One of the biggest advantages to deploying a site on WordPress is the ability to optimize it using WordPress SEO

There are advantages that can be gained when your web site comes out of a database as opposed to standard web pages. The process of optimizing a WordPress site is completely different in WordPress than it is in standard html. WordPress SEO involves selecting and installing an SEO plug in. Then configuring the site. We use WordPress SEO by Yoast. I believe this is the best SEO plug-in for WordPress sites.

The world of SEO changed forever the day Google issued their Penguin and Panda updates. Basically Google made SEO less effective. While SEO is not as effective as it was pre-penguin, it is still better to have your site optimized than not. While Google has taken away many long-standing SEO techniques you can get back what has been lost by doing a better job of optimizing the site. Google has taken away many of the brute force tactics, however WordPress SEO is so deadly accurate that it cannot help but improve rankings. If other words you can do such a great job of optimizing a WordPress site using an SEO plugin, it is still effective.

Here is why WordPress SEO with plugin is so effective:

1. WordPress allows you to change the URL

A fundamental SEO technique is to change the URL (filename) to the keyword. With a conventional site you have to change all the linking. It’s a lot of work. With WordPress you just change the URL and all your menus are updated automatically. There is no coding involved. Since WordPress uses rewrite (dynamic file names) you can change the filename and have it reflected throughout the site instantly.

2. WordPress SEO plugins check searches

Before you put time into optimizing a page it helps to know there are actual searches going on. You may think you’re optimizing for a popular keyword, but is possible no one searches for it at all. This means you’ll never be found. WordPress SEO plugins have online databases that check your keyword first to be sure it’s a popular keyword. It also brings up related searches that are popular. Armed with the list of actual searched upon terms you can select a keyword that accurately matches the content on the page. The importance of matching the content to a narrow yet popular search term cannot be overstated. When the plugin presents the list of popular terms it’s easy to select a specific popular search term. In the world of SEO selected the right keyword before you start optimizing is over half the battle.

3. Reading the page content from a database

In the WordPress admin area when you access a page it reads the page content from a database. The SEO plugin checks this data against the keyword you’ve selected and gives you a grade on relevance. It checks the important SEO elements of the page (page title, URL, content, meta-description, and H1 heading) and grades it red, yellow, orange, or green. SEO becomes a process of turning all the important elements of the page green. You can do right within the WordPress console. It takes time but it’s a fraction of the time you’d spend with standard html.

4. Fine tuning the web page

Most of the time we manipulate the main elements of the page to get it lined up with the keyword. If you’re looking to optimize further you can go into second level element like image URL and meta-description, length of content, and internal linking. There are a host of elements that you can adjust if you’re looking for a fully optimized web page.

Wordpress SEO plugins allow you to take page optimization far beyond what you can do with a conventional hand written html site. You can optimize it quicker and better than a conventional site. Even with Google diminishing emphasis on optimization it will still reap dividends because it is accurately and fully implemented. From the perspective of a search engine, looking for pages matching specific search criteria, WordPress optimized pages are almost guaranteed to come up first. I highly recommend any WordPress designed site take advantage of its position and become fully optimized using a WordPress SEO plugin.