How to Optimize Your WordPress Website for SEO in 2022

WordPress has become a preferred platform for businesses of all sizes and in all industries. This is due to its user-friendly nature and relatively simple maintenance features. Along with the many plugin and theme options available for users to customize their websites, WordPress is a great option for businesses looking for a seamless web experience.

Thanks to these beneficial options and features, WordPress is actually one of the most popular website building and content management systems in the world.

However, WordPress isn't necessarily the most SEO-friendly platform without a few key tweaks. WordPress powers nearly 50% of all websites on the internet; therefore, there is a lot of competition for business owners looking to rank their WordPress website on search engines like Google.

But fear not; there are many techniques you can use to ensure your WordPress site is optimized for search engines. Using a little SEO know-how and some effort, you can optimize your WordPress website and start climbing the search rankings. Here are five ways to start optimizing your website today:

Use an SEO specific plugin

There are many WordPress SEO plugins available, and they can help you optimize your website for search engines. These plugins help implement optimizations automatically, while providing valuable tips and advice on how to improve your website.

Some common SEO plugins include Yoast SEO, WP Rocket, and more. These plugins help you optimize your webpage title tags, meta descriptions, page speed, XML sitemaps, social media integration, and more. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins that helps optimize your website for both on-page and off-page SEO factors.

As we know, page speed is a key ranking factor for SERPs. If you want your WordPress website to load quickly, you can use a caching plugin. What a caching plugin does is create a static copy of your webpage and serve that copy to users instead of loading your entire website when you get a visitor. This can help improve your website speed significantly.

By investing time in researching, installing, and configuring the right plugin for your website, you can ensure that your WordPress website is seamlessly optimized without missing any important elements.

Select an SEO-friendly theme

Your WordPress theme can have a huge impact on your website's search optimization. There are thousands of themes available, so it is important when choosing a WordPress theme to make sure you select one that is SEO friendly. This means that the theme should be well coded, responsive on all devices and optimized for fast page loading speed. An SEO optimized theme will adjust to display correctly on all devices and should be easy to navigate; both of which are key for search engines and website visitors.

A search engine optimized theme will help your website climb higher on the SERPs, which will translate to more viability for potential visitors. With many options to choose from, there's one that matches both your brand identity and search engine needs.

Start your search for an SEO friendly theme and watch your WordPress website start to outpace the competition. If you're unsure which theme will impact your site's rankings, talk to a qualified SEO agency.

Finsbury Media, an SEO agency in London, can help you select and optimize the right theme for your business. SEO is a complex and ever-changing landscape, as many business owners choose to partner with reputable agencies that are proficient in building and optimizing websites.

As a business owner, you may not have time to sit down, research and test every optimization. An SEO agency takes the guesswork out by providing you with qualified experts up to date with the latest SEO trends.

Optimize your images

An often underestimated way to optimize a WordPress website is to start with images. You should ensure that all of your images have descriptive filenames and use appropriate alt tags, including your keywords.

In addition to properly tagging and naming images, you can also optimize images to increase your site speed, thereby improving your search rankings. This is because when an image is uploaded to your website, WordPress will automatically create multiple copies of that image in different sizes.

For most site owners, these extra sizes are often unnecessary. Storing these extra images can seriously slow down your website.

Getting the right balance between image quality and file size is critical. Optimizing your images can save you time with each page load and reduce your bandwidth consumption. There are several ways to compress images, including using...