7 Ways of Boosting the SEO Performance of WordPress Websites

Users find WordPress CMS so easy to set up and use that once they use it they would never think about using anything else. Moreover, WordPress is SEO friendly in its basic form as you can launch the SEO campaign right from the time you create the website.

However, to make real marketing gains by using SEO, you have to optimize it further so that the website can perform many advanced functionalities that give more strength to your optimization efforts.

Fortunately, you have access to 54,000 WordPress plugins all of which help to enhance the functionalities of websites in various ways, and you could select suitable SEO plugins for achieving the marketing goals.

Optimizing WordPress for SEO might not always be easy, but under the guidance of professionals, you can enhance the SEO friendliness of WordPress websites considerably.

The plugins have the capabilities of supporting out of the box ideas, which make WordPress all-powerful for search engine optimization. The plugins are capable of matching the needs of modern day SEO that have undergone major changes over a period.

Keyword stuffing and poor-quality backlinks are of no use anymore. To make your WordPress SEO campaign more effective, you can go through the techniques discussed in this article and make use of it according to your needs.

1. Install an SEO plugin

   WordPress derives its powers from plugins, and you must install an SEO plugin of your choice to achieve the SEO goals. Soon after installing the plugin, enabling the rel= ‘canonical’ option for web pages is the primary task of focusing on the pages that carry blogs and other content.

   Search engines are thus able to keep track of the original URLs of the content thereby eliminating duplicate content. From Yoast SEO to All in One SEO Pack and from Squirrly to WordPress SEO by Joost De Valk there are plenty of options for installing SEO plugin.

   For proper selection, you can take help from the experts who provide various Internet Business Solutions.

2. Tailor-made permalink structure

   URLs or the web addresses are paramount for websites because it creates the link between blog posts and web pages. For every post, category, web page and tags you would find permanents URLs, which are the permalinks.

   Often URLs lack clarity in its structure and search engines find it difficult to make out what the URL relates to. Since it is important to ensure that search engine bots can quickly understand the URL and use the information for indexing pages, you have to create search engine friendly URLs.

   An ideal way of doing it is to create a clear description of the content on the page and include focus keywords in it. To indicate the relevance of the URL to the content, you can include the name of the post, date and its category.

3. Choose the option of selective indexing

   Nobody would like search engines to crawl web pages that may contain some content that is under development. Unless you finally launch the content, you must not allow search engines to crawl that page.

   You can do it nicely by using the WordPress feature that discourages search engines from indexing the site. By activating the option, you can keep search engine bots away from it and avoid any adverse effect on search rankings.

   By using the options rel= ‘no index’ and rel= ‘no follow’ tags in the pages of your blog, you can keep it out of the purview of search engine bots until you want to index the pages.

4. Deactivate useless links

   Although you must always try to acquire good quality backlinks only, it often happens that some inferior links might sneak in, which you must get rid of. WordPress allows you to mark unwanted links by using the rel= ‘no follow’ option that advises the search engines not to follow the link as it might not be up to the mark.

   Effectively, the page that carries the ‘no follow’ link does not earn any Page Rank points. If your website carries paid advertisements that link to the websites of the advertisers, you should mark it as ‘no follow’ link.

   Any link that is not related to the website or not useful for search engines should qualify for ‘no follow’ tags.

5. Prevent duplication by using ‘no index’ option

   It might often happen that the category name coincides with the title of the blog post. In such cases, Google would deem it as duplicate content, which it is not.

   In WordPress, you can use the ‘no index’ option for the page that has lesser relevance or less important. To ‘no index’ a page you can do it by typing .

6. Speed up the pages with caching plugins

   Since the page opening speed has a direct relation to search rankings, WordPress allows you to enhance the page speed by using plugins. Use a caching plugin that can speed up the web pages and reduce the load on the server too.

   The plugins cache the content, both dynamic and static, so that users can access the content faster. Some caching plugins like W3 Total Cache can also facilitate browser caching, database caching, object caching and even have options for minifications.

7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

   If you have a large or medium website with lots of static content like CSS, JavaScript and images then you must use a CDN. The CDN is capable of cashing all static content across the network of servers and then serves it by using servers that are closest to users.

   This helps to speed up the response time of server and aids in speeding up the website. Faster page loading means higher search rankings as Google has made it official. Depending on your budget, you can choose a paid or free CDN service. Cloudflare is a CDN service that offers free plans.

Having done everything on your part, you must turn to the web hosting service to ensure that it supports your SEO endeavors by ensuring speedy and uninterrupted website viewing.