Have you ever tried searching for a brand, a product, or anything else on a search engine like Google?
Have you ever wondered why you get certain results on the first pages of search results and not others? Or have you ever asked yourself: “Why can’t my customers find me on the internet?”
Whether you are in one of the two previous situations, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), also known as natural referencing, may be the answer to your question.
What is SEO?
In the specific context of the internet and websites, SEO makes the content of these sites visible, easily findable and accessible to users.
You should start to see why it could be beneficial for your website to have good SEO. The reason is quite simple. The easier your site is found On the internet, the more likely you are to attract visitors, and potentially customers.Even better, if you provide your target audience with content they appreciate and find useful, they are more likely to return and tell others about your site.
Let us clarify that there are two types of internet referencing, paid referencing, which is paid advertising on search engines and natural referencing also commonly called SEO which means Search Engine Optimization or optimisation pour les moteurs de recherche in French.
What is SEO?
SEO, or natural referencing, encompasses all the techniques and actions aimed at improving the positioning of a website's pages on search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google or Bing.
It is often said that SEO rests on three main pillars: technical (on-site), content and authority (off-site).
For the first pillar, namely the technical (On-Site) aspect, the objective is to have a “clean”, fast, intuitive and easily readable site for both internet users and search engine robots.
For content, the goal is to identify the keywords you want to rank for and then address the search intent of internet users when they type those keywords into a search engine. This requires rich, organized, relevant, and well-structured content.
Authority refers to the trust that search engines place in your website. It depends on many factors, such as the age of the domain and the number and quality of backlinks your site receives. Be aware that Google can penalize sites that have acquired authority "unnaturally," meaning by paying for backlinks pointing to them. Therefore, we won't be discussing authority in this article, as it should increase naturally (albeit slowly) if you produce high-quality content that appeals to users.
Optimizing your website's natural referencing therefore creates a virtuous circle that can only be beneficial.
In this article, we will look in detail at how to optimize the SEO of a WordPress site, focusing on one technique in particular: natural referencing or SEO.
What, using WordPress isn't enough to get good SEO?
Short answer, no.
It's rather nuanced. First and foremost, WordPress is a tool. A tool that allows you to create websites, applications, blogs, etc.
WordPress therefore provides basic tools for managing a site's SEO. Among these, we have the ability to use and customize the .htaccess file, permalinks, content classification by categories or tags, and metadata such as the title tag, Hn tags, and meta description tag.
All these features make WordPress ready to be optimized for SEO. Combined with best practices, a solid SEO strategy, and the use of the right tools, WordPress can therefore become very effective at improving your site's search engine ranking.
Therefore, simply having a WordPress site and expecting to be highly ranked in search engines overnight is not enough.
Let's see how to do this in detail.
SEO Audit: Taking Stock of Your Website
In an ideal world, SEO optimization must be takene taken into account from the very stage of creating your site.
Indeed, it is easier to have and apply a good SEO strategy at the beginning of the site than much later.
The first piece of advice is to take this step into account as early as possible. If you haven't done so, don't panic, all is not lost yet.
Now is simply the time to audit your website's SEO.
The first step in this audit is to determine your ranking in relation to your website's main topics and keywords. You will therefore need to analyze these keywords using SEO tools. For example, you could use a free tool like... Google search consoleIn this tool, you will be able to see which keywords you are ranking for, which pages correspond to these keywords, their performance, and also see any indexing problems your website is experiencing.
Next, it is important to list the content you already have on your site (pages, blog articles, product sheets, etc.) as well as how this content is categorized and organized within each other.
Another step in the audit would be to check the technical status of your site. To do this, you can go to the tool Google Page Speed Insights which will give you valuable information about your site's speed, accessibility, and how to optimize your site from a technical point of view.
Content: Write for your users, not for search engines
If there is one piece of advice that comes up regularly on the subject of SEO, it is that you must be at the service of your users and not at the service of search engines.
In practical terms, this means that you must ensure you provide real value to the people who are part of your target audience.
On the other hand, you should avoid blindly following every technique you find. If you regularly provide quality content that benefits your website visitors, they will return more often and share your content.
Let's say, for example, that you own an online store selling children's plush toys. Your first priority should be to help people who might be interested in the products you sell. But also, to ensure that these people can easily find the content they're looking for when they visit your site.
One strategy could be to regularly write quality articles on the subject of plush toys. For example, on the different materials used to make them, how to choose them, etc. The goal here is to provide value. Therefore, articles with titles like “clickbait".
Another important point to consider in our example is the product descriptions you sell. You'll need to write detailed product descriptions, and ideally, include illustrations.
By focusing on the value you bring to your target audience, naturally and over the long term, this strategy will have very positive impacts on your SEO.
In terms of content, another slightly more technical point needs to be considered: optimizing the metadata tags of your content.
The most important tags for SEO are the title tag, meta description, and Hn tag, especially the H1 tag. They allow internet users, as well as search engine robots, to quickly identify what your web page is about.
It is therefore essential to insert the main keyword you are targeting on a page in the title and h1 tags, but also in the meta description tag.
A slow website has less chance of ranking well in search results.
Following on from the previous advice, if you have a slow, inefficient WordPress site, you reduce your chances of being well-ranked.
This is simply explained by the fact that users who are looking for information or customers who want to make purchases will not stay long on your site.
A slow website experience can be very frustrating; nobody wants to experience it, including search engine robots like Google.
Therefore, care must be taken to optimize the performance of your siteThis includes the hosting provider you use, the loading speed of your site, the loading time, the font format, the choice and configuration of the WordPress plugins used… etc.
If you want to learn more about optimizing WordPress sites for performance, we discuss it in detail. in this article on WordPress maintenance.
Configure your WordPress site correctly to improve SEO
Beyond all the aspects mentioned above, the configuration of your WordPress site also plays an important role in natural referencing.
Permalinks
Permalinks are the complete URL of a page, article, product, etc.
They represent the gateway to your website. Search engines will use permalinks to index your site, and visitors will use them to access your site. Therefore, it's important to have a consistent permalink structure.
By default, WordPress comes with a number of permalink structures, as you can see in the following image:
When setting up a site, it's the structure Simple which is used. You will notice that it is not very easy to understand. As a general rule, it is recommended to opt for one of the following three structures: Date and title, Digital et Title of the publicationHowever, we recommend a title-based structure for the publication, which we believe is the most suitable for optimizing SEO.
These structures make it easy to know which page we're on. And that's useful information for both visitors and search engine robots.
Redirects
Redirecting a URL simply means sending it to another one.
Imagine a scenario where your online store, which operates in multiple countries, has several domain names that need to point to the same website. For example superpeluches.fr et superpeluches.com.
In this case, if superpeluches.fr is your primary domain name, it might be useful to set up a redirect from superpeluches.com toward superpeluches.fr. Thus, users who enter superpeluches.com in their browser will land on the main site.
Or, suppose you've deleted a blog post for some reason. Visitors trying to access that post will encounter a 404 error page, which isn't good for your SEO.
Therefore, in this situation, it might be useful to redirect the deleted article to another article that deals with the same subject or a similar subject, for example.
In terms of redirects, there are two main categories: permanent redirects (recommended for good SEO) and temporary redirects.
Here is an article that tells you more about Best practices for redirects with WordPress.
The robots.txt file
The robots.txt file provides instructions to search engine robots that will crawl your website for indexing and ranking. It allows you to prevent the crawling of a website, or certain parts of a website, using the Disallow function.
Generally, this file is used to prevent search engine robots from crawling certain pages of a website. In practice, a robots.txt file looks like this:
In this file, we assume that the website address is http://www.example.comThe directive in the file means that the Googlebot user agent (Google's robot) is not allowed to browse the directory http://example.com/nogooglebot/ and all its subdirectories.
This can be very useful if you don't want certain pages or directories on your site to be indexed by Google's crawlers. This is often the case for e-commerce sites that use filters. When you click on a filter, your site will generate a new URL (i.e., a new web page) with parameters. This new URL could create duplicate content or cannibalize other pages that are more important for your SEO. Using the robots.txt file, you can instruct crawlers not to crawl these types of pages.
The .htaccess file
The .htaccess file is a configuration file for Apache servers, which are among the most widely used servers on the web.
This file has several uses, such as managing site security, but also optimizing certain aspects of your site's SEO.
Some practical uses of this file include caching site content to improve loading speeds, creating redirects for pages, products or blog posts…etc.
If you are unsure about configuring these settings correctly, please do not hesitate to contact our WordPress WP Maintenance agency.
Choose an SEO extension
Some of the improvements mentioned above are more technical than others. Furthermore, there are several other, more advanced improvements that can positively impact your site's organic search engine ranking.
That's why another recommendation is to opt for an SEO extension or plugin to harmonize all these steps.
There are a multitude of WordPress plugins that improve your site's SEO. Some contain more features than others, and some are easier to use than others.
Before making any choice, it's important to keep in mind that an SEO extension is primarily a tool that helps optimize your website. Therefore, you shouldn't jump into it entirely without a solid strategy.
Here are some SEO plugins for WordPress that you can choose from:
- Yoast SEO This is the most popular and widely used SEO plugin for WordPress. It offers features such as keyword optimization, search engine previews, redirects, advanced content metadata, and more.
- SEOPress: it's an all-in-one solution that offers interesting features such as local SEO, XML sitemap management, redirects and many more.
- Rank Math It also offers a full range of tools to optimize WordPress site SEO. This includes SEO analysis tools, breadcrumb navigation, and Open Graph support.
Hire SEO professionals
If you have a website for your business or activity, you certainly don't want to spend all your time optimizing the site's SEO settings.
You can also outsource these aspects by using SEO professionals. Our specialized WordPress SEO agency is able to support you on all aspects of natural referencing.
