WordPress SEO Basics.

Where to start with SEO.

If you haven’t got the basics covered, your site will struggle to rank for valuable search terms.

Lots of site owners are aware of SEO but don’t have either the time or knowledge to get started.

WordPress Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about making your website more favourable to search engines, with the goal of increasing the quantity and quality of the traffic you receive.

The following SEO basics are very much housekeeping tasks but form the basis of implementing a successful SEO strategy.

We believe that all websites have the potential to be improved, allowing their owners to refine their usability and maximise their potential. If you’re not sure where to begin, our SEO Basics could be the answer.

SEO isn’t all smoke and mirrors – it’s about adopting tools and systems to monitor and improve your websites.

The initial setup can be daunting, but once you have everything set up you’ll be able to gain real insight into your customers and how they interact with your site.

You can then move forward to ensure your site is ranking for valuable search terms and that search engines are looking favourably on your content.

Technical reports.

Set Up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools can offer you a comprehensive analysis of your site’s performance in the top two search engines, as well as its organic visibility and the site’s traffic.

You’ll be able to see which queries are bringing users to your site, identify issues that have led to a drop in traffic and use this information to shape your marketing strategy going forwards.

The information uncovered by these applications can work in conjunction with other monitoring and analytics tools.

Once set up, these tools can also help you to monitor and resolve server errors, recognise site load issues, and identify security issues such as malware and hacking.

Set Up Google Analytics.

Google Analytics collects tonnes of data on your website.

This free marketing analytics tool offers you invaluable insights into who is visiting your site and what they’re doing while they’re there.

Google Analytics is an essential part of a successful SEO strategy, and we can help to guide you through the initial setup process.

Yoast SEO plugin.

Installing Yoast is the #1 recommendation for your site.

We think that Yoast SEO is the best SEO plugin available for WordPress, and five million active users worldwide agree with us.

SEO is about more than just researching keywords, and Yoast also places emphasis on great quality content and an enjoyable user experience.

We love using it because the simple traffic light system is instantly accessible for SEO novices, and experienced users are served with a plethora of in-depth analysis tools.

Yoast will provide an SEO breakdown of each page of your site, showing you what’s working, if anything is missing and how improvements can be made.

All the most essential SEO tools are available in the free version of the plugin.

Generate and Submit A Sitemap.

Your sitemap allows search engines to navigate your site in the way that you intended.

They may not be the hotspot of your website, but they’re the second most important source of URLs to be crawled by search engine bots and if your site doesn’t have one, its SEO rankings are almost certainly suffering as a result.

A sitemap establishes canonical links, informing crawlers of which content you think is most important on your site and indexing it accordingly. The sitemap also provides information on when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page that are available. It can also help crawlers to discover new pages on your site, even if they’re not linked to existing ones.

Once you’ve generated your sitemap, we’ll upload it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Create a Robots.txt File.

Your robots.txt file is the antithesis of your sitemap.

This tells search engines what they can’t crawl and index on your website. It’s a simple text file that resides in the root directory and instructs crawlers as to which parts of your site are off-limits.

It can solve a number of potential problems relatively simply, including:

• Hiding duplicate content from search engines
• Reducing the bandwidth resources used by crawlers on large sites
• Pointing bots away from private folders
• Directing them to your sitemap

Not sure if you have one?

You’ll usually find it at https://www.domain.com/robots.txt.

Check Search Console For Manual Actions.

Not everything is automated in SEO.

Manual actions are usually clear attempts to manipulate search engine algorithms, such as thin content, hidden text, user-generated spam or unnatural links.

Most sites haven’t been affected by a manual action and won’t be in the future, but if you have been it can be devastating for your SEO.

If you are taking over a site or working on a new project, you’ll be able to check for any manual actions in the Google Search Console.