WordPress is inarguably the most popular content management system. Its reach can be assessed from the fact that 60 million websites use WordPress as their CMS. Some of the top websites like TechCrunch, The New Yorker, BBC America and Sony Music have WordPress managing their website. WordPress websites similar to all other websites need to be optimized for the search engines in order to ensure that they rank high on the search result pages.

Although a website is intended to target the visitors but it will achieve high traffic only when it is visible on search engines as users mostly find a website through search engines. WordPress powered websites are easy to optimize as there are several plugins that help in the process. With the aid of reliable & expert SEO services, you can not only optimize the website using on-page SEO techniques but also track the progress easily and tweak the optimization process. This will ensure that the search engine crawler programs analyze and index your website without any hindrance.

The issues that need to be addressed to make the website search-friendly:

• • Pay attention to the www.

The search engines treat the same website with “www” and without it as two different webpages. Hence, the URL must be configured in such a way so that the search engines are able to index only one version of the website. All you need to do is to choose only one version and stick to it.

• • Let the search engines index the website

To enhance the visibility of your website on the search engines, you must ensure that it is being indexed by them. Although the default settings allow the indexing, at times the website is blocked for search engine detection during the development. It is recommended that you need to be doubly sure with this setting.

• • URL structure

The default URL structure contains numbers and parameters representing the page. WordPress plugins let you customize the URL by replacing the numbers with words. You can either set it as the post name or customize according to your wish. The blog post can be customized under permalink setting.

• • Meta tags configuration

Meta setting is a very important aspect that impacts earch engine optimization of the website. It is different from the meta description and deals with archives that contain old content. Using the Yoast SEO plugin, the archives can be allowed to be crawled but not indexed.

• • Meta description and page optimization

Using Yoast plugin, you get immense control over the webpages. You can easily edit the page titles and meta descriptions as they are important factors that lead to better optimization of the website. These fields can also be effectively used for keywords leading to better visibility of the website.

• • Head code cleanup

Although WordPress ensures that the code is optimized, clutter is bound to accumulate. Arbitrary code gets added to the website and negates the optimization efforts. Yoast is a powerful SEO plugin that helps you get rid of the Head code, thus making your website optimized for the search engines.

• • Redirection

When your URL is changed, you need to employ redirection so that the users accessing the old URL are automatically redirected to the website they are looking for. 302 redirection, also called permanent redirection should be implemented as it passes the entire ranking power to the new URL. A plugin called Redirection can also be used for the same purpose.

With WordPress development, working on all these details becomes easy. There are scores of plugins like Yoast and many others that help in the search engine optimization of the website and let the crawler programs find, analyze and index your website.