11 Reasons Why WordPress Is the Best Platform for SEO
53.5% of all web traffic comes from organic search. 68% of online experiences start with a search engine. Indeed, SEO plays a significant part of your digital marketing success.
First, creating an optimized website requires choosing the right content management system (CMS). Although you have numerous SEO-friendly CMSs to choose from, there’s this one platform that seems to outshine all: WordPress.
Ask any of the successful Florida SEO companies, and they’ll completely agree.
In this article, we’re giving you a breakdown of the reasons explaining why WordPress is everyone’s go-to when it comes to optimizing their website in the most effective way possible.
Before we do, however, let’s talk a bit about WordPress.
What Exactly Is WordPress?
WordPress is a powerful site builder and CMS that intends to help users create an online presence within minutes. It’s scalable, flexible, and always free to use.
From a rookie to a seasoned developer, WordPress works for everybody.
For those without a design or development background, they can use the platform as a “one-click install” on a hosting program. They have the freedom to pick any of the thousands of WordPress themes at zero cost.
As for experienced users, the CMS allows access to all parts of the software, such as its theme and plugin systems, scripts, and application framework. This makes it possible to customize any site in such ways that suit their needs.
Whether you’re running an ecommerce store, company website, or a personal website, you’ll definitely benefit greatly from choosing WordPress as your platform for SEO. Plus, you don’t need to download any desktop software anymore – it is an online platform.
11 Reasons WordPress Helps Your SEO
Now that you have a better understanding of WordPress, let’s move on to its SEO-boosting capabilities. Let’s begin!
- Content Creation Made Simple
Building a new site using WordPress is really smooth and straightforward. Again, ANYONE can do it.
With its easy-to-use multimedia library and drag-and-drop editor, both technical and non-technical users alike can create and publish their content with ease for the entire world to see.
As soon as your website is live, just navigate to the “posts” section of your dashboard menu and from there, you can find everything you need to write and post a new blog. Formatting tools, text editors, and ways to upload media files – you’ll find all the essential tools there.
After publishing your content, there’s no need to stress yourself editing it as you move forward. Simply look for the post and use the visual editor to make any changes or updates. Then, click the “save” button and that new version will be live in an instant.
- Automatic Metadata
Meta descriptions and SEO titles are major ranking factors, which means that they should be included on every post of your site.
Metadata helps search engines understand what your web pages are all about. Adding relevant keywords to them can significantly improve your search position.
The process, however, can be really strenuous and time-consuming. This is where WordPress comes in and saves the day.
The CMS lets users automate the whole process, thanks to an SEO plugin that can create the appropriate HTML tags for you. You’ll certainly be saving a lot of time and effort.
- SEO-Friendly Themes
If you’re not aware, themes can actually leave a positive impact on your website’s SEO.
How so?
For starters, an attractive theme that aligns with your offerings keeps your visitors coming back for more. These returning visitors will do wonders for your search engine optimization.
Additionally, themes affect your site’s HTML markup. For instance, search engine spiders need H1 tags to identify the title of your content, which in turn, influences its ranking.
Luckily for you, WordPress has designed all of its themes to attract those spiders to your website. Using any of the platform’s high-quality themes will no doubt help you win both the aesthetic and technical aspects of SEO.
- Optimal Site Speed
Site speed is crucial not just to SEO, but also in keeping your visitors long on your website.
If your site has a slow loading speed, especially in mobile devices, expect your visitors to become frustrated and leave. In fact, 53% of users will abandon a page that takes too long to load. As if that’s not bad enough, you’ll find your ranking dropping on Google’s SERPs.
Fortunately, WordPress offers a fast loading speed even in its standard configuration.
It comes with tons of plugins that can help with speed site, one of which is the ShortPixel Image Optimizer. This compresses your past images and PDF documents to speed up your site’s load time.
WPOptimize is another plugin offered by WordPress. It optimizes site speed by caching your site, compressing your images, and clearing your database.
Despite relying on these plugins, it’s still important to implement regular maintenance and use a good hosting service to get the full site speed potential and SEO out of your website.
- SEO-Optimized Images
Images have an integral part to play in your website or blog posts. Using them in a timely manner breaks up your content into readable sections. Just be sure, however, that they’re of excellent quality and relevant to your posts.
Getting the maximum exposure requires optimizing your images for SEO, and WordPress can help you achieve that. Here’s how:
- It allows you to create alt text for every image you use. You can sneak in your keywords as image description to attract search engine spiders.
- Alternatively, you can use a plugin that automatically creates your alt text.
- You can resize your images so that they won’t slow down your page’s loading time.
- Mobile Optimization
More and more people are using their phones to look for information online. That’s why you should also have adapted to this trend by now.
With WordPress, you’ll steer yourself clear of any worries about mobile optimization. You don’t have to put any extra effort to make your site accessible on mobile devices anymore.
Why’s that? Well, most of the themes offered by WordPress are already optimized for mobile users!
- Social Media Integration
Although social media doesn’t necessarily have a direct impact on your rankings, user engagement does. In other words, if you keep your audience engaged on social media, your rankings will improve.
Don’t worry – it’s not about how many followers you have, it’s about how often people respond to your posts. The more shares and likes you gain, the higher your website lands in search engines.
With that in mind, WordPress makes it much more convenient for you to integrate social sharing with your site. You have the freedom to install one of their hundreds of plugins that are developed to maximize your social media reach.
Whether it’s to add social media buttons for users to share your content, embed a social media feed on your site, or automate your campaigns, there are so many things you can do to boost your content and brand awareness across social media channels.
- Plugins Specifically for SEO
Another reason to choose WordPress as your site builder is that it provides three of the best plugins for search engine optimization. These are Yoast SEO, Google Analytics, and Google XML Site Maps.
- Yoast SEO
It’s not surprising that Yoast SEO has had millions of downloads across the globe. It has made website optimization a seamless task for even the least tech-savvy person on the planet.
Yoast SEO helps you optimize the content you write using your target keyword. It also guides you in creating content that can be read by both humans and search engines. And, it provides metadata and SEO title templates.
What more could you ask for?
- Google Analytics
WordPress‘s Google Analytics plugin stands out for three reasons.
First, it lets you see how many clicks your affiliate links, outbound links, and banner ads get. Next, you don’t have to leave your WordPress dashboard to look at your Google Analytics reports. Lastly, you can identify which pages are more popular from detailed stats.
- Google XML Site Maps
As the name implies, this plugin makes creating complex XML site maps a simpler task. The role of these maps is to make your website’s structure easier for search engine spiders to understand. Also, whenever you publish a post, it notifies search engines of your new content.
- Attractive Permalinks
Editing your site’s permalink is super simple with WordPress.
Permalinks can affect your ranking in two ways: Clean permalinks can increase the click-through rate (CTR) of your posts on the search engines; and keywords in the link are a significant ranking factor.
Using WordPress, you can customize the format of your URLs without going through a lot of trouble. For example, you can set your blog posts to be generated in this form: site/blog/title. Permalinks in formats like this will make it faster for search engines to discover your content.
- Security
You may not know this yet, but your site’s security is an underlying factor that can impact your SEO.
If Google is unable to identify your website as secure, it might label your site as spam or harmful. This means that crawlers may not be indexing your content at all.
For this reason, WordPress makes a consistent effort to stay secure. Security vulnerabilities are often detected immediately, thanks to the security team and community doing their job. Nevertheless, you should remember to keep up with all those security updates.
WordPress also offers a range of security plugins to add an extra layer of protection for your site, and an extra peace of mind for you and your visitors.
- Source Code for Search Engines
Last but not the least, WordPress lays a strong foundation for SEO from the back-end.
Even if the platform is predominantly written with PHP, it still includes the proper HTML markup, which means that search engines can easily crawl through your content.
Over the past few years, WordPress has released themes that focus on HTML5. What makes HTML5 really great is that it has cleaner and more cross-platform-friendly code. Any site built with clean code and functions well in mobile is a top player in the world of SEO.
Final Thoughts
From providing you with thousands of SEO-friendly themes and optimizing your images, to speeding up your website and simplifying content creation, WordPress can equip you with all the right tools to rank high on search engines.
If you need help getting started, you can always partner with a team of experts from Florida SEO companies. It will be worth it.