According to W3techs, WordPress powers 60% of all the websites (with a known content management system) on the internet. A service doesn’t reach that kind of market share on usability and good advertising alone. WordPress works, and it works well.
We’re going to focus on the SEO benefits that come with using WordPress, and why it is our CMS of choice for carrying out Search Engine Optimisation projects.
Out of the box: All WordPress sites come with readymade SEO features that some other services do not. One such feature allows search engines to ‘crawl’ content – imagine Google sending out an army of nosey (but useful) virtual spiders to look for new content. It is the web, after all.
As useful as such features are, this is just skimming the surface of WordPress’s SEO capabilities. WordPress’s market dominance, coupled with it’s active community and open source framework results in an ever-expanding catalogue of themes, plug-ins and specialist agencies which take the tools at hand and build awesome things.
Here’s a rundown of the features that make WordPress an SEO dreamboat:
SEO friendly themes
A WordPress theme is the template to which the website follows and there are lots of them.
Some keep it simple and primarily aid the visual styling of your pages and blog posts, whereas some are very powerful tools that come with unique plug-ins and features which enable total creative control.
Themes can vary in how SEO-friendly they are, but most free and premium WordPress themes contain proper HTML markup. As page speed and mobile-friendly design are now topping Google’s ranking criteria, you can bet your Bitcoin that theme creators are constantly updating or creating new themes to stay at the forefront of SEO requirements.
Structured for great content
Something that keeps us coming back to WordPress and has led to us specialising in WordPress Development is it’s user-friendly and intuitive dashboard, which makes managing and optimising your content really easy.
Given how big a role content plays in SEO, having a reliable place to draft, schedule and post the stuff goes a long way. When creating content using WordPress’s editor, you have all the tools that you need to create high quality material. Proper HTML markup such as title tags, keywords and meta descriptions all play a big part in bumping you up those search results.
Optimised Media
A key feature in WordPress is it’s ‘Media Library’ which, as you might have guessed, houses all of your website’s media. It is in this area where you can properly optimise your media items to make sure that they are as SEO friendly as possible.
Adding ALT tags, descriptions and captions to your images can be set in a matter of seconds, and they all get you extra brownie points is the SEO department.
SEO specific plugins
This is a big one. As we eluded to earlier, WordPress has a buzzing community of developers who create a host of plugins being created which enable extra functionality and optimisation for your website. There are plenty of Search Engine Optimisation plugins to choose from which are regularly updated and backed up with support documentation to help keeping your websites SEO scores high and stress levels low.
One plugin that we favour in particular is WordPress SEO by Yoast. Yoast is a beast. It was developed by a team of professional SEO experts and it comes with extensive and well-integrated assistance, such as giving your individual blog posts an SEO score followed by suggested areas on how to improve it.
The ability to add these professionally crafted plugins to your website really lets you benefit from specialist experience in a few simple clicks. What’s not to love?
Talk to the pros
As well as there being no shortage of bells and whistles to attach to your WordPress site, there’s also a sizeable pool of specialised WordPress SEO professionals. Here at Squibble, our Search Engine Optimisation expertise, married with our extensive WordPress experience means that we know pretty much every trick in the book when it comes to optimisation – get in touch today if you’d like to know more about our services and how we can take your website to the next level.
