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After using many website building platforms for my multiple niches over the years, I’ve chosen WordPress as my favorite platform. Here’s Why.
WordPress is free to download, easy to install, and loaded with useful features. More importantly, the platform helps hearn higher search rankings, allowing me to attract more website traffic from Google, Bing, and other search engines.
To dominate the search results, you should consider building your website with WordPress. Over the past decade, it’s become the definitive content management system (CMS) for creating and maintaining websites.
Permalink Customization
WordPress supports permalink customization to create search engine-friendly URLs. Rather than using nondescript URL slugs, such as example.com/jd7he14d, you can give your posts and pages descriptive URL slugs that reflect their content, such as example.com/the-seo-benefits-of-wordpress, by accessing Settings > Permalinks in the WordPress dashboard.
Descriptive URL slugs tell search engines what your posts and pages are about, which they’ll use to calculate your website’s search rankings.
Streamlined Content Creation
Creating new content is a breeze in WordPress thanks to the CMS’s user-friendly interface. You don’t need to create new posts and pages offline and manually upload them to your website’s server.
Instead, just log in to the WordPress dashboard from your web browser, at which point you can access WordPress’s content editor to create new content.
WordPress’s default content editor is simple and easy to use yet offers all the necessary customization options for SEO-friendly content. When you create a new post or page, you can add a title, headings, lists, links, embed URLs, widgets, images, videos and more.
You can even specify the date and time when you’d like WordPress to publish your new content.
All these features streamline your content creation efforts, allowing you to produce more high-quality content while subsequently, compelling search engines to rank your website higher.
Fast Indexing
Search engines may index your website’s content more quickly if you use WordPress. The CMS automatically notifies search engines via pinging when you update your website.
In the Settings > Writing section of the WordPress dashboard, you’ll see a list of pinging services under “Update Services.” By default, WordPress uses a single pinging service: Ping-O-Matic.
However, you add other pinging services to the list to faster indexing. Each time you make a change to your website, including publishing a new post or page, WordPress will alert these pinging services, which in turn will notify search engines about the update.
You can use categories and tags to bolster your website’s performance in the search results. While optional, both of these elements — when used correctly — provide search engines with additional information about your website’s content.
And if you display your categories and tags at the bottom of your content, visitors can click them to find related content. (See bottom of this blog for an example)
Categories are particularly beneficial for SEO because they create a natural hierarchy with your website’s content. When you add a category, WordPress will create a new folder on your website for all assigned posts.
Therefore, placing a post in a category changes its URL slug from example.com/post to example.com/category/post. You can even place categories inside other categories to achieve a deeper level of hierarchy.
Search engines prefer websites with a well-structured hierarchy such as this because it helps visitors find content more easily, so using categories could have a positive impact on your SEO efforts.
Visitor Comments
Visitors can leave comments on your
When investigating the SEO benefits of visitor comments, digital marketing expert Neil Patel discovered over 26 percent of the keywords for which his website was ranking came from visitor comments.
In other words, roughly one in four keywords for which Patel’s website ranked consisted of an excerpt from visitor comments.
If you’re worried about attracting spam comments, WordPress offers several built-in features to safeguard your website from these potentially harmful comments. Under Settings > Discussion, you can opt to close comments on old articles, specify filter words or opt to manually review all visitor comments before they are published.
Image Optimization
WordPress allows you to optimize your website’s images using the content editor. After uploading an image and inserting it into a post or page, you can edit its alt text attribute to describe the image.
While search engine crawling technology has vastly improved over the last few decades, search engines still struggle to accurately identify images based on their appearance alone.
To overcome this challenge, most search engines now look at alt text when crawling images.
Mobile Optimization
Because WordPress uses themes, you can easily optimize your website for mobile devices using it. If you use a different CMS, you could be forced to manually optimize each page.
With WordPress, however, all it takes to optimize your website for mobile devices is downloading and installing a mobile-friendly theme.
There are thousands of mobile-friendly WordPress themes, including the CMS’s signature Twenty Nineteen theme. After installing a mobile-friendly theme on your website, the layout of all your posts and pages will be optimized for mobile devices.
And if you aren’t fully satisfied with the new theme, you can revert back to your old theme without breaking your website’s functionality or design.
SEO Plugins
In addition to themes, you can download and use SEO plugins on your WordPress website. Yoast is undoubtedly the most popular SEO plugin.
While a premium version of Yoast is available for $89, the free version offers dozens of useful SEO features, including keyword optimization, readability analysis, breadcrumb navigation, duplicate content analysis, custom title tags, custom meta descriptions, snippet preview and XML sitemap creation.
An alternative to Yoast is the All in One SEO Pack. Since being released in 2007, it’s been downloaded over 50 million times, so you can rest assured knowing it’s a useful SEO tool.
The All in One SEO Pack plugin contains many of the same features as Yoast but with a simpler interface.
To get started with WordPress, download the software from wordpress.org. Once downloaded, you can upload it to your website’s server and connect it to a new MySQL database. The entire process only takes about five minutes, allowing you to head start on building an SEO-friendly website.
