Among the good practices of WordPress SEO, some are directly related to plugins and the specific configuration of your content manager.
After installing WordPress on your server, I suggest here that you study 6 points relating to SEO optimization for WordPress 4.0 and above.
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1.Readable URLs or Permalinks
The URL of each page is an essential parameter for the ranking of search engines, especially for particular so-called “long tail” queries, for example, for niche e-commerce sites.
By default, WordPress creates URLs with a question mark and a string of numbers, determining the id of the article to display.
For WordPress to use readable permalinks (or URL rewriting), that is, containing keywords and not parameters, you must configure the URL rewriting tool.
In the Settings> Permalinks section, you can choose what type of keywords you want to appear in them.
As this manipulation requires two steps for each article, it can be quite tedious when you create pieces regularly.
This is why we will look at the solutions that offer plugins for the SEO of a WordPress site.
2. WordPress SEO plugins
To simplify the work on permalinks, and for the other optimizations that we will see later, it is preferable to install a specific plugin, because the basic features of WordPress do not allow you to go far enough, or without fairly technical manipulations on the theme you have chosen.
The WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, in its free version, is a good compromise between simplicity and completeness. This is the one this blog uses, and we’ll walk you through the essential features below.
First of all: when the plugin is installed, start by checking that the permalinks we have just mentioned are correctly configured. This is an essential setting for the plugin to function correctly.
Still concerning Permalinks, WordPress automatically takes care of the deletion of “stop words” from your URLs, that is, to say, the too common words that Google does not record (adverbs, auxiliaries, etc.), and which of suddenly lengthen your URLs unnecessarily.
3. Meta tags with WordPress SEO by Yoast (YWS)
The Meta Title tag
YWS allows you to configure essential Meta tags (Title and Description), as well as others like Keywords, directly within each of your articles.
By default, WordPress will use the title of your article as the page Meta Title.
The ideal is, of course, to include keywords, but without transforming your title into a list, and remaining in length between 30 and 60 characters.
Sixty character titles are not necessarily very relevant to present your articles. You can distinguish the Title field and Title tag of your page by using the SEO Title setting on the YWS tab of your posts.
To complete your configuration, also think about the default title of the site by going to “SEO settings” then on the “Taxonomies” tab.
Here, the “site name” takes into account the name that we have given to our site in the settings of our WordPress.
The “Sitename” will be used primarily if you decide to place it before or after the title of each page, which can simplify the choice of your keywords for each title.
The Meta Description tag
The Meta Description, long used by Google to better index pages, has fallen a bit out of favor, following the drifts observed in over-optimization of this tag.
Today, it instead has a role to play in your click-through rate on search engines. Indeed, it allows you to best present the content of the page, much more than what a robot will do if you leave it empty!
The YWS tab of your articles will allow you to set a unique Description tag and even preview what it will look like when published on Google.
To do this, click on “Modify the extract” and enter your Meta Description in the specific field. Your Meta Description can be between 260 and 300 characters long. Use professional writers to write your Meta Description
4. The breadcrumb trail
In the world of hyperlinks, nothing is worse than a dead-end! To remedy this, the presence of a menu on each page of the site is the first step.
However, this will only moderately help the search engines to judge the importance of a page over others.
The ideal is, of course, to find for each article several links to create towards other pages of your site directly in the body of the text, but this sometimes requires a little time-consuming gymnastics.
Therefore, the use of the navigation thread (breadcrumb or breadcrumb) is a good idea to reinforce the weight of the pages located at the top of the tree structure of your site.
YWS allows you to add breadcrumbs to the pages of your WordPress site.
Go to your Yoast SEO menu, then click on “General Settings.” Then click on the “Breadcrumbs” tab.
Then, you will have to edit the file of your theme corresponding to the location you have chosen for your breadcrumb trail, and insert the following code into it:
In general, by going to Appearance> Editor, you will be able to obtain a good result by placing it either at the very bottom of the header file (header.php) or failing that at the top of the page template files and single article (page.php and single.php).
5. The sitemap or sitemap
Allowing search engines to know all the URLs on your site at once will save it time and, therefore, will enable you to improve the indexing of your content.
To do this, nothing like a sitemap, also called a sitemap.
Several plugins will allow you to create an XML sitemap (to be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, for example), with more or less extensive possibilities to include or exclude individual pages from the sitemap.
The Yoast SEO plugin allows you to create a fairly basic sitemap easily.
Go to the Yoast SEO menu, then click on “General settings.” Then click on the “Features” tab.
With Yoast SEO, you have to enable the XML sitemap.
To view your site map, click on the question mark then on the link “View XML site plan.”
6. Sharing on social networks
When your site is shared on the main social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin), data is extracted from your website more or less randomly to be displayed on them.
In the same way that a personalized Meta Description will improve your click-through rate on Google, personalized data for your site’s display on social networks will contribute to its popularity.
In the “Social networks” sub-menu of YWS, you can enter the social networks associated with your WordPress site.
You can also configure this data for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+, in addition to other parameters relating to your audience (in particular if you have pages corresponding to the activity of your site on one or other of these networks).
Finally, other actions can be performed directly with YWS:
In the “Tools” submenu, modification of the robots.txt file to include individual data in the referencing by search engines, such as upload
In the “SEO Settings” submenu, then in the RSS tab, adding personalized content directly to your site’s RSS feed. The objective of this tool is to limit the risks of duplicate content (a practice penalized by Google) in case a third-party website has the wrong idea of republishing your content from your RSS feed.
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