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When it comes to business promotion, few things cause more headaches than navigating the requirements of search engine optimisation. From a trades person to an entrepreneur, to the CEO, unless you happen to be an SEO expert, everyone stresses about the best way to get their website ranking improved at some point.
You may agonise over whether or not to hire an SEO agency, or spend hours slaving at the keyboard writing blog post after blog post, but when it comes right down to it there is one decision that will have more impact on your place on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) than you might think: how you build your website to begin with. We’re firmly of the opinion that WordPress is the best platform for SEO, and soothing a lot of those headaches. Here’s why…
What makes WordPress the best SEO platform
There are so many factors involved in a successful SEO strategy for a website that it can be difficult to keep track of them all. Oddly, it’s frequently the offsite elements like back linking that business owners obsess over. The truth is that any strategy requires a balance of both onsite and offsite work, and (generally speaking) a lot more goes into the onsite work than anyone realises.
As a platform WordPress has a lot of really spectacular features. It’s extremely user-friendly, coming as a great platform for your Web Designer or Developer to produce you a great base to build not only your website on but key also to your SEO success.
It’s platform allows for a fully bespoke look and feel. It gives you the ability to install plugins for pretty much any functionality you can think of. Having your WordPress website created and managed by an experienced website development agency means they are on hand with their professional design skills, out of this world mad coding skills and super ninja dev knowledge, it’s a brilliant platform that makes your life a lot easier.
In short, WordPress is a brilliant platform to work with. And because it’s so functional and so versatile it also gives you a lot of spectacular benefits when it comes to SEO.
Enhanced user experience (UX)
One of the things about SEO that baffles a lot of people is the fact it’s constantly evolving. What works to get you ranking this year will not be the same as what works next year. And what is currently required to get yourself sitting pretty at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) is so far from what was needed when SEO first became a ‘thing’, that you’d be forgiven for being totally bemused by modern SEO tactics if you started looking at this a few years ago.
When SEO was in its infancy, keywords were King. They were all that. Literally. There was pretty much nothing else to SEO other than finding the keyword you wanted to rank for and stuffing it into your content as much as humanly possible. People tried all sorts, from shoehorning their keyword into every single header and every other sentence, to adding text that repeated it over and over to their pages that was the same colour as the background so it was there but invisible.
These days, you try anything like that and it will earn you a one-way ticket to the bottom of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Keywords are still important, but modern SEO tactics rely on more sophisticated strategies white hat technology to ensure good ranking of your website, and keyword stuffing or black hat activity is actively penalised, and your website will fall to the bottom of searches. So, WordPress ensures the build of your website in the safe knowledge is it being created SEO friendly for the search engines.
This is because search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. Currently, all they care about is user experience. The ease with which people can use your website is paramount. Is it easy to navigate? Is it easy on the eye? Is your copy well laid out with plenty of negative space to balance it? Do you have clear, easy-to-follow calls to action? Is contacting you simple? Is the user journey (the experience people have of your site from the second they see it in a search result to the point at which they leave it to look at something else), a positive one? Does the website load fast for the user?
WordPress’s greatest benefit in terms of SEO is arguably the ease with which it allows you to create a spectacular user experience that works to get you results.
Modern designs
Going hand-in-hand with the UX benefits of WordPress are the design elements at play. With new themes and designs specifically being designed for your WordPress by your Web Developer, you never need to worry about having an outdated design on your website. This is great for your user experience, but more than that it gives you access to elements that search algorithm updates require you to change over time.
From one year to the next the advice on best-practice where design is concerned changes. You need to have the ability to easily adapt in order to keep up. WordPress gives you that when managed by your web team to keep your site fully up to date on the latest trends.
Constant updates
On a similar note, WordPress has now been around for years, so you benefit from its constant rolling out of updates to ensure everything runs as it should. Using WordPress gives you this security of being the world’s long standing best platform for your website. Everything is geared towards ensuring every element of your site is running as smoothly as possible and keeping up with the latest requirements of being online to be ranked better by the search engines.
Dedicated SEO plugins
The range of plugins available on WordPress is one of the huge advantages of the platform in terms of usability and design versatility. But plugins are also one of the main reasons WordPress is the best platform from an SEO perspective.
With plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math making it super-simple to optimise every post and page you have, using WordPress is a bit of a no-brainer.
Versatile integrations
Another big bonus on the SEO front is the ease with which WordPress can be integrated with other platforms, from Google Analytics and Google Search Console, to social media platforms that can fully track conversions and actions on your site via a pixel that’s easily installed. You can achieve a complete end-to-end understanding of your user journey, your marketing funnel, and everything associated with your website through these integrations.
Google-friendly sitemaps
Another big SEO bonus of WordPress is the ease of creating XML sitemaps. These are essential in order for search engines to find and index your website. Building your site on WordPress ensures you are being Google friendly that will lead you to the results you need from your website.
WordPress Maintenance
Finally, we need to talk about the importance of maintenance on your site. Many people fall into the trap of creating a website and then never performing any kind of maintenance checks until something goes wrong. When it’s broken, it’s easy to see it needs fixing. But the ability of your website to achieve optimal performance is hugely impacted by whether or not your site has maintenance tasks/updates regularly carried out.
WordPress is an incredibly good platform to maintain, which is great news. If you’re running a high-traffic website with a lot of content and frequent updates, there are maintenance tasks that need to be performed every month. Smaller websites with less content and lower traffic can get away with performing these maintenance tasks less frequently, but they should still be done to keep your website safe and secure with all updates to both your WordPress system and all plugins fully up to date at all times.
When you hear of any website being hacked, 99% of the time this will be down to either someone logging into their admin panel on a unsafe connection (WI-FI) to they gain your login details from that, or you have a silly password that anyone can guess, and finally they can get into your website due to it being left from when it was build, and it has not been updated or maintained to ensure all systems are fully secure and up to date.
Essential maintenance tasks include:
Updating your WordPress system to latest version.
Checking any plugins you use are compatible with any new updates.
- Changing your WordPress passwords.
- Backing up your website.
- Checking and updating all your WordPress files.
- Checking your comments, approving those that are genuine and deleting any spam.
- Testing all your forms to ensure everything is still working correctly.
- Optimising your database.
- Running performance tests.
- Finding and fixing any 404 errors.
- Finding and fixing any broken links.
- Performing a through SEO and content audit and addressing any issues that are flagged.
- Optimising your images to ensure they are supporting your SEO efforts (in terms of size, quality, relevance, and metadata)
- Reviewing your WordPress security logs.
Troubleshooting any additional issues or tasks that have come to light in the course of your maintenance tasks and checks.
Overall WordPress is an incredibly user-friendly platform that allows a website to be created and maintained which is easily found, and a delight to use. From an SEO perspective, in particular, WordPress is a powerful platform that will make your life a lot easier while giving you a lot of options unavailable on alternative platforms.