While most people will praise WordPress for its combination of simplicity and versatility, you can often hear people expressing doubts about the optimization of sites made in this content management system. Even though there are some things that you need to pay special attention to when trying to increase the visibility of your site, the faults that the system has had with regard to SEO have mostly been eliminated, either by the platform itself, or by one of a great number of plugins that have been made for it.
The same things that go for other kinds of websites are also applicable here. This includes paying attention to keyword density, writing keyword rich post and page titles, engaging meta descriptions that will make the user want to visit your site, using headings properly and making sure that you provide image titles and alt tags. If you are having trouble doing any of these things in WordPress (and you probably shouldn’t) you can always find a suitable plugin to help you.
Permalinks structure should be your next stop. The URLs that WordPress will create for your new pages are neither user nor SEO friendly, as they only contain a string of nonsensical symbols. It would be a good idea to make understandable URLs that could contain the keywords that you want to optimize the page for, and give your users a clear idea of the content of the page in question.
Likewise, you need to make your content as crawlable as possible and you can do this in a number of ways. Making an XTML sitemap or using Google Sitemaps should do the trick and enable the crawlers to find your content as quickly as possible. Internal linking is another thing that you have to look out for. There are a number of plugins that let you find your previous posts that are related to the one that you have just written, you should mention some of them for extra exposure, especially if your new post is attracting a lot of attention. Finally, using breadcrumbs is another way to make it easier for Google to index your content, and they are also giving your users additional options for navigation.
Duplicated content is one of the issues that can make optimizing a WordPress website difficult. This is mostly caused by different ways of sorting content, such as the date and author archives. You can avoid this by using no-index and no-follow attributes, eliminating the archives that you don’t need (for instance if you only have one author on your website, or if you don’t need date based archive), and making sure that you are using canonicalization properly (again, there are plugins that can help you with this).
Even though WordPress sites might have been a tad more difficult to optimize in the past, the issues that were making it so have mostly been ironed out, and you left with a great and a convenient platform that allows anyone with just a little know-how to make a great website. However, even though technical issues might have been resolved, you still need to make an effort and produce engaging content, as that still remains the most important factor in your ranking.