The 10 basics of WordPress SEO to make sure you get right.

Mastering SEO basics is crucial if you want your WordPress site to rank well and attract more visitors.

From optimising titles and descriptions to installing SEO-friendly plugins, these ten basics of WordPress SEO will help lay the foundation for a search-engine-friendly site that appeals to users and search engines.

So, what are the WordPress SEO basics?

Getting the basics right on your WP site is essential for SEO. If you don’t both do the basic optimisation, it will hurt your site in the long run because all your ongoing SEO will be built around an unoptimised site.

My freelance SEO services for WordPress can help you ensure you don’t miss any of this work and prepare your site for additional SEO work.

1. Setting up a solid site structure
2. Using SEO-friendly WordPress themes
3. Using the right plugins
4. Creating optimised title tags and meta descriptions
5. Search engines love internal linking
6. Focus on your content
7. Don’t forget your images
8. Site speed
9. Mobile-first
10. Bringing it all together

1. Setting up a solid site structure.

When putting a site together, the design is often the main focus—people endlessly tweak and polish the site’s design rather than focusing on the content and structure.

The truth here is that the structure of your site is equally as important as the design.

Planning your content so that your navigation and URL structures make sense to visitors and search engines helps people and bots better understand your content and what they are meant to do on your site.

WordPress has a permalink structure, which allows you to change how the URLs work.

The main things that can affect URL structure are:

• Pages (parent, child, grandchild)
• Categories and tags
• Custom post types

Before you start adding any content to your site, you need to plan it in a spreadsheet and consider how large your site will get.

The larger you plan to grow your site, the more care you must take over the URL structure from the start of the project.

SEO Tip: If you don’t get your URL structure correct, changing it later, when you have ranking URLs and a large site, can be an SEO nightmare.

Your site structure also informs your navigation, which you want to be as simple as possible to avoid confusing visitors. Simple navigation is easier to use, easier to build, and easier to maintain on your site, whereas a complex mega menu, for example, can be complex.

If you have a large website, consider adding a search bar. People are well-versed in using search tools, and this is how they found you in the first place.

How to optimise your URL structure from the start.

When planning your site, it’s important to consider how you will organise your content using WordPress’s content structure.

These should be page content if you have top-level pages, such as About, contact, etc.

Your articles or blocks naturally belong in the posts section.

But where do you put everything else?

The two main errors people make here are:

1. Using Pages for all their content
2. Using Posts for stuff other than blogs

If you are new to WP, this is an easy mistake because you have probably never heard of custom post types (CPTs).

CPTs are a better way of organising your content and URL structures as they allow you to have specific URLs for each type of content and specific sections in the admin to manage this content.

This means the Pages section of your admin is reserved for top-level pages, your Posts section for, well, posts, and then you use CPTs for everything else, such as services, products, team members, locations, and so on.

This creates an organised site that visitors and search engine bots can understand.

If you want to go even further, CPTs can have their own categories and tags, allowing you to organise and collate your content into a meaningful structure.

The final important thing about your URL structure is to ensure you use ‘pretty permalinks’; this means not having numbers or underscores in your URLS, and you change these settings in Admin > Settings > Permalinks.

2. Using SEO-friendly WordPress themes.

I bang on about themes all the time.

They are equally what makes WordPress great and what makes WordPress an SEO nightmare.

As you probably know, your WP installation requires a theme to work.

This theme controls the layout, design and functions of your website.

But not all themes are created equal – there are three main types of WP themes:

1. Free themes
2. Premium themes
3. Bespoke or custom themes

Let’s start with the first two, as these are usually the worst offenders for ruining your SEO work.

Free and Premium themes are designed to do one thing: be as useful as possible to as many different people as possible.

This is very noble, as theme developers try to cram every conceivable function into their themes to make them widely appealing and increase their use.

However, this comes at a cost: adding everything and the kitchen sink to their themes adds loads of stuff (and therefore code) that your site does not require.

This smorgasbord of functionality and styling harms your SEO as it can make these themes a nightmare to optimise technically.

This means that although you have a great free or cheap theme, your site will suffer from an SEO perspective.

Add to this that your site will look very similar to thousands of other sites on the Internet, and you will find yourself in a branding and SEO hellhole.

Personally, I prefer to work with bespoke or custom WordPress themes as these are built from the ground up and only contain the functions and code you need now.

If you need more later on, you can add it, making the bespoke route the perfect option if you plan to invest in SEO work.

Another thing to consider with choosing an SEO-friendly theme is that if you choose an unfriendly theme and add 100 pages of content, moving your site to a better theme later on to improve your SEO becomes more costly as you can’t simply switch your theme – everything has to be reworked.

There are also things to consider, such as site speed (premium themes are slower as they contain lots of superfluous code) and responsive stuff, but, to be fair, most premium themes do have this covered, even if it takes an age dicking about with desktop, tablet and mobile versions of the same page).

3. Using the right plugins.

Every plugin you add to your site affects its speed and performance, so choose wisely and don’t install 100s of plugins.

You absolutely should have an SEO plugin installed, and the big players in this market are:

• Yoast SEO
• Rankmath
• All-in-one-SEO

You can take your pick as far as these go, but I have found that Yoast generally plays nicely with all these plugins; Rankmath can sometimes have compatibility issues, and I have never used AIO SEO, so take what you will from that.

All these plugins provide necessary SEO functions, such as redirects, sitemaps, editing metadata, and so on. It often comes down to personal preference, but you should have one of these installed on your site to help you with your SEO.

4. Creating optimised title tags and meta descriptions.

The bits of your site where you can use the least amount of characters, but they are very important.

You want your titles to contain keywords and your meta descriptions to be enticing: you can’t say more than that.

Spend time on your titles and meta. Don’t get AI to write them or see them as an afterthought—they are important, so craft the copy and be clever with these.

SEO tip: When you publish, WordPress will automatically generate your page slug from your title; you don’t want this, so change it, shortening where required (one thing AI can help you with).

5. Search engines love internal linking.

Again, this is something that is often overlooked but vital for effective SEO.

Internal linking helps the bots understand your site structure and what you consider to be important pages.

I am not talking about your main navigation or footer links here; I am talking about words on one page that link to another.

Here are the absolute musts for internal linking:

1. Never automate it
2. Make sure you use a broad range of anchor texts (so don’t link to the same page using the same text all the time
3. Make sure every page on your site has at least one internal link (to avoid orphaned pages)
4. Do this when you publish new content, as you will forget it, and if you need to link 1000 pages internally, it takes forever (whereas it takes five more minutes when you first publish
5. Use a WordPress internal linking plugin like WILO to help you internally link manually,

Good internal linking helps the bots and keeps visitors on your website longer, which Google notices and can be a ranking factor.

SEO tip: If you are going through the trouble of internal linking, make sure people can see the links; use an underline or accent colour to highlight them.

6. Focus on your content.

There is nothing more important than content.

You can have a slow AF website with amazing content and still achieve good rankings.

Content is what Google (et al.) exists for, so make it great.

Invest time and money in good content:

1. Research it
2. Write with opinion and passion
3. Make it relevant
4. Follow Google’s EEAT guidelines
5. Don’t pad it out
6. Don’t stuff it with keywords that turn it into gibberish
7. Invest in SEO software that helps you write great articles
8. 100% do not get Chat GPT or other AI apps to write it
9. Add internal AND external links
10. Add images
11. Add different types of content, such as bullet lists and CTAs
12. Make sure it has an author
13. Promote it on social
14. The list goes on…

If you think you can knock out an article in 10 minutes on GPT and publish it with any beneficial effect on your site, you don’t deserve to rank in the first place.

SEO is highly competitive, so if your content is to rank first, it has to be the best.

There are no shortcuts to this and no easy way of writing a winning article.

You have to know your stuff, know how to optimise it and carefully select the keywords you are chasing with it.

SEO tip: It is this simple: you have to write amazing content for your site and make sure it is better than everything else in your niche,

7. Don’t forget your images.

Don’t upload massive images with file names like ‘34232323_img.png”, and don’t upload PNGs, for that matter either, unless the image is suitable.

Optimise your images in Photoshop or using a website before you upload them, size them correctly, and save them as JPG files where possible.

Important tips for the best images for SEO:

1. Resize the image to the correct size
2. Change the file name to work with the post title before you upload it
3. When you upload the image, ensure you add an SEO-friendly ALT tag
4. Use a plugin to compress the images, like Smush or Imagify
5. User webP format to make them load quicker
6. Don’t add loads of images to a single page
7. Lazy load all images below the fold
8. If you use images as links, make sure they have a title in the link
9. Don’t go for the first free stock image you find; be original or utilise AI for image generation
10. Set image dimensions
11. Use SrcSet
12. Use a CDN to offload the images

Follow these tips, and your images will all be SEO-friendly and won’t slow down your site.

SEO tip: Images are often overlooked in the rush to publish, so just take five minutes more to get them right as you publish, and you won’t have to revisit 100s of them later.

8. Site speed.

Use cheap hosting and have a slow site.

There is zero point in going to the effort of designing, building and developing a site for SEO if you are going to host it on a crappy host.

There is not much to say about this subject: spend at least £30 per month on your hosting with a reputable hosting company.

They are not just because loads of affiliate sites tell you certain hosts are the best for click-bait and cash.

Judge your host by the reviews on their websites and what they charge.

Your hosting should seem reassuringly expensive.

A slow website is the biggest factor that tends to make visitors bounce off your site and back to the search.

Get a faster site

9. Mobile-first.

It does not matter if your audience is desk-based; your site is being indexed mobile-first.

Most themes are responsive these days; almost mentioning them seems a little daft as it’s a no-brainer.

Your site must work 100% on everything from the smallest phone to the largest screen.

According to Statcounter, around 60% of all traffic is mobile, so your site must work seamlessly on mobile devices.

10. Bringing it all together.

The above are the basics for getting your SEO correct on your WordPress site; in fact most of the above form the foundations for your SEO moving forward.

It can seem like a lot, but failing to follow these steps will hinder and underperform any future SEO work you do.

I can help you get all this stuff sorted.

I can sort in hours what will take you days, so if you want to get started in improving your WP site, get in touch below, and we can have an initial chat about your site and objectives, run a free audit and see what we are working with.

I see far too many small businesses paying for SEO on sites that are simply not optimised for it, so don’t waste any more SEO budget: get your site sorted for SEO.