WordPress is one of the world’s biggest and most well known publishing platforms available. The wide range of customizable configuration options, as well as its ease of use, has helped to propel it into the mainstream. It has held onto that position even while so much about the Internet has changed over the years.
With the ever-changing landscape of search engine optimization (SEO), is using WordPress to publish content a good idea? While the short answer is simply yes, here is a look at some of the SEO benefits that publishing on WordPress has.
URL Structuring
Search engines are always looking for simple URL structures that give an indication of what a certain Web page is about and that’s something easy to do with WordPress’ Permalink structuring options. The Permalink settings allow you to quickly and easily structure URLs across all pages on a website while adding relevant keywords and page descriptions too. All this makes sure that your website’s URL structure is search engine friendly. The more search engine friendly your website is, the better rankings you get.
META Descriptions
WordPress allows you to create unique META descriptions for each page. This is something that search engines really want to see – rather than the same description, or no description for each page. WordPress makes suggestions based on the content on the page, but you can override this and easily type in your own. Make sure you spend a bit of time creating something unique for each one of your pages and search engines will reward you with a better ranking.
Clean Coding
WordPress’ background coding is well-known to be quite clean. While adding in plugins and different themes onto your website may disrupt this, more often than not, your website will be better off in terms of clean coding on WordPress than something else. Search engines like clean code because it shows that a website is a high-quality one. Clean coding is also likely to indicate a good security set up, ensure a fast loading page time and offer a good degree of functionality. These are also things that search engines will like.
XML Sitemap Creation
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily create an XML Sitemap. While it’s not typically a complicated thing to do without WordPress, the fact that it’s built in really is useful. An XML Sitemap will guide search engines through your website and tell them what each page contains. WordPress can generate one for you rather than you having to worry about putting one together, so it can help save you plenty of time.
Third Party Plugins and Tools
WordPress prides itself on being highly customizable. That’s borne out by the vast number of plugins and third party apps that can sit inside it. Among the myriad of plugins available, plenty can have a great impact on your SEO efforts. Plugins that focus on CDN, caching, compression of JS and CCS files and even compression of image files…there’s a lot out there that search engines will give you brownie points for.
Are you starting to see the SEO benefits of using WordPress to publish your content? Can you afford not to take advantage of the five SEO benefits that publishing your content on WordPress offers? What are you waiting for…try it.
