically a must-have to be able to easily edit things like meta descriptions, page titles, and control index and follow statuses. You’ll still need to do proper keyword research and mapping before really getting the full benefit out of using this plugin.

Redirection

This plugin can be a life saver, especially if you’re running on nginx and 301 redirects aren’t as simple in your htaccess file.

Redirection allows you to easily and quickly add 301 redirects to ensure that you are not losing any link juice or authority. This is especially important during website redesigns so that none of your SEO value is lost.

WP Remove Category Base

This plugin is an upgraded version of WP No Category Base. They both do the same thing which is removing the /category/ section of your category links.

This plugin is required if you’re going to be setting up your theming and silos for your website using posts and categories rather than parent and child pages.

I’ll keep the plugin list to the must-haves and wrap it up there. There are some broken link checkers, analytics

Optimize WordPress for PageSpeed

We’ll cover this in a more in a depth post as well because we feel it’s only going to be increasingly important in the future (and it’s extremely important right now). Although page speed still isn’t a huge ranking factor, it will impact bounce rate and user experience and to that end we feel it’s important to optimize sooner than later.

A few plugins to mention for this process include:

• WP Super Cache – for caching your website content.
• WP Smush – for compressing the images on your website.
• WP Minify Fix – for minifying and consolidating javascript and css files.

If you’re running nginx in Plesk you can add a layer of compression right through the webserver, otherwise you can set that up in WP Super Cache.

WordPress is fast.

If you’re interested in how your website performs as far as page speed goes, you can check out the Google PageSpeed Insights. Getting a number you don’t like? send us an email and we’ll help you get to the bottom of it.

Integrations with Google Analytics and Search Console

Yoast SEO and Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast will do the trick for this one. Again with the plugins. Not only will WordPress lets you easily manage your integrations for Analytics and Search Console, but a lot of other tools and resources for marketing and promoting your website.

This also makes doing SEO audits on client websites a breeze since chances are they already have what you need integrated right into their CMS.

Powerful themes that let you deploy websites quickly

I love the concept of themes in WordPress. I specifically use WooThemes Canvas (which is what this website is built on). But there are a lot of other frameworks and standalone themes out there that are worth checking out. Here are a few reasons why I love themes in WordPress (and specifically, Canvas).

Built-in responsive code

Although I always like to tweak this a bit to make it the best it can be, the website is responsive out of the box and will get a “Mobile Friendly” marker in the search results page.

Clean and minimal code

This means that Google and other search engines will crawl real content without having to get through a lot of top-heavy code.

Child theming to deploy new websites quickly

Child theming lets you build upon the framework of an existing theme. As an example, this theme that seobrothers.co is running on, is a child theme of Canvas. They share almost all of the same html (with the exception of a few hooks here and there) but the CSS is tailored to produce a different looking website.

This allows us to deploy new websites that are optimized for SEO and conversions within a few clicks and a few small changes to the custom CSS file. While we work with a lot of clients for search marketing, we also do a lot of local lead generation that requires us to build out our own websites to rank and sell leads from. In this case, being able to deploy a new website in a matter of hours instead of days is a huge time and cost savings.

Do you like doing SEO for WordPress websites? Have any questions about SEO in general or just want to say hi? Leave a comment in the box below and let’s start the conversation!

If you’re local, we’d love to take you out for coffee and chat. Send us an email to get in touch.