28 Jul

WordPress and SEO

How does SEO work on WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular CMS platform used worldwide, but it requires a specific approach to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in order to get the best out your website.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice that helps a website appear high in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This helps increase traffic by appearing higher in an organic search within the SERP, and reduce the cost of traffic generation such as Google PPC, Social Media PPC, and other paid means of attracting traffic to a website.

What impacts SEO?

SEO practitioners believe there are over 160 elements that contribute to the SEO of a website (click here to learn more about SEO). Some are not worth the effort, as the impact is too marginal in relation to the effort you need to make.

Here are the elements that have high impact and you can directly control them:

SSL

This is critical, as websites that do not have a SSL certificate for encryption, get penalised by Search Engines for being unsafe.

Make sure your hosting company offers SSL and implements it. Click here to read more about SSL.

Theme

Theme is an important part of your SEO, as themes control more than just the aesthetics of the websites. Themes impact speed of your website loading. Always check their speed results, which well-written themes usually declare. If they do not advertise it, then you should ask yourself why that is!

Plug-ins

Plug-ins slow down your website as they have to be loaded, so void Plug-in parties. Try finding a theme that does as much as possible without the use of plug-ins.

Of course there are many specific functions that you have no choice but to use a plug-in, however, try using a plug-in that can do more than just one thing. For example, if you are using an SEO plug-in, make sure it also creates Sitemap for visitors, XML sitemap for Search Engines, and also gives you guidance or SEO scores so that you can optimise your Meta Tags (see below). Click here to see our favourite Plug-ins.

Meta Tags

This is an ABC of SEO, and you must make sure these are relevant and implemented correctly, including the maximum recommended characters.

Some themes have Meta Tags included, but there are none that we know of that offer an analysis of Meta Tags, scoring of Meta Tags, or create Sitemap (specially XML sitemap for Search Engines).

Sitemap

Sitemap, specially XML sitemap for search engines are critical for indexing of your pages and posts. Without these, search engines have to try to guess your content, their importance, when was the page or post last updated, hence decide what to index and not index, etc.

You can get a plug-in to create this for you, but you are best to select an SEO plug-in that does this rather than have another Plug-in added to your list.

Image Size and compression

Many websites are slow to load because images have been uploaded directly from the camera or a smartphone. These images are unnecessarily large and have higher resolution than required for a website.

You must resize your images, ideally all to the same size or ratio, which also helps the way columns and images are aligned and presented on a page.

Just as importantly, you need to compress them as you do not need a 4MB or even 1MB image on your website. Whilst resizing reduces the size of the file, compression reduces the density (resolution) of an image suitable for a website. Websites are not printed materials, so do not need high resolution images.

For compression you can use a plug-in, but they have their limitations. For example, many cannot compress images that are larger than a certain size (typically over 1MB), but also they cannot resize your images.

We recommend downloading and installing Ceasium compression software on your PC/Desktop (Mac or Windows version), or use Ceasium online service. Both allow you to resize and compress multiple images in one go.

Caching

Caching is an excellent tool for speeding up your website, specially WordPress as well as any dynamic website.

In essence caching is a technical cheat, and there are 3 types of caching. You should use all 3 to get the best results.

1. Plug-in

Caching plug-ins create a static copy of your dynamic pages and leave it on the server, so that when visitors need a page, dynamic pages do not have to be built on the fly. The server will serve them a static version created by the caching plug-in. Make sure the plug-in you use has auto delete, so that periodically the cache is deleted and a fresh one is create in order to include your changes to any content as well as any updates to the system. A good caching plug-in should allow you set this auto-delete timings, as well as allow you to manually clear the cache. This avoids errors and data corruption when you update plug-ins, WordPress, or your theme.

2. Browser Caching

This means a copy of any pages visited is left in the cache of the visitor’s browser, so the next time they visit the same page, the local copy from their browser is served to them. This is why often your website support asks you to “Clear your Cache” if you are not seeing what you are supposed to see. These copies are again set to clear by preset parameters, or users can set their browser to clear it every time they close browser (most people do not know how to do that!)

3. CDN (Content Distribution Network)

This is similar to plug-in caching, but this time the server sends copies of your website pages to a network of servers around the world, serving visitors from different locations nearest to them. This means when someone visits your website from the other side of the world, they are not getting your pages from your hosting server, but their nearest CDN server to them. This significantly reduces the page load times. You need to ask your hosting company for this service. This is why not all hosting packages are the same, and you should not buy the cheapest you can find. Click here to read more on how to select your hosting company.

Summary

WordPress websites, like all other websites, can be made to perform well on SEO. Whilst technical solutions can help, ultimately, these cannot compensate for lack of relevant content or regular updating of your content.

There are some good practices that you should follow, to optimise your WordPress performance on SEO.

All dynamic websites are slower to load than static websites, which means your WordPress is no better or worst than any other CMS package. All CMS products use Dynamic pages by using PHP. Ignore the myths of “WordPress is slow”, as all CMS are slow when comparing to a website built using Static Pages. (Static vs Dynamic Websites).

There are excellent WordPress solutions to address all of the above, so pay attention and choose your theme, plug-ins, and hosting company with care. Contact us if you need help with your WordPress website.