As you might know, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform available and also the most easy to use. Currently over 50 million websites worldwide use WordPress as a content management option and I can say that among these we can find many popular sites such as Mashable  or Ford.

Why do you think WordPress is chosen by many leading international companies to promote online and why you believe that nowadays WordPress is on everybody interested in online conversations? The answer is simple: The options provided by WordPress are those that a website needs in order to succeed online – simplicity, professionalism and an incredible community that improves the platform every day.

With that said, you should know that WordPress excels in an area confronted by many marketers every day. This is of course SEO and getting the best results and traffic from search engines.

What Makes WordPress to be SEO Friendly?

As you might know, the essence in SEO lies in simplicity and speed. Search engines like Google appreciate very much websites focusing on the offered content and also those that load quickly and are prompt for their users.

1. Simple and Perfect

WordPress developers have placed great importance on the simplicity offered and concentrated their work so that the outcome will be perfect. You can check out and see that every standard option and design meets all the requirements at HTML Validator or CSS or even the Feed Validator.

2. Fast

Unlike other content management systems WordPress knows how to distinguish between what is truly necessary and what is not relevant. Therefore, the WordPress structure is simple and build based on clean lines of code.

Keep it simple and clean and WordPress will be the fastest way of generating content online.

3. Has great modifications build for SEO

In over 8 years in which WordPress was able to provide the best and most interesting options for bloggers and webmasters, they managed to build up a community of developers that now includes hundreds of thousands of members.  Many have decided to devote all of their developer work to improve the platform. Among them you can find many SEO experts who have developed extraordinary tools for online promotion and SEO.

4. On WordPress you can edit every piece of content

This is very important because in order to create a good website optimization you need the ability to handle the content as you wish adding being able to add meta tags or descriptions for each post. Also the title is important, the text of each item and images require your optimization too. Unlike any other CMS and thanks to the community, WordPress allows you to do that with ease.

How to make my website simple and perfect?

The best designers in the world are using WordPress as a blogging platform, so it seems only obvious to me  that WordPress themes have the best ranking. Also, you should know that SEO professionals spend great amount of time in order to create a theme that will be minimalist, but at the same time it will manage to give users what they need.

Everything depends on you and if you want to offer visitors a good experience or whether or not you want your site to appear as one liked by search engines. Certainly  I am not exaggerated and say that there shouldn’t be a photo in your website content or an ad placed on your site, but when they are everywhere, they confused visitors confused. Actually, that’s one of the main reasons why search engines love simple and organized websites.

If you would like your website to have a simple theme, nice and also free, then one of the best places to get it is to go to the repository for WordPress themes. Some other verified and trusted theme creators are WooThemes and ElegantThemes where you can find some great looking designs simple and perfect. Of course there are many other theme creators out there, but these two I know and worked with and I can say that I am pretty happy with their creations.

How to make WordPress even faster?

Search engines love speed, in fact not long ago Google launched a campaign to test the speed of websites and help webmasters with techniques to improve it and rank higher in search engines. Learn more about Google Page Speed...

In addition to this, WordPress developers have devised several plugins that will make all dynamic pages to static pages and becoming easier to process and as a result your website will become faster.

Another factor that can aggravate the website slowness is due to plugins. Do not get me wrong, plugins are essential, but when there are too many conflicts start to happen and they can cause your site to move more slowly.

That’s why you should consider:

1. Deactivating useless plugins
2. Make sure you have the plugins up to date
3. Don’t install plugins that are not trusted by the WordPress community

You should also know that whenever a PHP call is made, it requires your web server attention and that’s why the process can take longer. You can optimize this by converting some parts of the PHP code in WordPress themes and add static HTML. Remember that you shouldn’t do this with all files in fact, I highly recommend you to backup your files before even starting to modify anything.

1. 1.       Optimize Title

If you start editing your header.PHP file, you will see that there is a function calling the title of the website and description:

<?PHP bloginfo(name); ?><?PHP bloginfo(description); ?>

You can easily replace this with the HTML version which is much faster and it looks like this:

<title>Your Website Title</title>

1. 2.       Optimize Feed

You can find something similar to this

<?PHP bloginfo_rss(‘url’) ?>

 

And it can easily be translated into HTML like this

http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName

1. 3.       Optimize URL

Even the URL of your website is shown using a PHP call.

<h1><?PHP bloginfo('name'); ?></h1>

In HTML will be

YourWebsiteName

 

Of course, there are certain disadvantages when you choose to use the HTML version instead of PHP call, but these ones are made because the theme designer doesn’t know what’s the name of your website or what RSS feed you have.

Make code cleaner and compress it

Did you know that you can compress all the nasty JavaScript and CSS code in order to build a much cleaner and good looking website? Well, you can and the process is extremely easy and also fast. Again Google Code is the one that comes to help us by offering the Closure Compiler which helps you compress JavaScript fast and free.

Make images to load fast

If you intend to post more pictures, it is essential to keep in mind search engine optimization and keep in mind that search for images is very popular even though most people don’t talk about this.

Compress Images

We talked about code optimization importance, but you should know that image optimization is also very important.

As a result to this, you should use .GIF images for the ones with few colors which are small and .JPG for ones with many colors. I also choose to create images with 80% quality if they are JPG’s and GIF’s I use only with small buttons or small icons.

Let’s see some great plugins that will help you with making wordpress static .

W3 Total Cache

When it comes to cache options for WP this is definitely my favorite plugin and is also the most popular plugin cache for WordPress.  Its functions include database caching, pages caching and even to minimize the size of your pages. It is used by Mashable, Matt Cutts, Smashing Magazine, Yoast and lots of other online gurus out there. This plugin will also do all the changes without any of your efforts and it will even modify the .htaccess settings for you. Download W3 Total Cache

Another great caching plugin is WP Super Cache which is pretty similar to W3 Total Cache.

How to add my tags and edit pieces needed for a good SEO?

It is well known fact that for a good search engine optimization you should be very careful with every piece of content that you post. Therefore on WordPress you can automatically choose to have article templates, add meta tags such as description and keywords, have customized page titles and of course add description and alt tags to images.

1. 1.      Optimizing Text and Links

I’ll start with a plugin that I use very often and who managed to bring very good results to my websites just because it gives me optimization tips automatically for each published article.

SEOPressor

Unlike the other plugins in this article, SEOPressor is not a plugin that you can get from the official WordPress repository because is premium. Is a great plugin, but unfortunately is not available for free. It provides relevant information about the density of words in your articles, offers tips on how to optimize your title and what type of paragraph you should add. Personally I believe is worth your money and you should try it. Buy SEOPressor

Platinum SEO Pack

Is called Platinum Pack because it is the ideal tool for SEO and allows you to automatically work around your site SEO like no other. If you know the “All in One SEO Pack” WordPress plugin, you should know that this is much improved version having support too.

Simple and fast, Platinum SEO pack allows you to adjust your general settings for the website and meta tags, title description for each page separately. Platinum SEO Pack allows you to choose which pages you’ll assign with no-follow and which pages do-follow. Download the Platinum SEO Pack plugin

Breadcrumb Plugin

You can see a great example of the utilization of this plugin on most popular websites, is that text which you can see at top looking something like this “Home > Articles > WordPress” showing where is positioned the page you are currently browsing. Get it from here.

1. 2.      Optimizing Images

That’s probably the easiest part of the entire tutorial and you should know that even though it might seem unimportant, adding an alt text and a title to images is vital – without these search engines will not even see your images. Search engines love text and so the next plugin gives you everything you need automatically.

SEO Friendly Images

This is definitely the greatest plugin I know used to optimize images for search engine results. SEO Friendly Images will add the alt attribute to all of your images uploaded using WordPress. This way, search engines will be able to see them and as a result index them. Get SEO Friendly Images

Will I get any results using these techniques?

Of course, this entire tutorial is not much if what your site offers to users has no value. But, with this arsenal behind your online business is impossible not to get exceptional results.