Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO for Beginners @ TwentySixForty

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing a website to increase relevant traffic through free, organic search engine results.

Why is SEO Important?

Have you ever looked at the number of results that are returned when you make a Google search? It can easily be in the millions. The first page of Google’s results displays 10 websites. Most people searching on Google don’t click past the first page so if you want to increase traffic to your website is very important that you optimize it as best as you can and try to get onto that first page of results.

If your website is not optimized correctly, you will just be one of the websites lost in the millions of others. The good news is that with just a little effort you can get your website optimized to a point that is much better than most.

Things You Can Do to Improve the SEO on Your Website.

Use a High Quality Hosting Solution.

A high-quality host provides your website with good security and performance. If your website is not secure and not performing at a high level, the rest of your efforts are pretty much worthless. Google places a high value on website speed, especially on mobile, so if you have a slow website you definitely will not make it into the top search results.

Quality Web Hosting Company Reviews.

Confirm That you are Using the Latest PHP Version.

PHP is the programming language that WordPress is built in. It is very important to be sure your web server is running on PHP 7.2 or higher. Versions 7.0 and earlier have reached their end of life and 7.1 is coming soon. This means they are no longer supported and can have major security exploits that will never be fixed. PHP 7.x is also twice as fast as PHP 5.x so updating also makes perfect sense from a performance standpoint.

How to Update PHP Tutorial.

Use an SSL Certificate.

There are many benefits to adding an SSL Certificate to your website but from an SEO standpoint, there are a few. Google announced that they would be giving websites with SSL a boost in their ranking.

How to Install a Free SSL Certificate.

Optimize All of Your Images.

Images typically take up a large percentage of each webpage size so it is important to make them as small as you can. Optimizing images involves re-sizing and compressing them to the high-quality you need at the smallest size possible. Here are a couple of basic rules to follow when adding images to your website:

Re-size your images before uploading them to your site. If you are re-sizing with CSS, it is a sign of a problem.
Use the correct file type.
Compress your images with a quality plugin.

Best WordPress Image Optimizer in 2019.

Format Your Permalinks.

If you are building a new website pay particular attention to this. Permalinks are the URLs of the pages and posts you publish on your website. It is important to make sure that you set up your permalinks to be SEO friendly. This means it should make sense when you read it.

If your permalink looks like this, it is not SEO friendly:

https://twentysixforty/?p=199/

It should look something like this:

https://twentysixforty/wordpress-seo-for-beginners/

It is important that you understand the consequences of changing the permalink structure on a live website. It may cause your rankings to drop and will create broken links if not setup correctly. If you do change the permalinks on a live website be sure to set up redirects for all of the old pages and posts.

How to Set Your Permalinks in WordPress.

Login to the admin area of the website.
Go to Settings > Permalinks.

Permalinks WordPress Menu Item

Adjust Permalinks as desired.

Permalinks Page

Use Headings Throughout Your Website.

Google likes to see that you are using headings throughout your content. It provides the user with an idea of what the paragraph is about and makes it easier to find the answers to their questions while skimming the page.

Focus on Creating Quality Content.

Content is Queen. Google’s ultimate goal is to provide its users with the best experience as they can and this means giving them the answers to whatever they are looking for. If you provide the best content on your specific topic, your visitors will come back and Google will raise your rankings.

Use an SEO Plugin.

The most popular SEO plugin for WordPress is Yoast. It gives you a nice interface at the bottom of each page where you can input your titles, meta descriptions and other SEO data. It also rates your page and gives you suggestions to improve SEO and readability. This is a super helpful tool.

Make a Sitemap.

A sitemap is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a map of your website. It outlines the structure and lists the pages on your website. Sitemaps are very good for Google and other search engines because it helps them to better understand the structure and content that is on your site which allows them to index it correctly.