Optimizing your content to rank highly on search engines is one of the most important parts of web development. Luckily, there are several tools that can help you achieve this, and one of the best for WordPress is the SEOPress plugin.
This plugin integrates with WordPress to give you real-time insights into your writing from the SEO side of things. It will also tell you exactly what the problem is so you can fix it without having to look elsewhere for answers.
A big focus of SEOPress are the integration options it provides for social media platforms. Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, and more are all fully supported and help improve the integration between these platforms and WordPress.
Today, I will demonstrate how to improve your WordPress website’s ranking with SEOPress.
This tutorial is for:WordPress 6.5.3Plugin: SEOPress v7.7.2
What Makes SEO So Important?
One of the main ways users find a website is by using a search engine like Google. Users type in a question or term and the search engine returns sites that can answer that question or are centered around a term.
If your website does not appear highly in the results, then fewer users are likely to find your website, which makes SEO critical for success.
You may be wondering about the actual significance of search optimization. Well, search engines drive 93% of all web traffic. Simply put, if you are not ranking highly on search engines to take advantage of this, your website is not going to be successful by any metric.
Each search engine uses an algorithm to determine your website’s rankings, and we still don’t fully understand how it works. Instead, most sites will employ an SEO team to help point them in the right direction and use SEO tools to help improve rankings.
With the proper tools websites can rank highly and reach their target audience, and the SEOPress plugin is one of those tools.
How to Use SEOPress to Improve WordPress Rankings
The SEOPress plugin is extremely simple to use, which makes it a great choice for beginners. It will provide real-time insights as you write and provide feedback that can help you rank higher on Google.
It also includes a slew of SEO tools that can help make other parts of your website SEO friendly like its redirection system. This can help you avoid 404 errors and make sure your visitors are landing on the correct content.
SEOPress is an all-in-one SEO solution, so you really will find pretty much everything SEO-related when it comes to its feature list. So, let’s just jump right into it and explore how you can use it to boost your rankings.
Step 1: Install SEOPress
Let’s start by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.
Search for SEOPress in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.
Find the SEOPress plugin and click on the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin for use.
Step 2: Writing Insights
Writing content is the backbone of most WordPress sites, thus it is an excellent starting point. Go to any existing post or page on your website. When you open it up, scroll down to the bottom and you should see an SEOPress section that contains insights.
The insights color codes different aspects of your content. Green is good, yellow is problematic, and red is bad. Simply click on an insight and you will be able to view everything about it in detail. This also includes how to correct it.
The plugin covers a variety of the most common parts of content creation that can impact your rankings. These include simple things like internal and external links to more nuanced things like keyword usage in your permalinks.
In most cases, you should aim to get a green color in every option it shows, but there will be cases where that is not feasible. Keyword usage in the permalinks is a good example, as sometimes that just doesn’t work well.
There are also more direct things you can enter in this area. For example, you can enter the keyword you want the content to rank for and a meta description that will be displayed in the search results.
These options can be found above the content warnings.
Step 3: Social Network Tools
Social media plays a huge role in any website and SEOPress offers a variety of tools for WordPress. You can use the plugin to integrate your various social media accounts with your website.
This involves providing a link to your social pages, so the plugin recognizes them as you. To do this, click on SEO and select the Social Networks option.
If you click on the Your Social Accounts tab, you will find a list of social networks with a textbox next to them. Simply paste the URL of your social page into the respective boxes. There is also an additional box where you can enter links to any platforms they did not mention.
You can also use the plugin to connect with Facebook Open Graph and manage your X Cards (Twitter Cards). If you are looking for a tool to manage your social media, SEOPress is a great choice. However, it doesn’t have any auto-posting capabilities.
Thus, you may still want a dedicated social media management plugin.
Step 4: XML Sitemap
Sitemaps are an integral part of any SEO strategy and virtually every tool will recommend having one, which is why SEOPress generates one for you. A sitemap is a map of your site that helps search engine crawl bots find all of the content you want to share.
By submitting one to Google or other search engines, it improves the accuracy of the bots and speeds up the process for being indexed.
Since the plugin generates one for you, there’s not much to actually do but to know where to find it so you can submit it.
Click on SEO and select the XML – HTML Sitemap option.
You’ll find a direct link to the XML sitemap in the General section, as well as a few settings you can configure. That said, for 99% of websites, you can ignore the settings as the default ones are perfect.
One other thing in this section is an HTML sitemap. You may be wondering what the difference is and the simplest answer is that an XML sitemap is for a search engine and an HTML sitemap is for an actual person.
An HTML sitemap can be a valuable development tool that can help you understand how your content is connected. By clicking on the HTML Sitemap tab, you can find a shortcode that you can use to display it on a page or post.
This is a very standard feature for SEO plugins, but it is still incredibly important, so be sure to take full advantage of it.
Step 5: Analytics
Google Analytics remains one of the most important tools for gathering information about your site and the users who visit it. You can integrate SEOPress with Google Analytics to improve site tracking for deeper insights.
To do it, click on SEO and select the Analytics option.
To connect with SEOPress, you will need to enter your Google ID, which can be found in your Google account. Once you locate it, paste it into the appropriate box. There are plenty of other options in this area.
For example, there are GDPR options to ensure your website follows the requirements for EU users. It is highly recommended to connect with Google Analytics as the additional info can prove invaluable for most sites.
And with this, you know the basics of what SEOPress brings to the table. If you really like the tool, there is a Pro version that has many more options and gives you access to their support team, so be sure to check it out.
Improve Your SEO Ranking Today with SEOPress
As you can see, SEOPress is a terrific plugin for WordPress that will help you improve your rankings. While it is an encompassing tool, it is worth mentioning that even with the best help, it can still take months to get a decent ranking on Google.
The level of competition between websites has never been higher, thus climbing ranking gets harder every day. Don’t get discouraged, as long as you are creating quality content and following the best SEO practices, you will eventually rank highly.
I hope you found this tutorial helpful in learning how you can use SEOPress to improve your WordPress website’s ranking.
How easy did you find the SEOPress plugin to use? Do you use any other SEO plugins alongside it?
