WordPress SEO Guide 2024: Essential Steps for Better Rankings

By Peter Brittain on November 15, 2024 in WordPress

Let’s cut straight to the chase – WordPress is an excellent platform for SEO, but only if you set it up correctly. After working with hundreds of WordPress sites, I’m going to share exactly what you need to do to optimize your WordPress site for search engines in 2024.

Essential First Steps

Before diving into complex optimizations, let’s get your foundation right. These are the crucial first steps that every WordPress site needs:

Choosing the Right Hosting

Your hosting choice affects your site speed, uptime, and security. Look for:

Reliable uptime (99.9%+)
Fast server response times
Regular backups
Strong security features
Good technical support

Basic WordPress Settings

First, fix these often-overlooked settings:

Go to Settings > Reading
- Ensure “Discourage search engines” is unchecked
Go to Settings > Permalinks
- Choose “Post name” structure
Go to Settings > General
- Set accurate site title and tagline
- Ensure correct timezone

Essential WordPress SEO Plugins

While you don’t need dozens of plugins, some are crucial:

SEO Plugin

Choose one of these:

Rank Math (my current preference)
Yoast SEO
All in One SEO

Don’t install multiple SEO plugins – choose one and stick with it.

Do I Need To Optimise My WordPress Site For Voice Search?

By Peter Brittain on October 17, 2019 in WordPress, Voice Search

Google Voice search is one of the fastest-growing web technologies at the moment. It involves people asking their phone a question and receiving one single answer, rather than the traditional list of results that are presented on a normal search engine results page.

One of the main reasons for the increase in the popularity of voice search is the rapidly improving ability of artificial intelligence to recognise human speech and infer meaning. And since speaking is a lot easier than typing, people have begun to adopt the technology. With this in mind, voice search optimisation has become a key feature of most experienced web developers’ toolkits.

Why should I optimise my website for voice search?

By now you should be realising that you probably do need to do at least some sort of voice optimisation on your website to make sure that you’re taking advantage of the emerging market. Although we don’t have a lot of up-to-date facts about the voice search industry, here are a few of the facts that we do have:

There were already 33 million voice-activated devices like Google Home and Amazon Alexa in circulation in 2017.
In 2015 65% of all US smartphone owners used voice assistants regularly. One can only imagine that this number has grown rapidly over the past three years.
Over 20% of Google’s search queries in 2016 came from voice searches. Again, one can only imagine that this number has grown exponentially.

To put it simply, voice search was becoming popular even a few years ago. It’s all around us today, and it’s therefore essential to make sure that you optimise your website for Google voice search.

Which Is Better For SEO HTML Or WordPress?

By Peter Brittain on September 29, 2019 in Technical SEO, WordPress

There are certain comparisons that are made where the evidence provided by data, does not match what the majority of those with an opinion will tell you. A classic example is when people ask whether HTML or WordPress is better for SEO. Let us say from the outset that most of the empirical data and statistics indicate that neither HTML nor WordPress has an advantage over the other when it comes to SEO.

Now we must clarify what we mean by an advantage. What we are talking about here is whether sites built using WordPress, for example, will rank higher than a site built with HTML, when all other factors are equal. The fact of the matter is that Google doesn’t place any great emphasis on what a website is built from when it comes to ranking them.

To confirm this, do a random search on Google and click through to each of the top ten websites. For each one, if you then press CTRL+U on your keyboard the source code will appear. Using the find function in your browser type in ‘wp-content’. If the search finds that in the code it is a WordPress site, and if not then it could be either a HTML site or one built using another less popular Content Management System (CMS).

Is Wix Or WordPress Better For SEO?

By Peter Brittain on May 8, 2019 in WordPress, Technical SEO

Regardless of what technologies, apps, or software there exist on the internet, there are always going to be competitors. Often this leads fans of each to sing their praises, and then those who wish to know more, asking which they should use. This leads invariably to articles such as this where we try to determine which is best. The difference here is that we are comparing Wix and WordPress within a very specific criterion, and that is SEO.

It may help many of you if we briefly explain what Wix and WordPress are and what they are primarily designed to do. If we start with Wix, it is an all-in-one website builder, and it is especially popular with newbies and those for whom website code brings them out in a cold sweat. With Wix you can have your website built very quickly using its pre-designed website temples, it has built-in security, and important for many, it has its own in-house support staff.

WordPress is an open-source content management system which can be used to create hosted websites. It has a bigger learning curve than Wix, but this also means it has much greater scope for flexibility. This means websites can be built with a raft of customisations and thousands of plugins to add greater functionality in both the front end and back end of sites built using WordPress.

When it comes to SEO there is one thing which Wix and WordPress both have in common, and that is their great reliance on third-party software. This will be apps in the case of Wix, and plugins for WordPress. There are several apps which Wix uses for SEO, with one of the most popular called ‘Site Booster’. Site Booster has both a free and premium version and as with most SEO apps it is only the paid one which gives you all the functions that you need to boost your website’s SEO