WordPress and SEO

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

In part seven of this guide I covered the topic of content management systems and the options available for internet start-ups. I concluded that WordPress is an ideal solution for many small to medium size business websites, especially where SEO is on the agenda. So, in this stage of my guide, I will be covering the topic of WordPress and SEO in more detail; looking at the benefits of the system and ways to fine tune it for search engine success. To go back to the start of my guide click here.

Advantages of WordPress

WordPress is an ideal solution for many small businesses that are planning on launching a website with search marketing as an objective. The benefits of opting for WordPress as your content management system include:

• Ease of Set-up. WordPress requires only a minimal amount of technical expertise to set-up and install. A knowledge and understanding of how to use an FTP client would be beneficial, although many web hosting companies offer automatic installation on your web space. For guide lines on installation, visit the WordPress site.
• Customisation. WordPress is a highly customisable content management system with an enormous range of plug-ins available for SEO, analytics and other purposes. This enables even non-technical users to configure and customise their websites without having to understand HTML or PHP code at an advanced level.
• SEO Friendly Themes. The popularity of WordPress has lead to huge proliferation of websites offering WordPress themes which you can download and install on your web space. Websites such as Theme Forest, offer SEO friendly, professional looking business and e-commerce themes from as little as £20. These can be adapted to fit your brand and business objectives.
• User Friendly. WordPress is easy to use and requires only a very basic understanding of HTML in order to be able to create professional looking web pages and posts. The option panels enable you to add page mark-up automatically although it’s advisable to familiarise yourself with standard tags such as H1 through to H6, bold and italics.
• Low Cost. WordPress is again ideal for small business websites as the cost to set-up, install and configure for SEO can be very low, especially if you’re able to educate yourself on the system and carry out the necessary customisations without employing a developer. The existence of affordable themes, together with the range of plug-ins and technical support from the WordPress community means that it’s theoretically possible to get a professional looking website up and running for less than £50 (unless you have to pay a third party to assist you with the process).
• Fast Results. WordPress is very SEO friendly. Once you have customised the back-end, added your original content and begun your link-building efforts, it’s not unheard of for brand new WordPress sites to achieve page one results in a matter of weeks (highly dependant, of course, on the key-phrase niche that you’re targeting and the popularity of specific keywords).

Disadvantages of WordPress

• Duplicate Content Issues. WordPress is still prone to duplicate content issues which are particularly problematic for sites with a large amount of content. This is a surmountable problem and, again, there are plug-ins at hand to help combat the issue.
• Management Time. WordPress is built as a blogging platform. Google identifies sites built using WordPress as blog sites. It’s therefore advisable to ensure that the blog section of your site is kept frequently up to date. (Google might be less likely to rank blogs high in its search results when they have not been updated for some time). This may pose a management time issue for some small business owners who lack the resources to develop site content.

WordPress and SEO

There are several things that need to be done once WordPress is installed in order to fine tune your website for SEO purposes. These include:

• Configuring the permalink structure. A popular option is to select “Custom Setting” and entering “/%category%/%postname%/“. This will create URLs for your posts that integrate keywords from your post titles. It also avoids crawling issues associated with the default setting.
• Install SEO plug-ins. A popular choice is the All in One SEO Pack, although for this site I have a different set-up. Installing an SEO pack of some sort is essential as the default WordPress settings automatically generate your page and post META titles. These need to be unique for each individual page and post on your site.
• Install Robots META. This plug-in is especially important, if like me, you don’t use the All in One SEO pack. This will, amongst other things, help you to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Install Google XML Sitemaps. Install this plug-in to automatically inform Google, Bing and Yahoo of your site updates. This also enables search engines to crawl and index your site more effectively.
• Install Analytics. Install Google Analytics or other analytics packages such as Statcounter. This is essential for monitoring user behaviour on your web pages.

WordPress and SEO Checklist

• Start-up businesses on a low budget can consider adapting an existing WordPress theme
• Ensure that you configure WordPress for optimum SEO by installing the recommended plug-ins
• Familiarize yourself with the the WordPress add Pages and Posts functionality

Part Nine

In part nine I will cover the topic of key-phrase research and how, as mentioned earlier in this guide, it’s essential to conduct this prior to any web development work. Click here to go to part nine.