Last Updated on March 13, 2019 by Larious

When you create a new WordPress blog there is a lot of work to be done before you can consider it optimized… Honestly, there are a hell of a lot of plugins out there, and you might get tired of installing plugins for everything because the more you see plugins the more you keep installing due to it functions, in other not to have too much plugin installed.. limit your total plugin on your blog to 8 plugins only.

So, if possible, try to get most things manually coded into the theme itself, and/or use a multi-purpose SEO plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast which is free and the best.

WordPress Permalink

The WordPress default permalink is as bad as the SEO settings offered by WordPress go.

The default permalink looks like this:

http://domain.com/?p=XX

And I have seen many new WordPress blogs using the default permalink, which is definitely not recommended. If you have read my Wordpress essential setup guide, you might not be making this mistake. But if you are still doing this, it’s time to change your permalink structure to a more search engine friendly version.

Reverse Image Search

Do you want to search similar images across the internet? This Tool makes it super quick and easy to do an image search for personal or work use https://smallseotools.com/reverse-image-search/ Simply upload an image or enter the image URL, or choose an image from Dropbox or from Google Images.

Replytocom and Other URL Parameters

This is another big SEO issue with WordPress.

If you check out your comment box reply link, it will show something like:

http://domain.com/%postname%&replytocom=1#respond

I have faced this issue in the past, and this became one of the big issues when my site got penalized by Google Panda.

There are many fixes for this. You can use the WordPress SEO by Yoast permalink options to fix it, or you can use URL parameter settings in your Google Webmaster tool.

There are many other such URL parameters which are used by WordPress (usually because of new WordPress plugins and/or theme settings), and you should use the Webmaster tool’s URL parameter settings to make sure your blog never gets victimized because of this WordPress SEO issue.

SEO Title and Meta Description

Whenever we talk about SEO friendly blogs, we can’t miss out on one of the most common optimization techniques: SEO titles and meta descriptions.

Though, in my opinion, it would be good if Automatic added an SEO feature into the stock WordPress installation. This would help new users make their on-page SEO stronger. But for now, you can always use any of these SEO plugins to add an SEO meta title and SEO meta description.

Many WordPress themes like Thesis, Genesis, and many others also offer this feature as part of the theme. But remember, don’t get confused with all of the SEO plugin options out there; just pick one and stick to it.

WordPress Loading Speed

The loading time of your pages is one of the factors in search engine ranking, and WordPress is one of the most memory-hogging platforms out there.

Well, not exactly.

The stock version is ok, but when you keep adding new plugins and themes, over time your database size grows. When this happens, your site slows down.

WordPress is working hard to optimize the future version of WordPress to be faster, but I highly doubt if we can get the kind of speed Google needs with just stock WordPress.

But again, WordPress is great because there’s a plugin for everything.

WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are two of the best plugins out there for optimizing your WordPress blog for SEO (in terms of speed).

Right now, I’m using the W3TC plugin for caching and improving the performance of my WordPress blog. I highly recommend you try it, too. Along with it, you can use the Smush.it plugin to optimize images.

Also, work on limiting your plugins to make your blog load faster. From time to time, keep deleting your post revisions, and clean your database for any redundant tables.

These are just a few features which make standard WordPress blogs non-SEO friendly. There are many other things which every WordPress user should do to make his/her blog optimized for search engines.

Is WordPress a bad platform for blogging?

Of course not!

It’s actually the best!

The reason why is because the WordPress platform is one of the easiest platforms for any novice blogger to optimize for search engines. With the availability of high-functioning plugins, you can do everything you need to do in order to achieve search engine success.

AUTHOR:

Ayorinde Ayodeji is a young Nigerian tech blogger, web designer &developer and seo expert and love to share his thoughts via is blog Tech Empowerment | Twitter | facebook