WordPress Best SEO Practices in 2016

WordPress is a classic example of from-humble-beginnings-come-great-things concept in the world of SEO. 411 Locals reminds you, that It started out as a simple blogging tool and by 2015 it became the leading content management system worldwide – arguably every fourth website is a WordPress site. The latter include NASA, CNN, the NYT, Best Buy, eBay and many, many more brands using this free and customizable platform.

So how to get the best of WordPress and make a name in the world of SEO and web design? Here is the list of must-do actions you need to take.

1. Setting Up Web Hosting

One of the most important ranking factors is the website speed. That's the foundation of successfully navigating your WordPress site and it's never a secondary investment – so be aware of any offer you get from hosting service providers. These are the key characteristics you need to know when you evaluate the pros and cons in the offer:

the provider's support for plugins; 
the backup support;
the availability of staging environment;
the volume of bandwidth;
the operating system;
famous and infamous sites in your IP range;

2. Content Delivery Network

For a faster website, with lower bounce rate and user-friendly interface, your static content (images, javascript, and CSS) is the major drawback. The CDN caches the content, thus lowering the response time.

3. Find an SEO Friendly Theme

Sadly (or not) the most beautiful WordPress themes are not necessarily the most optimized ones. You need to consider a handful of features before you opt for something appealing. First, concentrate on the following:

Look for clean and fast code for shorter load time;
A limited number of CSS and Javascript files is always an advantage;
Look for simpler design to get a user-friendly navigation;
The responsive design is a must for 2016;
The use of Schema Markups guides the search engines and help you rank better;

4.The Important Steps When You Launch Your WordPress Site

Use a cache plugin for increased website speed and performance: plugins like W3 Total Cache or Hyper Cache will do – just make sure that once activated, your plugin is also activated through the settings menu; 
Categories improve user experience and provide easy access to pages to get indexed: use generic topics that represent a keyword that your potential viewers would be looking for. Keep each post included in less than 2 categories and make sure your archive pages have content too;

Tags improve user experience and increase engagement: tag the relevant topics by post and keep them short – two words at max. Do a monthly evaluation and get rid of unnecessary tags; 

Permalinks increase the search rankings when keywords are used and the overall SEO-friendly characteristics of your pages will be improved: don't leave the default WordPress settings – Google support designated it as a bad choice. When you construct your URL, avoid “&”, “?” and “!” characters. Also, use hyphens instead of underscores;
Spam comments will hurt the performance of your website, so you should improve your credibility by taking some precautions; disallow anonymous posting and hyperlinks, prevent spammy comments through CAPTCHA code and use the “nofollow” attribute;

5. How to Optimize Your WordPress Website Quickly?

Optimized meta elements increase the click-through rate, so adjust your post type settings and most of all, download a special plugin – Yoast SEO;
The XML sitemap feature of Yoast will help you gather all your posts and pages in a list that search engines can easily read. Just make sure you have the sitemap of your website submitted in Google Search Console;
Proper internal linking will create an outstanding site architecture and distribute page authority throughout your site: place links that look natural and connect all the pages that need to be indexed. You can use a plugin for the process – WP-Optimize by xTraffic;

Optimized images provide better user experience and will be more likely to appear in image search: use keywords when you name your images (the image name must look natural), write an image alt tag description and fill in the image alt attribution description;
Never enough header tags: h1 h2 and h3 make your content readable and increase user engagement, so go ahead and make your audience ready for the next paragraph with a header;
Duplicate content is a major issue, so use rel=”canonical” tag to indicate where the source URL of your content is. Make sure all pages on your website have the tag enabled;
Guide the SERPs what to look for and what not with the help of robots.txt: make sure that all your quality pages and posts are allowed to be indexed in the robots.txt file;

6. Secure Your Website with Regular Maintenance

The broken links on your website can lead to poor user experience and decreased ranking in the long run, so download Integrity (for Mac) or Xenu (for PC) and fix the external links. In addition, the Redirection plugin will fix your 404 errors, so you won't have to do a manual check for broken links every once in awhile;
Backing up your website will help you rest easy, comforted by the knowledge that your SEO efforts were not in vain: use the cPanel or get a plugin like BackupBuddy;