You may be missing out on some crucial technical SEO optimizations as many other website owners do. Technical SEO is often overlooked but is a crucial aspect of any comprehensive WordPress SEO strategy.
If you ignore this, it can hamper your site’s ability to be properly crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines. I know this will be the last thing you want for your website.
In this guide, we’ll understand the technical WordPress SEO framework. We’ll help you check and improve important areas to boost your site’s search visibility. Ready to optimize? Let’s first understand why you need technical WordPress SEO-
What Is the Importance of a Technical WordPress SEO Framework?
Technical SEO refers to optimizing the non-content elements of your website to facilitate better crawling and indexing by search engines. While quality content is an important part of WordPress SEO strategy, even the best content won’t perform well if search bots can’t properly access and understand it in the first place.
A solid technical SEO framework for your WordPress site helps to avoid all the barriers or obstacles preventing search engines from crawling, rendering, and indexing your pages appropriately. This allows the search engine algorithms to accurately evaluate and rank your content for relevant queries.
Without technical optimization, your WordPress site may suffer from issues like
- Blocked resources preventing full-page rendering
- Slow page load times impacting crawler efficiency
- Duplicated or low-quality URLs being indexed over canonical versions
- Pages being de-prioritized or missed entirely during crawls
A good technical setup helps search engines focus on ranking your quality content, not wasting time on duplicates. Simplify and excel! It creates an optimal environment for your content to shine through the noise.
With that importance in mind, let’s understand technical areas to audit and optimize for WordPress sites.
Tips for Technical WordPress SEO
1. Make Sure Your Site Appears in Search Engines
The first step is to verify that search engines can actually find and access your WordPress site. Perform a simple “site:yourdomain.com” search on Google. If your pages do not show up, there may be an issue with your site’s indexability settings.
In your WordPress admin, go to Settings > Reading and uncheck the option “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. This setting is sometimes enabled when a site is under construction or in maintenance mode.
2. Check for Crawling and Indexing Issues
While your site may show up in search results, that doesn’t necessarily mean all of your pages are being properly crawled and indexed by search engines. Google Search Console provides invaluable data on this front.
In Search Console, check the “Pages” report to see a breakdown of indexed vs non-indexed pages. The “Crawl Stats” section will reveal any crawling and indexing errors affecting your site. Identify and resolve these issues to facilitate smoother crawling and indexing of your content. This is an important step in technical WordPress SEO.
3. Secure Your Site with HTTPS
If you haven’t migrated to HTTPS yet, contact your WordPress hosting provider as most now offer free SSL certificates with their hosting plans. Follow best practices for properly redirecting your HTTP URLs to HTTPS.
4. Find and Fix Broken Links
The plugin’s Redirection Manager allows you to set up 301 redirects, mapping broken links to their correct destinations. This makes sure that bots and visitors aren’t running into dead ends on your site.
5. Optimize URL Structure
Having an SEO-friendly URL structure aids search engines in easily understanding the content of your pages. Avoid cryptic, parameter-laden URLs in favor of short, descriptive permalinks using relevant keywords and hyphens to separate words.
You can configure your preferred URL structure under the Permalink settings in your WordPress admin area. For example, yourdomain.com/blog/keyword-targeted-post.
6. Submit an XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap acts as a virtual roadmap for search bots, showing all of your important pages and when they were last updated. This helps search engines effectively discover and crawl all of your content.
Most popular WordPress SEO plugins like All in One SEO (AIOSEO) automatically generate and manage your XML sitemap. Once created, you can submit the sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to accelerate the crawling and indexation processes.
Other Key Technical Optimizations
While those 6 areas cover some of the core technical SEO concerns for WordPress sites, there are several other important optimizations to consider:
- Mobile-Friendliness – With Google’s mobile-first indexing, ensuring your WordPress site is responsive and mobile-friendly is crucial. Test with Google’s Mobile-Friendly tool and implement a mobile-responsive theme if needed.
- Site Speed – Page load times are a confirmed ranking factor. Optimize performance by compressing files, leveraging browser caching, using a content delivery network (CDN), and implementing other WordPress speed optimizations.
- Internal Linking – Streamlining your internal linking architecture aids crawlers in discovering all relevant content on your site while also providing a better user experience. Use plugins to analyze and optimize links.
- Structured Data – Implement schema.org structured data markup to provide richer context about your content to search engines. This can enhance visibility in rich results like Featured Snippets.
- Robots.txt Optimization – The robots.txt file provides instructions for crawlers on how to access your site. Optimize by allowing key resources and disallowing unnecessary paths.
- JavaScript Rendering – Ensure any JavaScript-based content on your site is rendered server-side as client-side rendering may result in content being missed during crawls.
