How to Do On-Page SEO in WordPress

New website owners often get a little nervous when they see highly technical-sounding phrases like search engine optimization (SEO). The truth, though, is that on-page SEO in WordPress isn’t rocket science – and if you don’t have the budget to get help, it’s something you can definitely learn to do on your own.

Doing SEO in WordPress doesn’t require any special training or technical skill. It’s simply a matter of creating and organizing your content in a way that makes it easy for Google and other search engines to understand it.

WordPress is a fairly SEO-oriented website platform on its own, and it’s only gotten better over the years thanks to some great plugin developers. It’s better still when you’re using an SEO-optimized theme.

In this high-level guide, we’ll explain how to get started.

Create a Logical Plan for Organizing Your Site

It’s a very good idea to plan your website’s structure on a whiteboard before you begin building the site. Think of the overall hierarchy as being a bit like a tree in which the main ideas of the pages become increasingly specific as the branches move away from the trunk. Here’s how it works.

• Your home page represents the main idea – or the target keyword, in SEO terms – for the entire website. If you’re a jeweler, for instance, your ultimate goal might be to create a website that ranks well for the keyword phrase “designer jewelry.”
• Your product category pages represent ideas that relate to the website’s main keyword but are a bit more specific. The category pages for a jeweler, for instance, might have keywords like “Necklaces,” “Bracelets,” “Rings” and “Earrings.”
• If you carry a large selection of products, you might need to place subcategories like “Gold Necklaces,” “Silver Necklaces” and “Herringbone Necklaces” under the main categories. These subcategories will be more specific than the main categories and will help to reinforce the relevance of those categories.
• The individual products will reside within the categories you’ve created.

Organizing a small WordPress site is fairly simple, and the category menu in WordPress will even nest related categories automatically to provide a visual representation of your site’s hierarchy. Organization can easily become more difficult, though, with larger sites. For example, you might want to have separate main categories for product types, brands and colors. That’s why using a whiteboard can be so helpful. If you feel stuck, look at a major e-commerce website like V2 Cigs UK to see how it’s done.

Build a Logical Menu Structure

Once you’ve designed your website’s overall hierarchy, the next step is to build a menu system that helps visitors get around. With a smaller e-commerce site, every product category that you create might end up becoming a clickable menu option. If your site is larger, though, developing a menu can get tricky. You want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to get to the section of your site that they want to view without bombarding them with so many options that they end up feeling stuck. If you have dozens of product categories, they probably don’t all belong in your site’s main menu.

WordPress has a built-in menu system that works very well for smaller sites. You can add categories or specific URLs to a menu and choose where the menu will appear based on the options that your site’s theme allows. It’s also possible to create complex menus with images and multiple drop-down options by installing a third-party menu plugin.

A WordPress theme generally has at least two areas where you can insert menus: the top (header) section of the page and the bottom (footer). The header menu is usually where you’ll put the most important links such as your site’s main product categories. You’ll use the footer menu for things like links to your blog and policy-related pages.

Configure Your Site’s Permalink Settings

Before you add any content to your site, you’ll want to configure your site’s permalink structure. The permalinks are the URLs of the individual pages on your site, and this is an important aspect of on-page SEO because a page’s URL should always contain that page’s target keyword. You may also want to include categories in the permalinks. Two examples of valid permalink structures are:

• com/necklaces/herringbone-necklace
• com/herringbone-necklace

Here’s an example of a bad permalink structure.

• com/?p=123

The above permalink would be bad for on-page SEO because the page’s URL wouldn’t contain the primary keyword for that page.

It’s important to settle on your site’s permalink structure before you begin adding content to the site. Altering the permalink structure after the fact will change every URL on your website, forcing Google to delete and reindex the entire site. You would almost never want to do that.

Use a Plugin or Theme That Lets You Create Custom Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

The title tags and meta descriptions of your site’s pages are two extremely important aspects of your on-page SEO. Out of the box, though, WordPress doesn’t let you modify those things. You’ll need to use a theme or plugin that lets you specify custom title tags and meta descriptions. Additionally, using an on-page SEO checker can help ensure that all the critical elements, like title tags, meta descriptions, and keyword placement, are optimized for search engines.

By default, WordPress will take the title that you enter for a page and use it as both the title tag and the H1 heading displayed on the page itself. There are many reasons, though, why you might not want the title tag and H1 heading to be exactly the same. Google may display a page’s title tag in its search results, so crafting a custom title allows you to enhance your site’s branding or include additional information that might encourage people to click through to your site.

For example, let’s consider a product page for our hypothetical jewelry site.

• The H1 header – which is the title that’s actually displayed on the page – might be “Elegant 14K Gold Herringbone Necklace.”
• The title tag for this page – which would be displayed on Google – might be “Elegant 14K Gold Herringbone Necklace – Free Shipping – Websitename.com.”

The title tag promotes a free shipping offer that might encourage people to click through and see the product. It also includes the website’s name, which is good for branding. You wouldn’t want such a long title to be displayed on the page, though, and that’s why it’s important to have the ability to edit H1 headers and title tags separately. The H1 header and title tag, however, should both contain the main keyword phrase that you would like the page to rank for on Google.

Google may also display a page’s meta description in its search results. It’s worthwhile to spend some time on your meta descriptions because a well-written meta description may encourage people to click through to your site. Although meta descriptions have no direct effect on on-page SEO, they can affect your rankings indirectly because pages with high click-through rates tend to increase in rank over time.

Focus on Content Quality Over SEO

The entire point of SEO is to ensure that your content can be easily read and understood by a machine. Once you’ve done that, you should stop worrying about SEO and focus on the quality of your site’s content. Compared to combing through your website looking for small tweaks that you could possibly make to improve your rankings incrementally here and there, your time would be much better spent writing high-quality content.

It’s also important to note that many of Google’s recent algorithm updates have been specifically designed to help great content rise to the surface while demoting content that looks like it’s written for no other purpose except to rank well on search engines. The more time you spend tweaking your on-page SEO, the more your site will end up looking like every other website. Truly great content, on the other hand, always makes a site stand out.