Why Use Wordpress? SEO Benefits

Building a New Website?

As everyone nowadays is aware, it’s not enough to simply create a website and assume that you will achieve good rankings on Search Engines. You will obviously need to optimise your website for Search Engines. This brings us to the decision of which platform to use when building a website. There are many different Off the Shelf packages and also the option of getting a purpose-built CMS.

This decision will depend on what you need from the website. However, normally an off the shelf package with the right designer will give you all you need. This is where we recommend WordPress.

Reasons to use WordPress

Here are some reasons why WordPress is our design platform of choice…..

OpenSource

WordPress is an OpenSource platform. This means it can be downloaded for free and the whole internet community can help with it’s development. On numerous occasions we have come across websites that have been purpose-built or built using packages that are unsuitable for online marketing. Often companies are stuck with their current web developer, simply because they are the only ones that understand the code with which the website has been built. Due to the vast amount of websites being built using WordPress, and the huge number of developers who are comfortable designing using WordPress, you will never have this problem. If you are ever unhappy with your developer it is very easy to move to another.

SEO Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

These areas are extremely important in SEO, and with the help of the Yoast Plugin, WordPress makes it easy. It’s worth mentioning here that there are other Plugins for SEO, but Yoast is the best by far (All In One SEO is the closest competitor).

Using Yoast you can amend the SEO information and see how it will look on Google. On the image below you can see how this works. Here you simply click on the area you want to edit then enter the information you want in its place.

URL Structure

It is important to have meaningful, descriptive URLs on your website, such as https://www.janklin.com/blog/why-use-wordpress-seo-benefits/ instead of https://www.janklin.com/blog/p?=1234. This will obviously be more useful for Search Engines and Visitors alike.

WordPress makes this extremely easy with it’s Permalink Structure. You Simply visit Settings -> Permalink. Here you can choose how you want your URLs to be generated.

On the image below you can see that we have opted for /blog/%postname%/. The %postname% part of this will automatically generate a URL from your Blog Post Title. So for this post Why Use WordPress? SEO Benefits becomes https://www.janklin.com/blog/why-use-wordpress-seo-benefits/.

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are an important way of letting search engines understand the structure of your website in a simple way. These sitemaps are then submitted to the search engines. This is done via your Google Console (which used to be Google Webmaster Tools).

Although there are numerous plugins for this, we, again, recommend Yoast. There are a few ways that you can tailor this to your website but if you trust the Yoast configuration, all you need to do is tick the box.

Optimising Images

Optimised images can be very useful for Image Search on Google, but also help with the overall SEO on each page. Image optimisation is all about creating engaging, relevant image titles and alt text, so that you will get better visibility on Google and other image search engines. WordPress makes this easy. It allows you to add image Titles, Captions and Alt text. All of these features enable search engines to understand the images, and what the image is about.

Technical

There are numerous technical issues which can hinder your websites’ performance on Search Engines: Website Speed, Image File Sizes, Broken Links etc. Luckily, because WordPress is OpenSource someone else is more than likely to have come across these issues before you and developed a plugin. Over the years we have come across numerous plugins which help with SEO and, obviously, the design of websites.

We have mentioned Yoast a few times in this article, but here is another plugin which is fantastic for ensuring your website passes the Google Speed test whilst also ensuring there are no other technical issues….

W3Total Cache

This is a very useful plugin which allows you to compress files and code, cache pages on your server, cache databases, cache objects and more.

Summary

Over the years Jan Klin & Associates Ltd have created and worked with a huge range of different website packages, and even direct code such as PHP, aspx and html websites. In all these years we have not come across anything that has even comes close to WordPress. It has everything needed for Online Marketing and is our choice for Web Design.

If you have any questions about WordPress please feel free to get in touch and we can discuss this with you: Jon Seymour – 01492 460 460 (jon@janklin.com).

Jan Klin Example WordPress Website

Here are a few websites that we have built to give you more of an idea of what WordPress can do:

Everything Dinosaur