10 Reasons You Should Use WordPress For Search Engine Optimization

If you’re not using WordPress, you should be.

Yes, that’s a bold statement, but it’s meant to be. There are a lot of options out there for website platforms, but WordPress is the best for SEO.

WordPress was originally known only as a blogging platform, but quickly became known as a top-choice content management system. One of the biggest reasons for its popularity is that it is the best platform for search engine optimization.

There are two main ways that people bring traffic to their websites. One of them is social media. The other is search engine traffic. The higher your website ranks in the results, the more search engine traffic you’ll receive.

Ranking higher in the results is not a result of wishes or magic. There are real things you can do to make your website rank higher. WordPress knows this and handles as many of the tricks-of-the-trade for you as they can because they want your site to do well.

The better you understand the reasons WordPress is so great for SEO the more prepared you will be to take advantage of these features and make your site soar.

WordPress Makes SEO Easy For Everyone

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is not difficult to understand.

The real trouble with SEO is in organizing your site so that making your website Google friendly does not become tedious and something you eventually stop bothering with.

WordPress makes it easy to enter your metadata, titles, and tags on landing pages, site pages, and blog posts.

Plugins Make it Even Easier

It is easy to load plugins. All you need to do is go to the plugins section, search for something you want a plugin to do, and then choose one that has the functionality you need and is rated well.

There are a plethora of plugins meant to make sure you are doing the things you need to do to make your posts search engine worthy.

Plugins like Yoast SEO prompt you to enter in information every time you go to make a post. The plugin will give you a green light if things look good to go, a yellow if it’s mediocre, and red if you really need to work on making that post ready for search.

Yoast SEO checks for things like your meta information, the length of your post, your tags, and how things are formatted. It is a fail-safe to make sure you’re thinking about these things every time you write something.

It does all of this right on the page where you’re writing, so it’s easy to make sure you’re getting things done. It’s plugins like this that make the system so perfect for search functionality.

It Loads Fast!

Site speed isn’t the most important part of a search-engine friendly site, until your pages load so slowly that Google bans you. Yes, that can happen.

Generally, the reason this is so important is that if your website takes a long time to load people will close it before it finishes. Search engines don’t want to see a high bounce rate and that can lower your ranking.

Fortunately, you don’t need to worry about this with WordPress. Most themes are designed well to make things run smoothly and the system itself is focused on keeping things clean.

You Don’t Need to Be An Expert

If you were an SEO expert, WordPress would still be great, because it makes things easy to do and tedious work is the real heart of what makes search engine optimization difficult.

But even if you aren’t an expert, that’s perfectly fine! You can do this yourself, especially on this platform, and especially if you load in some plugins to check your work for you.

You don’t need to necessarily know why one thing makes you rank better than another because the site makes doing the right things intuitive.

It’s Easy for Spiders to Crawl Through Your Site

WordPress knows this. Their sitemaps are simple and well laid out specifically so spiders can crawl site pages easily.

What this means for you is that Google won’t miss any of the pages on your blog.

Your Images Are Optimized for Users and Search Engines

A blog post written by someone thinking about SEO will have images. There are a couple reasons for this.

For one thing, it adds to the user experience. Sites like Google care a lot about the user experience. If they show pages to their users that people don’t like then people might find another search engine to use.

When people load your site and stay on it longer, that tells search engines that this is a quality site to recommend. That’s what we want.

For another thing, WordPress makes it easy to add in titles and alt tags for images. When the spiders come to crawl your website, it’s the titles and alt tags that tell them what those pictures are about and that affects what they think your site is about.

Adding in alt tags needs to be an easy thing to do, and luckily it is. When you upload your photo, there is a little box for entering that information in on the same page. With a couple words typed in, you're done. Your images are optimized and SEO ready.

Your Site is Easily Shared and Integrated With Social Media

I know, I know. You’re thinking, “Wait! What does social media have to do with SEO?”

A lot of online marketers like to separate search engines and social media, almost like the two exist on separate internets, but that is not the case. Search engines are watching and thinking about everything that affects the user experience.

They look for cues from social media to see that something is relevant, interesting, and important.

The more popular your site is, the more social engagement Google wants to see.

It’s not about how many followers you have. It’s about how engaged people are on your posts. Likes and comments count for something.

And they definitely want to see that your pages exist on social media.

WordPress makes that part easy. There are many plugins on WordPress for sharing your posts on social media.

There are plugins to make it so users can easily share your pages, there are plugins to automatically share your posts for you, and there are plugins that do both of those things in one.

WordPress Works Well On Any Device

No matter whether your users are on their desktop, tablet, their Android or iPhones, whether they use a Chrome browser, Firefox, or for some reason, Internet Explorer, WordPress makes your website responsive to however users access your site.

Mobile is becoming a more and more popular way for people to browse the web, and search engines know this. Responsive websites rank better.

Luckily, this isn’t something site owners on this platform need to worry about.

Your URLs are Search Engine Friendly

When you go to publish a post, you can choose to use a generated ID number for your permalinks. That would be a bad choice.

Instead, you can create your own custom URL for every post in an easy to access box right next to where you enter your title for the post.

A permalink full of keywords tells Google exactly what your page is about. This is an important piece of the puzzle.

Also, pretty permalinks can increase the click-thru-rate of your posts on the results page. When people scroll post higher results to go for yours, the search engine will take notice and rank your page higher.

A Better User Experience

Let’s face it. WordPress makes pretty websites that load quickly and are well organized so users can find what they’re looking for easily.

As we talked about briefly above, search engines want to show their users pages that the users will like. If people aren’t happy with the search results, they’ll go use a different engine.

A website that users like will rank higher.

Search engines want to see your visitors spend more time on your website and that they are engaged with your content.

You can check your Google analytics to see the average amount of time visitors spend on your website and what your bounce rate is. The lower the bounce rate and the longer they spend on your site, the better.

Users don’t like websites that are difficult to understand. They don’t like not being able to find the information they came for. They don’t like weirdly placed images, ugly designs, or sites that load slow.

WordPress makes your website more user friendly, and search engines reward you for that.

To Help Your Site Rank Well, Use WordPress

It’s not as simple as just using the platform though, make sure you are taking advantage of all the easy features WordPress offers you.