WordPress SEO : Perfect SEO Setup for WordPress

This is the comprehensive guide for WordPress SEO in 2020.

And in this Guide, I will Show the Perfect SEO Setup for WordPress so you can optimize your WordPress Site for higher rankings and more search traffic.

Yes, I’ll cover the most important Plugins and their setup that you need to opimize your WordPress website for SEO in 2020

So if you are looking to improve the SEO of your WordPress Website or Blog, then you’ll love this new guide.

So Let’s Dive in,

Select The Best Theme

WordPress has a lot of beautiful themes that makes a user experience better and makes your site easy to use.

But the fact is that, not every theme you use is SEO Optimized or SEO Friendly.

So, you should only go with Search engine friendly themes that have all the necessary features and optimized for search engines also.

A good WordPress theme should have all of these features:

1. Mobile Responsiveness
2. Fast Speed
3. Schema.org optimized
4. User friendly design
5. Lightweight

You should always go with themes that have all of these SEO friendly features , so it will help you to get higher rankings and more traffic through search engine.

Keeping all these things in mind, you can go with any of these themes:

1. Generatepress
2. Astra
3. schema
4. Divi
5. OceanWP

The Blog you are reading is built with Generatepress Premium theme, I’m using marketer child theme of Generatepress on this blog as it is very fast and lightweight theme and optimized for Search engines.

Permalink Structure

Permalink settings are very important for seo point-of-view as well as for better user experience.

Permalink is the link url of blog posts or pages of your website.

But the default permalink structure of WordPress is not seo friendly, the default WordPress structure is like : https://example.com/?p-4653

You should change the link structure to Post Name Permalink,

Example of Post Name Permalink: https://example.com/your-target-keyword

It’s the most recommended setting, because :

1. With this setting, your keyword can be included in your post url, which helps in seo
2. Your visitors can easily understand the topic of your article by reading the url of your post.

You can change your permalink settings by going to Settings > Permalink, as shown in the screenshot below:

Note: If your website already have content, then don’t change your existing permalink structure, it will create errors and you can loose rankings of your existing posts, so only implement this setting if you have a few articles or you just have started with your blog.

Install SEO Plugin

A SEO Plugin helps you optimize your WordPress site easily, by helping you in writing On- Page SEO Optimized content and by creating sitemaps and submitting it to search engines.

You can choose any SEO Plugin from Yoast or Rankmath,

I will recommend you to use Yoast as it’s the most popular plugin i have good experience with it.

After Installing the Yoast SEO Plugin, you have to do some settings like creating a sitemap of your blog, create a robots.txt file, no-index archives and category pages from your blog etc.

Install Google Site-Kit

Google Site- Kit is an amazing plugin made for WordPress users officially by Google.

Google Site Kit make your site connected to all of these google services easily:

1. Google Search Console
2. Google Analytics
3. Google Adsense
4. PageSpeed Insights

You can setup site kit in a few clicks with by following the 3 easy steps:

1 Install Plugin from WordPress Directory

2 Verify Your domain Ownership

3 Setup Search Console and Other services

Google Site-Kit makes your work easier as it integrates your site with all google services with one click,

You can check your site for speed, check your website’s ranking in search results and how many visitors you are getting on your blog.

You don’t have to open different tabs for analytics and search console, you can view all the important metrics on your WordPress Dashboard:

Site Kit is a must have plugin for WordPress, it makes easy for you to set up your site with google products. shows you the important metrics, Information about how your website is performing and up-to-date advice on how you can succeed on the internet.

Selecting WWW vs Non-WWW Version

When creating your WordPress site, you have to choose between the www or non-www version of the WordPress,

Because, Google sees it as different websites

Let me tell you that there is no benefit from one over another, both the versions have equal impact on search engines, it depends on your preferences you can any version that you like,

But if you should make sure that both the WordPress Address and Site Address fields in your settings have the same version as shown in the screenshot below:

I’m using the non-www version on this website.

Optimize for Speed

Site Loading Speed is very important for higher rankings in search engines, and for user experience also,

No one likes slow loading websites, in a research, it is found that if site speed is above 3s then the user leaves it, your website speed should be below 3 seconds,

Google has already said about site speed and they count it as ranking factor, So it is very important to have a fast loading site, not only for seo, but also for great user experience for your visitors.

You can check your site loading speed in the tools like: GTmetrix.com or Google PageSpeed Insights.

After that, if you have a speed more than 3 second, then you can follow these steps to optimize it for faster speeds:

1. Install a cache plugin: you install any of these: WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache,

WP Rocket is paid but it is the best one, or you can also go with W3 Total Cache which is free and also a decent plugin.

2. Use a CDN: You can use Cloudflare, a CDN helps you improve your site speed significantly.

3. Move to a Faster Hosting Provider: The Hosting you are using is the biggest factor for your site speed, many hosting providers have slow servers that can destroy your site speed and rankings,

You can use any of these hosting providers:A2 Hosting or Greengeeks.

These Hosting providers are the fastest ones and we have good experience with them.

This Blog (WPClues) is also hosted on A2 Hosting , You can go with GreenGeeks as they are more budget friendly than A2 Hosting and they offer the similar high quality service.

4. Optimize Images: you should always compress images on your site, as it helps you decrease the size of the images and results in faster speeds.

You can use tinypng.com to compress your images manually,

Or you can use Plugins like ShortPixel or WPSmush to optimize images on your site automatically.

Optimize Internal and External Links

Links on your site should be optimized according to seo best practices,

External links: If you are using Affiliate links or any other type of links then make sure to nofollow them, because this is not good to pass link juice to every site you mention on your blog from seo perspective.

So add Nofollow tag to external links and affiliate links,you can use link settings option to nofollow the links.

Internal Linking : you should always add internal links to your blog posts. t helps google understand the different pages on your blog and understand the related posts in your blog.

Internal links also helps you boost your rankings by linking high authority pages of your site to the pages which you want to rank.

So always add 3-4 internal links in your blog posts. You can also automate the internal linking process with plugins.

Final Thoughts

So that’s how you can optimize your blog to make it more SEO Friendly, These tips will definitely help you to improve your blog traffic.

No it’s your turn, which tips from this guide you are going to try first?

If you have any questions or additional tips that i missed and should be included in this guide,

Let me know by leaving a comment in the comment section below.