WordPress began as a basic blogging platform and has grown to become the world’s most popular content management system since it was released back in 2003. Nowadays, WordPress websites are created by people from all over the globe, ranging from individuals to small company owners looking to develop their firms online to large corporate enterprises. To be more specific, WordPress currently powers 43.3% of all websites on the Internet. It continues to expand, slowly but gradually.
Web search accounts for more than 51% of all organic traffic. Hence, as companies with creating leads online, SEO (search engine optimization) is a key element of your marketing plan. This is the reason the first step in optimizing a website is selecting a suitable CMS.
While there are numerous SEO-friendly content management systems available, one appears to outperform them all: WordPress. WordPress is the most widely used content management system (CMS), and although there are other reasons for this CMS’s meteoric rise in popularity, it is evident that WordPress is very well-designed for SEO.
The following are twelve reasons why WordPress is the best content management system for SEO.
Specifically designed for content creation
If content marketing is a critical component of your marketing plan, you’ll need a content management system (CMS) that simplifies the process of frequently generating material. WordPress, which began as a blogging platform, simplifies this process of creating content. Through its drag-and-drop editor to its easy-to-use multimedia library, technical and non-technical users alike may share their material with the world, utilizing the platform.
WordPress includes a number of built-in SEO features, however there are several areas where these features can fall short. There are always WordPress SEO plugins that can help by extending the optimization capabilities of your site.
Source code that is search engine friendly
Apart from being simple to use, WordPress establishes a solid basis for SEO on the backend. WordPress is primarily written in the PHP programming language. However, the CMS retains the necessary HTML markup, making your content easily crawlable by search engines.
On top of that, in recent years, WordPress has also published additional themes that take use of HTML5. HTML5 offers the advantages of cleaner, more cross-platform code. And, of course, a site created with clean code and optimized for mobile is an SEO-friendly site.
Metadata generation on the fly
If you already have knowledge on search engine optimization, you’ve probably heard about the value of your content’s header (or SEO title), meta tags, and meta descriptions. By ensuring that each of these includes a relevant target keyword, you greatly increase your chances of ranking on search engines.
Nevertheless, manually entering all of this information might be a lengthy process. WordPress, thankfully, enables you to automate this procedure. The CMS may generate the necessary HTML tags for you with the assistance of an SEO plugin.
Clean URL structure
You’ve probably noticed that certain URLs are easier to remember than others. The URLs you choose for your website articles have a significant impact on how search engines view your content. By default, the feature that shows URLs based on a few unusual letters and digits is enabled. They are referred to as permalinks and look like this: https://pixagon.co/?p=123.
Permalinks are the URLs for your blog posts, web pages, categories, and tag archives that search engines use. Their structure, on the other hand, might make it easier or harder for search engine crawlers to understand and index your web pages and postings. In these cases, you need to improve its readibility for both search engines and visitors.
Fortunately, WordPress provides for simple changes through the settings menu in your dashboard. You may either use /post-name/ or /category/post-name to update it. Customize the URL permalinks for each of your articles and pages by providing the desired format and description. Add any relevant keywords to your URL structure to make it even more search engine friendly. If your URL contains a strong term from your content, this is an excellent SEO booster.
You can easily customize the format of your URLs with WordPress. For instance, you can make it so your blog posts are always generated in the following form: yoursite/blog/title. Individual permalinks can also be edited to reflect your desired format. And with the help of those clean permalinks, search engines will have an easier time finding your content.
Easy image optimization
Everybody loves image-heavy sites. They look wonderful and are compelling to visitors. That said, images that aren’t optimized can greatly slow down your site speed, and site speed undoubtedly factors into how your site ranks. Moreover, research by Google indicates that over half (53%) of users will abandon a page that takes too long to load. As such, if your site takes too long to load, fewer users may want to engage with your content, which will directly impact your SEO.
Instead, you can use the WordPress editor to easily resize your images and reduce site loading speed. With that same editor, you can take image optimization a step further by adding alt tags and descriptions as well.
Along with high-quality content, your articles should incorporate photos that complement the subject. Images break up the word flow and increase readability, giving your material a more attractive and consistent appearance. Hence, They should be of a high standard and relevant to the topic. However, search engines do not just hunt for pictures in the manner in which humans view them. They are looking for photos with alt text.
Alt text is an HTML property that may be applied to an image element. It enhances the overall user experience and accessibility for those with low vision who use screen readers. Therefore, if you want to increase web traffic to your site, you cannot ignore image optimization. It is a critical part of effective SEO. It’s all about establishing compelling, relevant picture names and alt text in order to improve your search engine exposure on Google and other search engines.
With WordPress, it’s as simple as filling in the appropriate fields. It’s simple to add titles and alt text to your photos after they’re uploaded to the CMS. Simply choose the picture editing choices and input the text in the “Alternative Text” box.
Optimization for mobile devices
As mentioned, site speed is critical to both SEO and keeping your site visitors, but images aren’t the only factor at play. You’ll want to ensure that your site loads quickly for users, no matter what device they’re using, whether it be a mobile phone, a tablet, or a desktop computer.
With the number of mobile users now outpacing desktop users, ensuring your site loads quickly for mobile users is more critical than ever before. And mobile users are impatient: According to Google Partners, the optimal loading speed for a site on mobile is just 3 seconds. You should also know that Google prioritizes mobile-friendly results for all those key search queries.
The good news is that WordPress is known to offer a quick loading speed even in its standard configuration. That said, if poorly maintained, any site will show signs of slowing down. As such, ensure you implement regular maintenance and use a good hosting service, so you can get the full site speed potential and SEO out your site.
You have nothing to fear if you utilize WordPress. The majority of themes are pre-optimized for mobile devices. Thus, while customizing your website, you can see how it appears across a variety of devices. While we take it for granted that every theme should be responsive, there are still website owners who are unsure how to do this.
Google is on the lookout for a mobile version of your site and has implemented mobile-first indexing when analyzing and ranking websites. Therefore, if you want to stay on Google’s good side, you must guarantee that your site’s mobile version is as high-quality as the desktop one. This implies that your site should load fast, have easy navigation, and allow visitors to easily execute a variety of activities.
Security
An underlying factor that can impact SEO is your site’s security. When Google fails to identify your site as secure, the search engine might label your site as spam or harmful to users. Unfortunately, this means that Google may not even bother to index your content. That’s why WordPress makes a consistent effort to stay secure. With the WordPress security team and community on your side, security vulnerabilities are often immediately detected—it’s just up to you to keep up with those security updates.
Social Media Integration
When it comes to SEO, many internet marketers neglect the relevance of social media. While social media does not have a direct impact on website rankings or SEO, the links you publish across several platforms can enhance brand exposure.
If you engage your audience on social media, you will improve your ranks. The converse is also true: when you have a high rating, you may anticipate more participation on your social media postings. The more social shares your website receives, the more likely it is to be discovered by your target demographic.
It is not about the number of followers you have, but rather how engaged others are with your articles (likes, comments, shares). The likes, comments, and shares you get on your articles are signals that search engines utilize to index and rank your site. It is critical to monitor your brand’s online engagement and how consumers discuss it, since these discussions drive search inquiries. With WordPress it is easier to setup and use comment and share functionalities.
Site Performance
Google is very concerned with speed, and as such has incorporated site and page speed as a ranking factor. Indeed, Google expressly considers page speed, since the quicker a page loads, the simpler it is for the search engine to scan and index the whole website.
Additionally, page/site speed plays a critical role in the user experience. Pages that load more quickly have a lower bounce rate and a longer average time spent on the page.
Site performance should not be an issue for individuals who currently use WordPress. There are several fast-loading themes available to suit every need. Additionally, you may discover plugins that were built specifically to increase the performance of your website.
To confirm that everything works properly and loads quickly, you can run a speed test on your site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. The PageSpeed score is calculated using data from two critical performance metrics: DOMContentLoaded (DCL) and First Contentful Paint (FCP), as well as data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). These assist in evaluating the performance of a page on both desktop and mobile devices and provide recommendations on how to enhance it.
Several typical causes of a slow-loading WordPress site include unoptimized photos and digital assets, insufficient web hosting services, and the use of too many plugins. And, while speed is critical, it’s critical to be aware of possible bottlenecks, when and under what conditions they may occur, so you can learn how to approach and deal with them.
Community support
Even when you have a plethora of great features at your fingertips, that doesn’t mean much if you don’t feel like you can access the help that you need. But with WordPress, there’s no need to worry: You have an entire community behind your back.
Of course, you can visit the WordPress Support forums and engage with the community there. But because WordPress is such a popular CMS, there is a surplus of third-party websites, tools, and videos available to offer you any additional support and information you may need.
Wrap Up
If content marketing is at the forefront of your strategy to get noticed, WordPress is a great CMS for providing you with the SEO-friendly foundation you need. From making it easy to publish content to its supportive community, WordPress can arm you with the right tools to start ranking on search engines.
If you’re a WordPress user, it’s simple to see why the platform is so strong. While some believe WordPress is solely useful for blogging, nothing could be farther from the reality. It has dominated the web development industry for the last decade. It’s free, simple to use, and comes with a plethora of plugins/add-ons to allow you personalize your site or blog to your specific requirements. Utilizing WordPress has a number of advantages for both you and your user. It quickly became the preferred method of many designers, developers, and SEO specialists due to its time-saving capabilities.
WordPress supports not just the user, but also the development of your brand and company. This platform is ideal for organizations of any size due to its unique features and tools. It’s simple to use, scalable, and always improving, giving your website the flexibility it requires. As a result; WordPress is an excellent content management system for establishing an SEO-friendly basis for your website.
