Since its advent in the year 2003, WordPress has emerged as the topmost as the popular choice for the CMS. Several businesses are using it as a blog platform too. The WordPress 5.3 had more than 8 lakh download and now powers more than thirty-four per cent of the websites. The WordPress CMS has carved a niche for its own and gained ample credibility in digital marketing. One of the many reasons behind its abundant popularity is its compatibility with SEO. Many SEO professionals and digital marketing agencies prefer WordPress.
SEO is an acronym for SEO Engine Optimisation and an integral aspect of setting up a website, for, it is the technique that pushes a website further up in rankings. Using WordPress as the CMS ensures that you are already ahead of the curve in digital marketing. Let’s have a look at what makes WordPress the best CMS for SEO and a favourite among the SEO professionals out there.
Comprehensive HTML Markup
WordPress comes with the readymade SEO booster package. While the CMS is written in PHP, it creates HTML pages for a website that are easy to navigate through by search engines. Several latest frameworks bring forth the advantage of HTML5 that are easily accessible by the search engines.
SEO-Friendly Beautiful and Catchy Permalinks
WordPress comes prepared with SEO permalinks. The permalinks are the links to the keyword-rich posts and pages and act as an indicator for the search engines. A permalink fulfils the user intent and lets a search engine know what the page is about. Besides, the WordPress settings allow you to modify a permalink and make it search engine friendlier. You can always edit it to insert a keyword of your choice and embed it into the URL.
Headings and Tags
The H1 tags and heading tags are one of the many SEO elements that make WordPress an SEO-friendly CMS. Apart from giving web content a much-needed structure, these tell the search engine what the page is about. And it is all automated! One doesn’t need to write HTML tags manually, reducing any chance of manual error and burden of work.
User-Friendly and Eye-grabbing Web Pages
Not only WordPress offers you plugins and themes that make for beautiful and attractive web pages, but also outstanding user experience. A WordPress website is easy to browse through and makes for a breezy experience for a user- resulting in lower bounce rates and improved SEO ranking.
The themes are also power-packed with SEO elements. A digital marketing professional can choose from an array of WordPress themes that are available for different objectives, business and goals. Whether you want to set up a corporate blog for a data appending company or looking to set up an eCommerce website complete with payment options and live project tracking, there are plenty of themes to choose from!
Irrespective of what your goal is, you can find a theme laced with proper HTML markup, basic technical SEO and professional presentation. The UX of a WordPress site entices the user to stay for longer times and has reduced bounce rates, thereby addressing the nightmare of every SEO professional out there.
Optimisation of Images for SEO
A picture is worth a thousand words and can also be an excellent tactic to fetch rankings. With WordPress CMS, the images can be optimised for size and title tags, leading to better rankings and search results. The Alt Text on images can be used to plug in relevant keywords, which are informative and lets the crawlers understand the content. WordPress Plugins can be used to create automated Alt Text for images, and you don’t need to do it manually!
Images also give a proper structure to a web page, making the content readable and quite enjoyable to scroll through, leading to lesser bounce rates as well.
We all know that Google absolutely hates slow websites. Well, you don’t have to worry about it when you are using WordPress CMS. WordPress Websites load quick if they are configured correctly. Also, if you can resize the image sizes for better loading speed and performance of the website, several WordPress Plugin can compress the PDF documents and even older images to speed up your website. The CMS has also rolled up downloadable plugins to clear the website cache and clear the old database to reduce the loading time, so visitors don’t have to worry about clearing the browser cache themselves.
Also Read: The Ultimate B2B SEO Guide
Ease of Creation
WordPress started as a blog platform, and thankfully, it retains some of its former qualities even as a CMS. The platform makes it easier for the content and SEO professionals to post content, structure it and embed multimedia content such as video and images. Besides, WordPress is absolutely breeze to set up. There are hundreds of themes available that can be customised or use as-is.
You need no coding to enable most of its features on to the website. A person without any technical expertise can have a website up and running in no time!
SEO Plug-ins
WordPress has loads of plug-n-play SEO plugins to offer that make it a complete package for digital marketing ecosystem. The All-in-One SEO pack and Yoast SEO are the most common plugins used by bloggers. However, the versatility of WordPress SEO plugins goes beyond them.
Yoast SEO
It gives you an automated, detailed purview of on-page SEO for web page content along with XML markup and robots.txt. It also gives you instructions (which you can follow or ignore) to improve the content and make it more SEO-friendly. The Yoast SEO also offers insights into SEO title and meta descriptions.
The WordPress CMS is also compatible with third-party tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console.
Google XML Sitemaps
You can create search-engine-friendly XML sitemaps with this WordPress plugin. It will also notify the crawlers of newly published content on your website.
Google Analytics
The Google Analytics plugin is any digital marketing professional’s dream come true. The WordPress dashboard has a detailed view of stats, traffic, clicks, bounce rate and geographical stats of your website right there!
And this isn’t it!
WordPress extends its ease of usability to other software tools as well. There is ConvertKit for email marketing campaigns and landing page and G-Suite for your emails and documents.
The software tools for data mining and data appending can also be integrated with WordPress CMS easily.
Also Read: 12 Best WordPress plugins every Sales and Marketing website must have
Optimised for Mobile
All of us prefer to search for on-the-go, read on our smartphones and even shop on our hand-held devices. But exactly how many CMS are mobile-centric. WordPress, however, definitely is.
Here’s the industry-wise breakup of mobile-centric browsing and how much traffic industry is getting from a smartphone user.
Since the web is accessed via smartphone more and more, Google also loves a mobile-friendly website – so much that the mobile-friendly websites have a competitive advantage and can redeem themselves in SERPs. The mobile-first indexing is for real, folks!
However, WordPress is a step ahead here as well. It offers plugins like Jetpack for mobile indexing and to create a mobile-friendly version of an existing website.
Comprehensive Security
Google blacklists more than 10,000 websites every day for malware, spamming and more than 10,000 websites for phishing. WordPress used to get a bad rap about its lax security practices, but not anymore. WordPress best security practices secure against the threats of malware and hackers. At the very core, the software prioritizes code security and is regularly audited by the community of developers for any cracks. Also, you always have the WordPress Security team at your beck and call to guard you against security vulnerability. The team sends out security updates, which are applied to WordPress automatically to stay one step ahead.
Apart from these, you have an array of WordPress security plugins that you can choose and integrate to your website.
Social Media Compatibility
Social media has become an integral aspect of SEO. The boundaries are blurred, and social media platforms are increasingly utilised by digital marketing professionals to gain organic traffic. WordPress plugins such as SumoMe and Jetpack sharing can be used to integrate social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many more with your website.
You can also integrate paid marketing campaigns with the website and track their progress through the dashboard. WordPress also lets you create personalised social media buttons to add that ‘zing’ factor to your blog. You can add social media feed to the home page of your website for more visibility.
Developer Support
The WordPress community support is nothing short of astounding! The exorbitant community and support forums have your back in case you run into an issue.
Conclusion:
WordPress and SEO go hand in hand. It is one of the best website platforms and CMS out there that is packaged with SEO-friendly tools, plugins and themes. Third-party software and tools for data mining, data scrubbing and email marketing can be easily integrated with the platform. The best part is that most of the plugins and SEO themes are available at no extra prices! Pretty good, don’t you agree?