5 WordPress SEO Tweaks You Should Know

WordPress is a CMS we all love. And with good reason: it’s user-friendly, easy to maintain, powerful and has a sea of features you can exploit to grow your business online.

No wonder, WordPress powers nearly 21% of all Web, including top folks such as TechCrunch, Mashable, The Next Web, VentureBeat, GigaOM etc. In fact, it powers the ResultFirst blog, too.

But let’s face it: in spite of a lot of top-notch plugins out there, WordPress SEO proves to be somewhat complex. It may not be an absolute mess, but it’s important to understand the what, why and how of WordPress SEO in order to get most from it.

Since a lot of good how-to guides are available, today we focus on the five most important SEO related tweaks you can do to your WordPress.

Harden your website

This is one of the most important yet often ignored things to keep in mind while optimizing WordPress for search engines.

See, if your site gets compromised and you somehow don’t get to know about it, it will result in site downtime, which affects the user experience. This will not only decrease your leads, sales and conversions, but also make search engines lose trust in you, and thereby decrease your rankings.

Consider these two guides to harden your WP site:

Securing Your WordPress Website

Hardening WordPress

Change your permalinks setting

We could go on ranting about title XML sitemaps, page titles, meta descriptions, image optimization, canonical tags, nofollowing comment links etc, but again we witness the permalink problem more often than others.

ResultFirst.com/blog/twitter-ads-best-practice-tips is better than ResultFirst.com/blog/social/twitter-ads-best-practice-tips or ResultFirst.com/blog/archives/36868237, or even ResultFirst.com/blog/2013/1/1/twitter-ads-best-practice-tips.

That’s because categories may not always be terribly relevant, numbers don’t make a meaningful URL and dates don’t make content timeless.

Change the permalink setting to /%postname%/ to implement this best practice.

Improve your site speed

If your website is not fast enough, you won’t be able to get a single visitor to it – forget about salivating them.

So check your site performance. Acknowledge the sore areas. Consider your mobile audience. And embrace the site speed best practices.

Curious to know more about site speed? Check out this post: Your page speed is more important than you think.

Claim your Google+ authorship

Google+ is proclaimed by many to be the future of SEO. So it’s more important than ever to claim your Google Plus authorship, which not just helps you get higher rankings, but also get more noticeable in the SERPs.

Don’t know how to do it? Check out Google’s own brief guide.

Install SEO plugins

At ResultFirst we don’t recommend you to install hundreds of SEO plugins. Installing WordPress SEO by Yoast (Yes! Just a single plugin) would do. For it lets you take care of most SEO related aspects, such as canonicalization, breadcrumbs, robots meta, page titles et al. Simply put, this plugin makes your life way easier.

If you need more help, though, you can contact our SEO experts right away.