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  1. SEO Basics
    12 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  2. Semantic Core
    12 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  3. Keywords Clustering
    14 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  4. Website Structure
    11 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  5. On-Page SEO
    55 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  6. Technical SEO
    9 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  7. SEO Reporting
    38 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  8. External SEO
    8 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  9. SEO Strategy
    2 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz

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SEO Technical SEO SEO Optimization WordPress
Lesson 6, Topic 7
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SEO Optimization WordPress

11.02.2022
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Check your site health

Running your website on a server with updated software at a web host that offers excellent performance. So ask yourself: on what hardware and software are your sites running? What is your hosting plan? Are you using a budget shared hosting provider, or have you invested in a dedicated hosting plan at a well-known web host that fine-tuned its servers for use with WordPress?

To find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your site, you can visit the Site Health section in WordPress. Also, you could choose to install the Health Check plugin. 

  • Check you’re using suitable hosting
  • Upgrade to PHP 7.0 or higher
  • Make sure you’re using SSL and HTTPS

Check your site settings

It’s worth double-checking your visibility settings in Settings → Reading, to make sure that you’re not accidentally preventing search engines from indexing your website. That’d definitely hurt your visibility!

You should also make sure that your Writing and Reading settings are all set correctly, these control your default categories, and what should be displayed on your homepage. Don’t forget to give your site a strong tagline in Settings → General, too!

Pick the right permalink structure

If you’re creating a new site, change your permalink settings, which you can find in Settings → Permalinks. If you don’t change your settings from the default, all of your pages and posts will have URLs that look like example.com/?p=123.

We usually recommend that people use a structure that creates URLs that look like example.com/post-name/, or example.com/category/post-name/, depending on how much importance they anticipate placing on the categorization of their content.

Optimize your content

  • Research what your users want and need
  • Write great content for your users
  • Optimize your individual posts & pages — When writing or editing your post, you need to pay special attention to some elements to make it SEO-friendly. The elements include your subheadings, your title, and your meta description need to reflect the topic of the specific post:
    • Set your focus keyphrase(s)
    • Optimize your permalink — you should always try and keep your permalinks short, descriptive, and clean
    • Optimize your page title 
    • Use headings correctly — WordPress transforms the headings you put in your content into their respective HTML tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on). That makes it important to think about which type of headings you use, and in which order. Getting that wrong can make your content harder to understand
    • Optimize your meta description
    • Optimize your images and media
  • Maintain your content quality
    • Keep your content fresh and up to date
    • Update your cornerstone content
    • No outdated cornerstones with Yoast SEO
    • Keyword cannibalization
  • Avoid accidental duplicate content
    • Solutions for duplicate content:

Whenever possible, avoid creating duplicate content. If your system creates session IDs in the URL, try to turn that off, for instance.

Can’t avoid creating them? Redirect those URLs with a 301 to the original version.

If you really need to keep a duplicate article, make sure to add a canonical link to the original version in the <head> section of the duplicate article. It will show search engines what the original version of the article is, so they can pass the link juice on to the original version. In the next section, you’ll find out how easy this is with Yoast SEO.

  • Set a canonical link with Yoast SEO
  • Support international audiences

Another important aspect of international SEO is picking the right domain structure. Generally, a different ccTLD (e.g. www.yoast.de) for every variation is only a good option for very large companies with big budgets. In most cases, subdirectories (e.g. www.yoast.com/de) are the way to go.

Search engines want to display the right language version of your site to each visitor, whatever country they’re from. To help them, you need to implement hreflang. hreflang is code that tells the search engines what language variations of a page are available and helps prevent duplicate content problems.

  • Add Schema.org structured data

With structured data in Yoast SEO, we set out to make it easy. Today, we generate the code search engines need to make sense of your site and its connections automatically. You only need to make a couple of choices in SEO > Search Appearance. Select Person if your site is a personal site or Organization if it is a business or professional site

Optimize your site structure

  • Organize your site — You should always make sure your homepage is clear and easy to navigate
  • Connect your content with contextual internal linking — When adding a contextual internal link, make sure the link makes sense within the current page’s context. Moreover, always use anchor texts which accurately describe the page you’re linking to
  • Manage your categories and tags — When setting up your site structure, pick a number of main categories. Adding them to your menu can be a good idea, especially if you only have a blog. If you have a blog and several products, a different setup might make more sense. Make sure your categories are roughly the same size. If your categories become too big, make subcategories. Tags are useful for users exploring topics, but they are often misapplied.
  • Manage your archive pages — First of all, you want to prevent search engines from indexing archive pages that don’t make sense on your site. You can use the Yoast SEO plugin for this. You do this under SEO → Search Appearance, where you’ll find the following options on the “Archives” tab:
  • Configure your breadcrumbs
  • Manage your XML sitemaps

Speed up your WordPress website

  • Measure your site speed
  • Improve your site speed

The best WordPress plugins to speed up your site

Broadly speaking, there are three categories of things which WordPress plugins can do to speed up a site. They can:

  • Implement caching (server-side and/or client-side)
  • Alter the way in which your theme (and/or database) works/loads
  • Optimise the deliver of media

There are some speed optimisation plugins which are very specialised, and focus on doing a very good job on just one small part of these categories. Other plugins may tackle most, or even all of these areas, but do so more generally. It’s rare to find a single plugin which solves all of these problems.

You should do your own research and testing, as performance may vary significantly based on your hosting setup, location, theme, and other plugins. Be sure to test thoroughly, as a purely configured performance plugin can very easily break a website.

In most cases, installing one (and only one!) of the following plugins should get you started. Most of them come with full page caching (where a static version of each page is saved and served to users, without needing to load WordPress and your whole site), and various flavours of resource optimisation (image compression, lazy loading, etc).

  • WP Rocket – very powerful, and one of the very best options to make your site faster. Designed to be simple. No free option.
  • W3 Total Cache – extremely powerful, and extremely flexible. Designed to be comprehensive. Hundreds of checkboxes and options.
  • WP Optimize – A good middle ground, with basic full page caching, and some sophisticated database + media optimization tools.
  • WP Super Cache – A basic solution which offers full page caching, but lacks other/advanced optimization techniques.
  • Autoptimize – Some really clever JavaScript/CSS/HTML optimization, though no full page caching (should work well with a dedicated full page caching solution)

Plugins not to run

It’s important not to forget that, in most cases, every plugin that you add to your site is likely to have some degree of impact on your site speed. At worse, a plugin may be poorly coded, and create bottlenecks as your pages load. At best, a plugin is streamlined and efficient, but still adds extra logic to your site, which may still require precious milliseconds to execute.

When you’re picking plugins, it’s best practice to consider the performance impact, and if possible, to measure before and after so that you can decide whether it’s worth the trade-off.

Secure your WordPress website

  • Make regular backups
  • Harden your setup — Hardening your setup starts with picking the right hosting company for your WordPress website. Also make sure that your WordPress install, including plugins and themes, is always up-to-date. Updates might fix security issues as well.
  • Use monitoring and logging — you could put part of your WordPress security in the hands of, for instance, a company like Sucuri. In case of a hack, they’ll fix this asap. For your own monitoring, you could check your site regularly with their Sitecheck tool. A couple of plugins can help you secure your WordPress site by, for instance, monitoring files on your server, like WordFence, iThemes or Sucuri. 

The best WordPress hosting

Having a slow hosting environment can cripple a site’s speed, even if you’re using caching and every performance optimization technique in the book. Ditching a slow host, and upgrading to a better one, can have a huge impact on how quickly your pages load.

But, like performance plugins, there’s no perfect fit for everybody when it comes to hosting. It’s important that you do your own research, and find the right balance of cost, features and performance which meets your needs.

That said, some hosting companies are much better than others; especially when it comes to expertise with WordPress and performance optimization. Some hosting companies go even further, and have their own performance-boosting plugins which help your site to take advantage of their specific hosting optimizations, or even add their own caching systems (e.g., Siteground Optimizer or Servebolt Optimizer).

The best WordPress CDN

A CDN (or ‘content delivery network’) is an excellent tool for improving the loading speed of your site. The CDN brings your site physically closer to your visitor, so to say. If your hosting provider has a server in California and your visitor is from Mumbai, India there might some long latency that results in poor performance. By adding a CDN, you can serve your content from a location near your visitor and, therefore, dramatically speed up its loading times.

no cdn vs cdn wikipedia

On the left: traffic to your site lands on a single server. On the right, a CDN sends visitors to the server nearest to their location. Image: Wikipedia

When you’re choosing a CDN for WordPress, it’s worth making sure that they have a good plugin integration, so that page and resource caches are automatically updated or purged as you write or update your content (like the Cloudflare WordPress plugin).

Cater to your mobile visitors

  • Make sure your theme is mobile-friendly — it starts with making sure the links are not too close together, and buttons are easily clickable. Your font should be consistent and shouldn’t be too small and your images not too big, both in file size and dimensions.
    • Use a responsive design —it means that the design of your website adapts to the screen size your visitor is using. You can do this by using specific CSS media queries. You have to address certain ranges of screen widths and design for those. Most WordPress themes are now responsive.
    • Prioritize what’s important to mobile users
  • Consider using AMP —  Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) It allows for fast mobile pages and does so by stripping some of the design. AMP these days is used for both static content and dynamic content like news articles.

Analyze and improve your performance

  • Set up and integrate Google Analytics 
  • Set up your Google Search Console account
  • Other useful tools
    • Microsoft Clarity
    • Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
    • Ryte
    • Semrush
    • Google Lighthouse
    • Hotjar