WordPress is by far the most widely used CMS in the world. It holds a market share of over 52%, which gives you unique opportunities when it comes to plugins, forums and much more. WordPress is also the most SEO-friendly CMS, partly due to the Yoast plugin – but more on that later. First, let’s have a brief introduction to WordPress.
What is WordPress?
As mentioned, WordPress is a CMS. CMS stands for Content Management System, which simply means a system for managing and maintaining your website content. It originally started as a CMS for bloggers, but as its popularity grew, it evolved into a comprehensive CMS with endless customisation options. The strength of WordPress lies in its simplicity – anyone can use it with minimal training. Plus, there are thousands of plugins available for every possible solution.
When it comes to SEO, there are three must-have plugins for 2020:
- Yoast
- WP Rocket
- Smush
Yoast
Yoast is the go-to plugin for SEO in WordPress. You won’t find anyone working in SEO who hasn’t heard of or used Yoast before. Yoast offers you a wide range of tools to improve elements such as your titles, meta descriptions, sitemap and much more. It makes SEO easy and accessible, so even those with little technical knowledge can use it – and best of all, it’s free!
As you can see, Yoast is an incredibly user-friendly tool that can help you with CTR optimisation and your general presence in Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
It also provides a complete overview of all SEO aspects on your individual pages. It gives you insights into things like links, keywords, text ratio and much more. While Yoast does not always provide a perfect picture, it still points you in the right direction.
WP Rocket
This plugin is a cache plugin – in other words, it stores a copy of your website on the user’s computer, which significantly improves load times.
It also has a wide range of other features aimed at improving your website speed – a crucial factor for ranking higher on Google. Statistics show that if a page takes more than three seconds to load, users will return to Google and potentially click on one of your competitors instead.
Some of the improvements WP Rocket offers include lazy loading, meaning images only load when the user scrolls down to them. Another feature is file compression, which reduces file sizes and thus improves your website speed.
These are just a few of the many features included in WP Rocket. The only “drawback” is that this plugin is not free. However, if you are serious about your website, it is a must-have plugin.
Smush
Unoptimised images are one of the main culprits when it comes to slow website speed. That’s why you should use plugins such as WP Smush, as it automatically optimises, compresses and resizes your images. This plugin is completely free, so there’s no reason not to use it. It is incredibly easy to set up and will undoubtedly improve your site speed.
Once you have installed and configured these three plugins, you are well on your way to having a fully optimised website. That said, here is a little bonus tip that is not related to plugins, but is something many people forget – and it will improve your SEO.
Bonus tip: Permalinks
Your SEO will benefit if your subpages use SEO-friendly URLs that are relevant to the page content.
If you go to settings and “permalinks”, you can quickly change your URL structure by telling WordPress to use the page title or post title as the URL.
This makes it easier for Google to understand what your page is about, and therefore easier for Google to index and rank your website.
Summary
If you use these three plugins, you have a solid foundation and should notice a difference in your SEO results. Of course, there are many other measures you can take, but these are some basic steps that are easy to implement. If you have any questions or would like help with your SEO in WordPress, you are more than welcome to contact us!
NB: Please note that different plugins can potentially conflict with your existing plugins. We therefore recommend that you keep this in mind. If you are in doubt, you are welcome to contact us and we can help you install the various plugins without any issues.
