How to SEO your WordPress Pages?

How to SEO your WordPress Pages

WordPress is a best SEO friendly platform but for better search engine visibility you’ll need to SEO optimize each and every page as you publish online.

In this post, we will learn everything one needs to know about WordPress On Page SEO.

What is the dissimilarity between a WordPress Post and WordPress Page?

A WordPress installation comes with two types of contents: posts and pages. Both do the same thing i.e. they allow you to add a title and publish content, but also have certain differences.

In a nutshell: For the static content of a website, pages are used and are not part of WordPress’s blog content loop.

The new pages you add on your website will never appear in your main blog page or in your latest posts widget.

Pages by default does not have the option to be added to categories and are mostly used for the ‘about us’, ‘contact us’ and any other pages of the website that are not posts.

How to On Page SEO WordPress Pages

Before jumping on SEO for your posts or pages, you should analyze and ensure that your homepage is optimized.

This is important especially for corporate websites or e-commerce stores since the home page can give a lot of information to search engines about the website and its purpose.

The performance of SEO on the other pages on your website also has an impact on it. So, once you get your homepage SEO corrected, you can then proceed with optimizing your WordPress pages.

Let’s get started.

 1. URL Optimization

First of all, you need to know that WordPress uses SEO friendly URLs.

An SEO friendly URL has the following characteristics:

• It is significant and describes what your page or post is all about
• It has ‘-’ to separate each and every word to make up the URL
• It does not include any unnecessary characters and it isn’t too lengthy (the limit for a URL is not more than 2000 characters).

Here are a few examples of good and bad formatted URLs.

Good

• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/news
• https://www.avid.com/pro-tools
• http://www.audio-technica.co.in/cardioid-condenser-microphone

Bad

• http://www.reliableofsoft.net/sessionid=123&var=1&content=SEO
• http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00KDRUCJY/ref=pf_rd_s=desktop-hero-kindle-A&pf_rd_r=13N79C0V01QC2&pf_rd_t=36

WordPress has plenty of options for configuring your URLs. You don’t have to provide any other information that will make the job of search engine crawlers difficult.

2.  Media Elements SEO

Including images, videos and other media elements in your page, makes them more interesting and easier to read.

Things to consider:

• Too many media elements will lead you extending the loading time of your website and this is not good especially for mobile users.
• Upload your videos (if you have) in a streaming video service like YouTube or Amazon WES and embed them in your website. Hosting the videos on your own server is not a good idea.
• Use ALT Text for images and proper schemas for Videos.

 3. Page introduction Optimization

The content which appears at the top of any page is important for SEO. Google always thinks that the useful parts of a page are closer to the top.

To take advantage of this make sure that:

• Keep your text content as close as possible to the top of your page.
• The first two or three lines of your page must accurately describe the page’s content.
• Use keywords that are consistent with the title of your page.

Think of this like a synopsis of the page and a way to pass the information to the search engines (and users) in a few words what the page is about.

You can also use the first 150 characters of your introduction as the meta description tag of the page too.

4. Optimize Your Subheadings (H2, H3)

It is proven that long blog posts perform best in SEO. This means that pages become longer and become difficult to read. To keep your readers glued, you should break down your content into parts and give subheadings to describe each section. Subheadings are good for SEO, create the structure of your page in the same way you approach the setup of a ‘table of contents’ for a book. The page titles are your book chapters and the subheadings of a page are the chapter contents. In terms of technical SEO, the page title should have the <H1> tag (and you should only have one H1 per page) and the subheadings can be <H2> or <H3>.

5. Content formatting

Make use of other options for formatting to make your pages more appealing to the eye. Bold text, italics and small paragraphs help in beautifying your page.

Many of us think that search engine crawlers cannot really ‘see’ a page like a human but this is wrong.

Don’t forget that the user experience is what matters the most and here is where you should concentrate on all your efforts.

Make your users happy so that they spend more time in engaging with your content and come back for more.

6. Annotate your content with schemas

Structured data is good for SEO. They can improve the way your website is shown in the search results.

You need to ensure that the relevant schema is implemented in your pages while optimizing your WordPress posts or pages.

7. Build high quality external links

An SEO optimization guide is incomplete without including the importance of incoming links.

Links pointing to a website or webpage are considered by search engines as ‘votes of trust’ and this works in achieving higher rankings.

A good link is one that comes from a related website and is trusted and verified by Google.

This excludes purchased links, links exchanges, links from blog, links from article directories, spam comments and anything else that doesn’t provide good control.