SEO friendly website design structure for WordPress Site

The definition of SEO has kept evolving over the period like all other things. Search Engine Optimization never had a clear definition. For example: Page Speed was once considered to be a matter of usability and found its way into the SEO domain. Same goes for design, readability and accessibility, are now considered main conversion rate factors as well. Making your WordPress website SEO friendly means it’s optimized for conversions.

Listed below are some factors that all websites should aim for:

1. Targeted audience
2. Retaining people long enough, so they read what you have to say
3. Evoking the desired reaction in people after they read your content

The quality of the content that you post on your website is a paramount to making it SEO friendly. Everything else done is just for making the website more appealing, easier for people and search engines to access it and guiding your visitors to reach your targets. Thus for SEO to work well, the content should be educative, meaningful, informative and entertaining. Making your WordPress website SEO friendly means it’s accessible and optimized for conversions.

Listed below are some factors that help making WordPress website SEO friendly.

1. Speeding up WordPress

Speed is one of the key elements that make your website more usable, thus your visitors tend to stay longer, resulting in increase in the conversion rate. Moreover with every update search engine is placing more importance on page load times. If your page doesn’t load in time and shows malware warning the potential visitor will turn away from your site.

Before you do anything to your website a child theme for the website should be created.  A nifty plugin can do that in a minute with one click. After doing that you can try to make your website as fast as you can. This can be done by following performance best practices, adding a couple of .htaccess speed hacks and subscribing for a CDN.

2. Optimize Site Architecture

Before you start creating your first content you also require thinking around Site Architecture or Information Architecture. This includes deciding which categories you want to have on your site and being ideal you should try to stay below 10 categories.

Optimized information architecture helps build a nicely categorized and symmetrical pyramid, making the content evenly distributed across your website. Ideally this means that every page should be accessible through only one URL. However, WordPress uses archives and taxonomies which will make it hard.

But fortunately, WordPress SEO plugin enables you to define canonical pages as well as those you don’t want search engines to index at all (categories, tags or other archives, thus avoiding duplicate content) thus helping maintain a SEO friendly  website design.

3. Optimize Tags

Furthermore we use Tags and Meta tags to label the websites, they present good pointers for search engines and people, likewise. Tags and Meta tags are used by search engine to determine what your WordPress website is about all about. Moreover your keywords should always be present in the Title tag, Meta description tag and Alt tags.

Title tags

Title tags explain what your website is all about and thus you should use your keywords while creating a title tag. However besides keywords, you can try to include branding and put it all at the end of each title tag. Ideally, Title tags should be no longer than 70 characters, but this is not the blind rule, you can go beyond 70 characters if that’s what it takes to tell what the website is all about.

An example of a title tag is: “SEO friendly website design structure for WordPress Site”. It’s 49 characters long and contains the main topic of this post.

Header tags

Coming towards header tags (H1…H6) although they have lost their importance to search engines they are still a very important in making your content hierarchically and semantically correct. They help people read and remember your content much easier.

Meta Description

A Meta description is used by search engines for crafting the result pages as well as is a great way to leave a good first impression for the search engine and should stay below 154-character limit.  Moreover the description should be relevant to your title and content for the best results

Image attributes

You must also pay attention to your sites image attributes. Your website will contain images and photos for easier understanding your content so you must focus on adding the relevant images; it also helps for spicing up dull paragraphs of text.

Search engines learn about images through:

• Alt tags
• Image filenames

People learn by reading:

• Captions
• Image titles

Hence, it’s preferred that the image titles should be same as alt tags and very similar to captions and image filenames. When uploading your photos, take a minute to populate these fields to get the better results.

Url structure – Permalinks

Permalinks should be “pretty”. One should use a permalink structure that uses both category and post name in it. This means that the URL slug should be descriptive, like this-

– http://abc.com/2019/post-name/

not like this:
 – http://example.com/?p=123.

4. Link to Related Posts

Relationships are vital part of everyday life and definitely matter for the internet too. Links are like a relationship to the website and it’s important that a site is linked well both internally and externally. This helps people to continue reading topics that interest them. However, you can use some WordPress plugins to do this task too.

Using plugins

There are a lot of WordPress plugins which will do this job for you. Here are some best rated:

• Contextual Related Posts
• Related Posts Thumbnails Plugin

Link within posts

You can even see links within this post as well. This enables you to follow those links in case you want further knowledge on the matter.

Moreover it’s easier for search engines to follow and index the interlinked website.

5. Use WordPress SEO plugin

Your website pages and posts will carry the most of your content and it’s important to have all the pages optimized.

If you have the WordPress SEO plugin it will take care of the following:

• Content analysis
• Meta & Link Elements
• Social integration (Facebook Open graph and Twitter Cards)
• Technical SEO
• Sitemaps
• RSS optimization
• Breadcrumbs.

6. Design

Besides working on the SEO basics you also need to improve the design and things that matter to the visitors. When you design a website all you want is visitors to enjoy browsing your website and actually read the content they came looking up for. A well designed website plays a vital role in creating a pleasant ambient for your visitors.

You must remember, you cannot go wrong with clean, unobtrusive and simple website design, just add a perfect theme to this WordPress mix and all is set.

Moreover typography adds 90% to design of your sites so it’s important you pay special attention to choosing the right font, font size thus making it easier for the visitor to read. Thus resulting in making it more usable and likeable by the visitors.  Hence as you optimize your content think of all of the following: font size, line height, contrast, paragraphs and white space.

Social Sharing

Social sharing plays its own part.  When search engines crawls your site it takes into account every share your website gets and thus you should also consider making it easier for visitors to share your stuff. This can be done with the help of  plugins available.

Conclusion:

SEO means so much more than what the acronym stands for. Making a website SEO friendly has become vital stuff and needs much more attention than the other basic technical SEO stuff to get the desired results.