Using Wordpress to Drive SEO

Whereas before SEO was just a component of digital marketing, now search engine optimization is a crucial and intergrated portion of successful and ongoing digital marketing strategy.

I didn’t understand how important SEO is to marketing strategy until I realized that over 80% of our leads came from being in the top three search results. As a beginner, SEO may be frustrating to understand. In this post, I’ll highlight how to easily implement a successful SEO strategy using WordPress. Read on to understand how to use WordPress for SEO.

As a young marketer, I was hired for my crm and automation knowledge, yet it took me less than a year and only several marketing reports before I realized where most leads and quality leads at that came from. While email and Google Ads still produced leads, most of our quality leads were sourced from our optimized website. The CMS we used was WordPress.

In this post, I’ll cover the following to help you understand how to use WordPress for SEO:

What is SEO
What are some SEO fundamentals
WordPress and SEO
Using Yoast SEO

What is SEO

SEO, search engine optimization, are the techniques needed to make your website rank well in a search engine such as Google or Bing. Top of mind for any digital marketer should be, ” How to I get my website to rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).” Now because ads are at the top, your website really should be ranking within the top three results of the keyword terms that are important for your leads.

What are some SEO fundamentals

Although SEO is highly complicated and a good SEO strategy needs both relevant content and technical expertise, I’ll highlight below several aspects that all optimized website share:

Targeted keyword placement that includes both popular and long-tailed keywords searched by leads
Relevant and numerous links both internal and from authoritative website to your website
User friendly and easy to read and understand
Loads in a few seconds and resizes according to device
Includes an XML Sitemap that is updated regularly

WordPress and SEO

I believe that WordPress is the best Content Management System (CMS) for your website. If you plan on editing your website often, you need a system that helps you efficiently accurately managed content. What makes WordPress special is that it has over 34,000 plugs that enable you to easily optimize your website.

Whether you choose WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, I recommend that the CMS will provide at least most of the following functionality for your SEO effort:

Static url creation ability
301-redirect option
nofollow and noindex options
Meta tag and description customization
HTML tags customization
Internal anchor text creation
Alt attributes for images
<title> tag customization
CSS customization
XML sitemap options
Static caching
Option to avoid tracking parameters and session IDs
Breadcrumb navigation option
Ability to categorize and tag
XML/RSS pinging

Using Yoast SEO

Yoast is the most popular WordPress plugin for SEO. It allows for most of the features above. Additionally, it helps you analyze your SEO efforts by showing you problem areas and areas that can be easily improved and it even evaluates your user friendliness through it’s readability section. My favorite feature of Yoast SEO is its number of easily accessible tutorials: