Improving your WordPress SEO

The few things that make the most difference to how your site ranks.

WordPress covers the basics of search engine optimisation on its own. It builds clean page addresses and generates a sitemap for search engines without any plugin. What follows is what is worth adding, in the order worth doing it.

Install one SEO plugin

An SEO plugin lets you control page titles, descriptions, and how a page looks when someone shares it. Yoast SEO and Rank Math both do this well.

Install one of them, not both. Two SEO plugins compete to write the same tags and the result is unpredictable.

Either offers far more settings than most sites need. The defaults are sensible, so change only what you understand.

Connect Search Console

Google Search Console shows which searches bring people to your site, and reports pages Google could not index. It is the most useful free tool available to you, and it is free.

Add Google Analytics as well if you want to see what visitors do once they arrive. Your SEO plugin will have a field for the tracking code.

What actually moves the needle

Write pages that answer a real question, and give each one a title that matches what someone would type to find it. No plugin compensates for a page that says little.

Keep the site quick and working on phones. Both affect ranking, and both are easier to fix early than late.