WordPress SEO Edits: What Is It And How We Do It

WordPress Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes optimizations that help search engines effectively crawl, index, and understand the structure of your website. While content is crucial for ranking, technical SEO ensures that your WordPress site is fully optimized for search engine algorithms, improving your site’s visibility, performance, and user experience. Key aspects of WordPress technical SEO:

An XML sitemap provides a roadmap of your site to search engines, making it easier for them to find and index all your pages. WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math automatically generate an XML sitemap for your website, ensuring that all important pages are discoverable by search engines. You should submit this sitemap to Google Search Console to help search engines index your content quickly and efficiently.

The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or directories to index and which to ignore. For example, you may want to block crawlers from accessing unnecessary backend files like /wp-admin/. WordPress allows you to edit the robots.txt file manually or through an SEO plugin. Properly configuring this file ensures that search engines crawl only the most valuable parts of your site.

Page speed is a crucial ranking factor for SEO. Slow-loading pages can negatively impact both user experience and search rankings. WordPress offers several ways to enhance site speed, such as using caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket, which reduce server load and improve load times. Additionally, image compression tools like Smush can help minimize image file sizes without compromising quality. Utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare also enhances speed by distributing content to servers closer to users.

With Google’s mobile-first indexing, your WordPress site must be optimized for mobile devices. WordPress themes are generally responsive, but you can further test your site using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Ensuring your site works well on mobile is key for both user experience and SEO performance.

Structured data helps search engines understand the context of your content better, leading to rich snippets like star ratings or product prices in search results. WordPress SEO plugins simplify the addition of schema markup, improving your site’s chance of standing out in search results.

Google considers HTTPS as a ranking factor. To secure your WordPress site, install an SSL certificate to encrypt data between your site and users. Most hosting providers offer free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt, which can easily be installed via plugins like Really Simple SSL.

WordPress permalinks refer to the permanent URLs used to link to your website’s pages, posts, and other content. Optimizing permalinks is a crucial part of WordPress SEO, as they contribute to both user experience and search engine visibility.

By default, WordPress generates permalinks that include the post ID, such as yoursite.com/?p=123. This structure is not SEO-friendly, as it provides no context to users or search engines about the page’s content. To make your URLs more meaningful and optimized for search, you should switch to a custom permalink structure.

We keep it concise: Our WordPress developers avoid long URLs; short, descriptive URLs perform better.

We use hyphens, not underscores: Search engines treat hyphens as word separators, making URLs easier to read.

We avoid unnecessary words: Remove stop words (e.g., «and», «the») to keep URLs clean.

By using optimized WordPress permalinks, we can improve the SEO performance and usability of your website.

WordPress image optimization, page speed optimization, and mobile optimization are all essential for improving your site’s SEO performance. These aspects focus on enhancing the user experience, reducing bounce rates, and improving rankings in search engine results.

Optimizing images helps reduce load times and enhances the overall speed of your WordPress site. Large, uncompressed images can drastically slow down page load times, negatively impacting SEO. Our WordPress development company can optimize images on your website. We also install special plugins that subsequently automatically compress images and download them in the optimal format without loss of quality.

Page speed is a key factor for SEO, as search engines prioritize faster websites for better user experience. Slow load times can increase bounce rates, which negatively impacts rankings. The page loading speed depends on many factors, including caching, media size and format, and page code cleanliness. As part of supporting the WordPress website, our team monitors page loading speed and optimizes it if necessary.

Mobile optimization is critical, especially with Google’s mobile-first indexing, which means Google primarily uses the mobile version of a website for ranking and indexing. When developing a website, our WordPress specialists use responsive themes that automatically adjust layouts for different screen sizes. We will test your site using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure usability on smartphones and tablets. Our WordPress developers prioritize touch-friendly navigation, fast mobile load times, and avoid intrusive pop-ups, as these factors are essential for both user experience and SEO.

Together, image optimization, page speed, and mobile-friendliness significantly improve SEO, enhancing both user experience and search engine rankings.

We are specialists with many years of experience who develop, optimize, and support WordPress websites. To support your website, we offer:

• SEO edits;
• work with pages;
• contact forms set up and optimization;
• ensuring high scores for Google Pagespeed Insights, etc.

Contact us today to keep your website running smoothly!