Easy WordPress SEO for Beginners – marketgoo
Easy WordPress SEO for Beginners
This guide includes everything you need to know about WordPress SEO.
If you’re a beginner, you’ll learn how to get started. If you’re past the early stages, you’ll have access to more advanced resources. Basically, this is your one-stop guide for everything related to WordPress SEO.
Let’s start!
Contents
Step 1
Cutting through the WordPress SEO Noise
If you’ve done a simple search for help with SEO for your WordPress site, you know that everyone out there claims to have the guide to end all guides. We took the time to sift through all of them and pick the best of the best so you don’t waste time looking at subpar or rehashed material.
So why is there so much material on WordPress SEO? Why do so many these guides look like they were lifted word for word from others? Well, this is because WordPress is a huge market and there are millions of people like you searching for the same information. Exactly how huge is this market?
Let’s see:
- WordPress powers 32,23% of the top 1 million sites in the world.
- There are at least 26,938,805 live websites using WordPress.
- There are 2.7 million global monthly searches for WordPress.
Does your job description include analyzing why WordPress is a great platform for SEO? Here is a side by side comparison of website builders and how they perform regarding SEO features.
Step 2
Interpreting your SEO Report
If you’re dead set on improving your WordPress site’s traffic and search rankings, the first thing you’ll do is run an SEO Audit or Report. This will scan your site and return a comprehensive evaluation of how friendly it is for search engines like Google.
SEO Reports often assign a score to your site and usually include how well you’re doing on factors like speed, missing and/or duplicate content, titles and descriptions, broken links, mobile friendliness, and current keyword rankings.
After you’ve looked at your report, you should have insight into why certain competitors appear before your site in Google results and what is preventing you from getting more visits to your site.
- Where to get a Free SEO Report
- Correctly Reading an SEO Audit of your Website
- Looking at an Audit of your Site, step-by-step?
Step 3
Choosing Keywords
Keywords are the words and phrases that Internet users type into a search engine like Google in order to find websites that are a match for what they’re looking for. The keywords you choose to monitor and to include in your site’s content directly affect your positioning in search engine results. Before you implement the changes that you need in order to improve your site’s SEO, you need to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords.
- What’s a Keyword?
- How to Choose your Keywords?
- What’s a focus keyword?
- Where in your WordPress editor should you add keywords?
Step 4
Covering SEO Basics on WordPress
Your WordPress editor may not be as pretty as other platforms, but it is user-friendly and there is a plugin available for practically any feature or functionality you want to add to your site. In this section you can click through to the best resources on traffic analytics, setting up different plugins, implementing titles and meta descriptions, free SSL and more.
- Jetpack Stats vs. Google Analytics
- Understanding your Traffic Numbers on WordPress with Jetpack
- Understanding your Traffic Numbers on WordPress with Google Analytics
- How to set up Yoast on your Site
- Get a free SSL Certificate for your WordPress Site
Step 5
Taking more Advanced SEO Steps
Once you have the basics covered, it’s time to look at how to get backlinks (an important factor in how well you do on search engine results), simple actions you can take today to improve, making sure you correctly redirect deleted or renamed pages, seeing if rich snippets are for you, and what this robots.txt business is all about.
- Setting up Google Search Console on WordPress
- Understanding what your robots.txt file is for
- How to add Canonical URLs in WordPress
- Improving the Internal Linking on your WordPress Site
- Implementing Rich Snippets on your Site
- Getting into Featured Snippets
- Improving your WordPress site’s speed
- Implementing CloudFlare on your Site
Step 6
10 WordPress Plugins for SMBs
Yoast SEO
Use it for: if you kind of know what you’re doing when it comes to SEO Yoast is very powerful, and if you’re a total beginner, we still suggest implementing it in order to enter and update your Titles, Descriptions and keep track of what keywords you’re focusing on.
Disqus Comments
Use it for: gathering and showing testimonials on your site. Essential if you want to keep visitors around.
Redirection
Use it for: when you need to redirect one page URL (that may have been deleted or just doesn’t exist anymore) to another.
Heatmap
Use it for: understanding what parts of your page visitors are actually clicking on and interacting with.
Livechat
Use it for: getting to your site’s visitors before they leave, and understanding what they need. Lower your site’s bounce rate!
Schema Pro
Use it for: when you’re serious about going all-out with your rich snippets.
Wordfence Security
Use it for: when you need to protect your site against hacking and other types of malicious attacks.
WP Smush
Use it for: when you need to Resize, optimize, optimise and compress all of your images.
Broken Link Checker
Use it for: detecting which links on your site are broken.
Jetpack
Use it for: when you want to see traffic stats, enable multiple features on your WP site, a CDN, social sharing, need to build contact forms, etc. it’s a full-featured tool.
Quick WordPress SEO Resources
- Join Relevant Facebook Groups. In our opinion, the most useful are WordPress, SEO, & Internet Questions and SEO LaunchPad – these communities were created so that you can ask even the most beginner-level questions regarding your WordPress site.
- Use an SEO Cheatsheet created for your industry. Don’t see your industry? We’ll make one for you, just ask!
- Watch the WordPress tutorials from WP Cupid.