How to create a WordPress blog with SEO in mind

After many things and buts, you finally decided to create a website. A personal website for yourself, or the long overdue website for your business.

You know you have to think about the design and provide well-written texts. Have you ever wondered about accommodation?

You may even have called someone who can build your website for you. Overall, you are pretty confident that you can now start a website without any issues.

But wait. Have you thought about this little thing called SEO?

Create your website with SEO in mind

Much of the search engine optimization process hinges on one point: what is your website talking about?

You have to focus on what we sometimes call the “main tasks”. It is a term used for the user experience, but the same also goes for that moment when you decide to create a website from zero.

What is the purpose of a visitor coming to your website?

And how can we make this visitor's journey a pleasant journey?

When we discuss SEO with people who want create a website, we focus on two main areas:

The technical side of things
Fill the website with content

In this tutorial, we will highlight a number of important technical issues.

But before, if you have never installed WordPress discover How to Install a WordPress Blog in 7 Steps et How to search, install and activate a WordPress theme on your blog

Then back to why we are here.

The technical side of things

With WordPress, it's easy to build a website. But many of you have probably hired a web agency to do it. It doesn't mean you can sit back and wait for them to finish. There are a lot of things you need to check and optimize yourself.

Speed optimization

One thing you need to be careful about is the speed of your future website. You can easily check this on websites such as Google PageSpeed Insights ou Pingdom. In an ideal world, your web agency has already tested things and your own check of your website speed will yield nothing but greens and good ratings.

Discover also our 10 WordPress plugins to improve the speed of your blog

Otherwise, these tools will tell you exactly where you can improve. This could be a multiMB image that slows down the loading of a page, or the loading of an excessive number of JavaScript files, to name a few.

URL structure

Since setting up a new website, you still have full control over your URL structure. In most cases, theattention is your friend here. Including dates in blog URLs that are unrelated to dates is my favorite example of what not to do.

Read also our article on: How to change the default search URL on WordPress

You don't need a date unless you are an informational website and that date is important.

For online stores, focus the URL on your product.

Do people use SKUs (Stock Management Unit) to find your products?

You must include it in the URL. Otherwise, please don't. Rule of thumb: remove anything from your URLs that is unnecessary. And if we are honest: /blog/is not a useful addition to your url, let alone /boutique/.

A quick note about your URL length: if you use precision, your URL will never need to be trop long.

I'm not against long URLs, especially since Google seems to display search results pages. But a shorter logical URL is easier to remember. And easier to share.

Headings

One of my favorite topics: title tags. HTML5 allows one H1 per block element, am I right? I am formally against this practice. If you only use un H1, you must clearly specify the subject or the keyword of this page.

By limiting yourself to this H1, you will certainly add precision to this page. This will help you optimize properly.

Also check out: How to make an external link with the title of a WordPress article

It's simple :

Just one H1 per page
H2 for subheadings
H3 for subheadings of an H2 subheading
H4? You probably don't need this.
Try not to use the HTML headers above as design elements . They serve another purpose: to structure your content.

Make it responsive

Just as important, if not more important than the desktop version, is the mobile version of your website. Mobile-First, they say. The point is, your website probably has as many mobile visitors as it has desktop visitors, of course depending on what type of website you have.

I therefore believe that a responsive website should be the default website for all websites built in 2010 or later. We use all of our mobile devices to browse the web, and your website should be ready for it.

If your web developer tells you that the website is accessible from a mobile device, don't trust them. Go to your mobile website and see if you as a visitor can do anything you want and need to do there.

Local optimization

We have written a lot about structured data. By using structured data, you can provide Google with your contact details in the most convenient way. With JSON, for example, you can insert a snippet that will help Google assign your website / business to a location.

This information is used for local searches, but will also be found in the Google Knowledge Graph :

So if your business or website is linked to a real location, be sure to optimize for that part of your website from the start. And definitely add your data LocalBusiness right now, if you haven't already 🙂

Follow your traffic

Let's not forget this one. I've seen websites where the owner told me the conversion was low or no one had completed their Contact form. But the owner had no no idea of number of people visiting his website.

Discover to go further How to view popular articles and generate traffic

No idea of what the main landing pages or exit pages were.

If you are serious about your website, install at least Google Analytics or any other favorite statistics app. Collect data about your visitors and learn about the customer journey on your website.

Find out which pages people like and which pages they dislike. When you start a website, don't wait too long to add Google Analytics to increase your traffic from day one.

Discover also some premium WordPress plugins

You can use other WordPress plugins to give a modern look and optimize the grip of your blog or website.

We offer you here some premium WordPress plugins that will help you do that.

1. tactile

Touch is a plugin WordPress premium from menu and header for smartphones, created with the design principles of Google's Material Design. Its header design is extremely clean.

It features subtle and thoughtful animations, and at the same time offers plenty of customization possibilities, which in turn make this WordPress plugin suitable for any website.

You will have the opportunity to quickly change the colors of each element, add a background pattern, modify the animations, show / hide different elements And so on…

Download | Demo | Web hosting

2. Hotel Booking Reviews

The WordPress premium Hotel Booking Reviews plugin is an extension of the WordPress MotoPress Property Rental plugin. It emphasizes reviews of properties or real estate. Overall, it will allow you to collect different opinions and ratings in the form of stars from customers who have acquired a good or service from you.

You will be able to gain the trust of your potential customers by allowing them to view the real comments of other customers of your platform.

Upon installation, this extension automatically created a comment form simple and a five-star rating system that will be incredibly intuitive. In addition, as it is based on the native WordPress commenting system, it will be easy for you to manage reviews and improve the functionality of your review system.

Download | Demo | Web hosting

3. Youtubomatic

Youtubomatic is a new premium WordPress plugin that will be particularly useful if you are a blogger video. When this WordPress plugin is active on your website, it can automatically import videos from YouTube and publish them to WordPress using YouTube's native API.

Once this feature is enabled, you can download a video to your channel from YouTube simply by accessing it through a link.

You'll be able to import both posts and comments to YouTube to provide engaging content on your blog. The plugin reduces the duplicate content with some advanced features, like a random phrase generator and a synonym generator that will make your publication different from the source. Its support for text rotation enhances the value of SEO.

Google robots are likely to treat the content generated by this plugin as unique. You will be able to define the rules based on which the posts will be generated and search the content using filters and options.

Personalized shortcodes are available for inserting videos into a post to display a list of videos suggested by a keyword search or to display videos from a playlist.

Download | Demo | Web hosting

Recommended Resources

Find out about other recommended resources to help you build and manage your website.

Conclusion

Here! That's it for this tutorial on how create a WordPress blog with SEO in mind. Feel free to share this article with your friends on your favorite social networks.

However, you will also be able to consult our resources, if you need more elements to carry out your projects of creation of Internet sites, by consulting our guide on the WordPress blog creation.

If you have suggestions or remarks, leave them in our section Comments.

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How to create a WordPress blog with SEO in mind

Create your website with SEO in mind