How to make SEO friendly WordPress websites?

One of the most incredible feature of WordPress is that this comprehensive CMS comes with no installation charges as it is a an open source platform. You do not have to invest time as well as money to acquire the key and within matter of few minutes your dashboard is ready for work.

To add icing on this incredible platform we have curated steps to make it SEO friendly. Let's find out:

Step 1: Ensure to add Privacy Settings

Privacy setting is one of the last configuration setting in the infamous installation process which takes 5 minutes to install. However, it is advised to better uncheck the box while developing. This block website to get indexed by all the well known search engines.

Step 2: SEO Friendly URLs

There in no big deal in configuring URLs that are search engine friendly (SEF URLs) and for that you can select the option for Custom Structure and then add the parameter in to your text box.

Step 3: Do not keep post in Uncategorized Category

When we go on internet we come across ample lot of blogs that are marked under the heading of Uncategorized. You need to correct that. For that you need to go to the setting page from where you can access categorize settings from the menu of the posts. Find out where you can get the Category and then go to the Quick Edit.

Step 4: All in One SEO Pack Plugin



It is the default property of WordPress that uses page or post title as the title tag value for an HTML page and there is no need of including the for meta description tag or meta keywords tag . Along with that we have several plugins that allow you to customize the tags as per ones requirement, for instance the Yoast plugin, despite of that we have simple plugins such as All in One SEO Pack. Once completing the installation process of All in One SEO Pack move towards the admin page. The best part is that they remind you about those parts that are yet to be configured for your settings.

Step 5: Plugin to remove 404 errors

This is one of the bug in WordPress where we will come across 404 errors while accessing a Category page that goes beyond the first page. For those who include the plugin call Category Pagination Fix for your instillation process, then one can ignore web master tools for search engines Google & Bing for not showing 404 errors.

Step 6:Unburden your Images from unnecessary links

It is a default property of WordPress that links images that one uploads or inserts in the blog posts to themselves. This is something which is not required and all the efforts go in vain if the user clicks the image. This will pop open the image where the user gets blocked with no navigation and this forces them to click on the back button of the browser.

Step 7: HTML & XML Sitemaps auto-generate

With WordPress we can get web pages where we can have posts of the blogs that incorporate pages of better quality that can have search index that run quite faster if there we can have access to bots and crawlers access on our XML and HTML Sitemaps.

Apart from this we have Simple Sitemap plugin that can generate the HTML and Google XML Sitemaps plugin that can generate XML Sitemap.

All you need is to make use of the basic version of these plugins, and it does not requires anything fancy if you do have a great knowledge of XML Sitemap.

After completing the installation plugin of Sitemap and officially launching your website, you need to register your XML Sitemap to search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing.

Step 8: Make of Google Analytics

There are ample lot of methods in which one can add tracking code of Google Analytics into your website; we generally like Google Analytics for developing plugins that are based on WordPress and the main reason behind this is that they give you the the leverage where Administrators can be ignored. If you will configure this option you will see administrators will work fairly without altering the your reports.

Step 9: Adopt Responsiveness

There are umpteen number of directories such as ElegantThemes.com, ThemeForest.net, TemplateMonster.com, to name a few that offers “responsive” design themes to developers. A responsive theme has the ability to fit to the layout, images, and menu items so that they can be easily displayed on all kinds of devices be it regular personal computers , laptops, mobile devices such as tablets, phablets or smartphones.

Google has launched an algorithm that suggest the developers to design responsive websites as they render quite an incredible user experience and they have also considerable paved a way to increase SERPs if carried out with utmost care. Along with that Google has also been testing additional SERPs that will help website owners to develop niche products. Google have introduced an icon to indicate users working on mobile devices that whether that particular website is mobile friendly or not. This is the reason you need to make sure that your website is quite accessible or not.

Step 10: Rectify errors in your Theme Code

Now that you have selected your WordPress theme, the next step is to optimize the code of the theme in order to optimize all the technical errors. For this there are several add-ons available on net and one of them is SEO Doctor Firefox to get a glance on the web pages.

Using this Firefox tool, one can easily get review website for figuring out opportunities for optimization. It is but expected that there is no need for incredible web designers who can develop brilliant SEO friendly themes.

Author bio: Samuel Dawson eats, drinks and breathes WordPress, as he works as developer in a leading IT firm that renders top notch PSD to HTML conversion services. Apart from this he likes to strum the guitar and explore creative side of programming.  He is also indulged in html to WordPress conversion process.