WordPress is a popular CMS that provides an easy to use platform, suitable for most blogs and brochure sites.

The CMS offers a wide range of themes and plugins to allow you to completely customise your website. Alternatively, a web design company will be able to provide SEO friendly web design for your site.

When optimising a WordPress site for organic SEO purposes, the four key areas of optimisation remain the same:

  • Meta Titles
  • Meta Descriptions
  • Meta Keywords
  • Page Copy

There are a wide range of plugins that you can use to add in the Meta data; we recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast. Install the plugin by clicking the “Plugins” tab (obviously!) on the left of your Dashboard. Then click “add new” and type “WordPress SEO by Yoast” into the search bar that appears when the new page loads. The one you want should be at the top of the list so click “Install now” and then activate the plugin once it has downloaded.

Now, a new tab called “SEO” should have appeared in the left-hand menu. Hover the mouse over this tab and click the option “titles & metas”. Once this page loads, tick the box that says “Force rewrite titles”. This will overwrite the standard Meta title (which is generally “Page Title – Site Name”). Now click on any page and scroll down to the bottom. Boxes to enter the Meta Data should now have appeared so you can optimise the page! Hooray!

Once you have determined your main keywords, you need to include them in the meta data and page copy. Remember to include 3 anchor text links into the page copy to help increase relevance on each of the linking pages. You can also edit the URL of each page in order to make it SEO friendly (e.g. www.example.co.uk/seo-friendly-url, rather than www.example.co.uk/2229375620?-947376)

Check out our simple guide to on-page work for further information on how to optimise each page.

Now, it’s all very well optimising each page and creating new landing pages for specific keywords, but how do you get Google to find them? An XML Sitemap can be submitted to Google through Web Master Tools which will prompt Google’s robots to crawl your site and index every page. You will need to resubmit the sitemap every time you add new pages.

To do this, install an XML sitemap plugin to your WordPress site (the same way as you did for the Yoast plugin) and then it will appear as an option in the “Settings” tab in the left-hand menu as “XML-sitemap”. Click this and then click where it says “rebuild sitemap” on the page that loads.

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