Did you know that by undertaking a WordPress SEO checklist you can improve your website ranking? An SEO audit of your site can help to boost your website page ranking in Google and other search engines. It is important to rank high in search engines to get visitors to your website.
What is a WordPress SEO Checklist?
A WordPress SEO checklist is like a to-do list. It reminds you what you need to do and in this case, it is reminding you what you need to do to ensure your website is optimised.
There are many aspects of search engine optimisation to consider and by undertaking an SEO audit of your site you can find out ways to improve and resolve any critical issues that may be affecting the ranking of your website.
Use a WordPress SEO checklist to increase website page ranking
A WordPress SEO checklist includes an SEO audit as this is the best place to start optimising your site.
Search engine optimisation is one of the best ways to get your website ranked high in Google to bring in visitors. When you have an audit of your site it will tell you all about your site and how well optimised it is and it shows any issues, such as how fast or slow the site is loading and whether it is mobile-friendly, along with other things.
Once you have run the audit you can then take action against anything you find to help increase your website ranking over time.
Performing an SEO audit in WordPress
If WordPress is the base for your website you can first use the AIOSEO plugin to audit your site.
This will not fully audit your website but it is a great starting point for the content you have written to ensure it is fully optimised. Bear in mind that content is king in regards to SEO. The All in One SEO plugin will help you to take care of this easily.
This plugin will provide you with an overall site score under the SEO Analysis tab and anything over 70 is considered to be good. A score of this and above indicates that your website is optimised for search engines.
Along with this, it provides you with information about the different parameters of your website. It also tells you about any critical issues that could hurt your SEO. It will also give ideas for ways you can improve your website ranking.
This plugin will help you to keep your eye on your website and you might want to check it two or three times per year to ensure all is going well.
A more in-depth website audit
If you want a more in-depth website audit you might want to consider undertaking a SEMrush website audit.
You can sign up for a free trial and get a deep audit of your website and then go on to fix any issues it comes across. This is a great choice to ensure that your site is fully optimised to help increase your website ranking.
Follow this WordPress SEO checklist
Following your website audit, you can then move on to follow this WordPress SEO checklist.
1. Ensure search engines can see your website
One of the first things you should check within your WordPress dashboard is whether search engines can see your website.
Go to the “settings” tab in WordPress and head to the “reading” section. There is a heading on that page for search engine visibility. Make sure that this box is not ticked. If it does have a tick it means you discourage search engines from indexing your site.
Once you have made there is no tick in the box save the changes.
2. Are you using HTTPS?
When you install WordPress you can choose the URL. If your website has an SSL certificate (it should have), you need to choose HTTPS://WWW.YOURSITE.COM to install WordPress, not, HTTP://WWW.YOURSITE.COM. The HTTPS ensures your website is secure.
Google prioritises websites that use HTTPS over HTTP, so check to make sure you choose this during the installation.
3. Make sure you have a sitemap and upload it to Search Console
If you are using the AIOSEO plugin you can generate a sitemap for your WordPress website easily. All you need to do is go to the “sitemap” tab in the All in One SEO settings and enable the sitemap. You can also preview it by clicking on “open sitemap”.
Again, this is an important part of SEO, if not the most important point in this WordPress SEO checklist. The sitemap tells Google about all of the pages and posts on your site and so helps the search engines to crawl your site better.
Once you have created a sitemap you should head to your Google Search Console and in the sitemap category on the left-hand side click on it and then type in sitemap.xml after your website name and click save.
Google will then check to find out if the sitemap is located on your website and it will crawl the URLs on it.
4. Check for broken links
Links are important for SEO and a valuable part of our WordPress SEO checklist. We are talking about both internal links and backlinks.
A link is said to be broken if it is clicked on and you see a 404 error. This doesn’t go down well with search engines so it is important to find and fix any links that are broken. You can find broken links when you run an SEO audit with Semrush.
5. Check Meta tags
Meta tags are another important part of search engine optimisation. These are the snippets of HTML code that help search engines understand a page and help it rank.
Two important Meta tags are the title and description. The AIOSEO plugin helps with these.
The title tag and description are what are shown in the search results. This means they should be relevant to the content and contain your main keyword.
The Meta description should provide a clear and concise description of what the content is about to help search engines. This is also helpful when shown in the search results. It should be unique and have your main keyword in it.
6. The speed of your website
You need to check the speed of your website. If your site takes more than three seconds to load visitors will more than likely click off and visit a different website.
The faster your website loads the better it is seen in the eyes of search engines and visitors.
7. Is your website mobile responsive?
Google uses mobile-first indexing for websites so you need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
You can check this in the WordPress dashboard yourself. The options for how to view your website are found in the “customise” tab. Click on the mobile or tablet views to find out how your website looks in these formats.
With mobile-friendly in mind, you should install and use a responsive theme for your site. This ensures that it adjusts to look good on any device.
In summary
So, there you have it. Go over our WordPress SEO checklist and make sure that you have done everything you possibly can to optimise your website.
You can then run a full website audit using the Semrush trial without it costing you a penny. Making sure you have a fully optimised website is essential to get ranked high in Google and other search engines so that visitors will find it.
