5 Reasons Why WordPress Is The Best Platform for SEO

⏱ Reading Time: 7 minutes

WordPress started out as a simple blogging tool and has become the leading content management system in the world. It has certainly come a long way since it’s initial release in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.

Nowadays, users from all over the world build WordPress sites, from small business owners, who want to expand their businesses online to authorities in different niches. To be more precise, WordPress is now used by 39.9% of all the websites existing over the Internet. It continues to grow, steadily yet magnificently.

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If you want to achieve a higher ranking on Google and other search engines, it’s important to make the best out of your search engine optimization. Compared to some other content management systems, WordPress is pretty exceptional, especially when it comes to SEO.

Did you know that the most successful SEO experts use and recommend WordPress?

Even Google’s Matt Cutts is a fan of WordPress, calling it “a fantastic piece of software”. Individuals and brands are relying on SEO-powered website-building platforms even more in order to make businesses discoverable.

When using WordPress as your CMS (Content Management System), you are able to use a number of in-built features that make optimizing your content for search significantly easier. Here is the breakdown of the main reasons why WordPress is the absolute best platform to use as the foundation of your SEO success story.

Reasons Why WordPress is Great for SEO

1. SEO-friendly URLs

The chosen URL for your website posts is a crucial determinant of how search engines will perceive your content. By default, you’ll find the setting which displays URLs based on a few odd characters and numbers.

They are called permalinks and look something like this: https://yoursite.com/?p=123.

Permalinks are the search-engine URLs for your blog post, web page, categories, and tag archives. However, sometimes their structure makes it difficult for search engine crawlers to read and index your web pages and posts. Thus you will need to make it more accessible for both — search engines and visitors.

Luckily, WordPress allows easy editing from the settings on your dashboard. You can change it either using /post-name/, or /category/post-name. Customize your URL permalinks for each of your posts and pages, giving it the format you want and the clear description. To make your URL structure even more search-engine friendly – add any relevant keywords. If your URL carries the power keyword from your content, that is definitely a great SEO booster.

The custom permalink URL structure will look something like this: http://yoursite.com/%articlename%/

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Picture 1. WordPress permalink structure

2. SEO-Friendly Titles

Once you’re about to add content, head over to the content editor and first add a title of a blog post.

Did you know that just one word in a title can give a 59% increase in organic traffic?

We suggest it be coded as an H1 or H2, depending on the theme you’re using. The title tags tell search engines what your page is about. They also leave the first impression on those who see your article title in the search results. Thus this is one of the crucial aspects when it comes to getting a better ranking on search engine result pages.

Additionally, SEO focuses more on the initial words of the titles. So, make sure to add keywords at the beginning of your title tag. WordPress allows you to optimize your title tags for SEO using the All-in-One-SEO-Pack plugin.

After its installation, head over to WordPress admin panel — Settings – All in One SEO Pack and add the following:

• Post Title: %article_title%
• Page Title: %page_title%

This will help you create unique, engaging, relevant, and search engine friendly title tags for your site, which in turn increase your CTR as well as page views. You can also consider looking for the most popular articles on the web about your niche. Analyze them and find out which one word can trigger targeted readers. This works!

3. SEO Meta Descriptions

Along with the title, the meta description is the major ranking factor across the search engines. Shortly, it’s a brief summary of your blog post or a web page to both – the search engine bots and web audience. You can see it under the page link within a Google search result page. It can improve your position significantly so you need to add it to almost every post and page of your website.

The default WordPress settings allow you to optimize your meta description. What you have to do is to install one of many free SEO plugins and then add them. It takes only a couple of minutes, but you can reuse them all over again. In case you aren’t adding the metadata manually, a plugin like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO will automatically create SEO-friendly meta descriptions for your WordPress site.

Picture 2.  Meta description in WordPress

4. SEO-Optimized Images

Besides the text quality, your articles should also include images that go along with your content. They should be quality and relevant to the article. Images break up the flow of the text and improve the readability, making your content look more appealing and consistent. However, search engines don’t just look for images as we see them. What they look for, are images with alt text.

Technically, alt text is an attribute that can be added to an image tag in HTML. It improves user experience in general and accessibility for the people with poor sight who are using screen readers. So, if you want to drive more web traffic towards your site, then you can’t overlook image optimization. It’s one of the crucial aspects of good SEO. It’s all about creating, engaging, relevant image titles and alt text in order to get better visibility on Google and other search engines.

With WordPress image optimization, it’s simply a matter of filling in the right fields. Once you upload them to CMS, it’s easy to add titles and alt text to your images. Simply enter the image edit options and fill in the “Alternative Text” box.

Picture 3. Alternative Text Editing in WordPress

When choosing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in the context of the content of the page. Avoid keyword stuffing – filling alt attributes with keywords, as it results in negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam. Hence, when you’re customizing your articles, you are only two clicks away from successfully optimizing any image on your page for the SEO.

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5. Mobile Optimization

Did you know that for all those valuable search queries being done on mobile, Google displays the mobile-friendly results first?

It’s also obvious that more people use a search engine from their mobile phones than from a computer. Hence entrepreneurs must adapt to this new trend.

For instance, websites that are responsive to mobile allow blog pages to have just one URL instead of two — one for desktop and one for mobile. This way, your inbound links won’t be separated between the different URLs, which helps your article’s SEO. Hence you centralize the SEO power you get from these links, helping Google to recognize the value of your article and rank it accordingly.

So, in order to make your blog mobile-friendly, use “responsive design”. The first solution is mobile phone optimized themes that WordPress offers to the premium users. So if you are using it, you don’t have to worry about your SEO ranking.

Moreover, once you customize your website, you can check how it looks on different devices. Secondly, for most simple WordPress websites, there is a popular Jetpack plugin. When installing it, you are able to comply with Google’s mobile website standards.

Wrapping Up

If you’re a WordPress user, it’s easy to understand why WordPress is such a powerful platform. People might think WordPress is only good for blogging, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Over the past decade, it has taken over the web development world.

It’s free, easy to use, and has more than enough plugins/add-ons to help customize your site or blog to fit your needs.

Using WordPress benefits for both sides – you and your user.

It became the first choice for many designers, developers, and SEO professionals as a great time-saver.

With the tools and features, it results in an overall better experience for everyone. Thus to rank yourself better, be up-to-date with your old content, add more storytelling and new fresh images.

You will see a remarkable organic traffic increase.

Not only with its ease of use, but also its community-open source plugin and theme developers, there is no doubt that WordPress will continue being the dominant CMS in the SEO community for the upcoming years.

The point is, whatever your specific SEO plugin needs are, either now or in the future, the WordPress community has your back.