The ease of use and the user-friendly interface of WordPress makes it one of the most popular content management systems on the internet. The most attractive thing about WordPress is that it cannot only help create the content for a website, but it has several features which make the site well optimized for getting good rankings on the Search Engine Results Page. Let us know what the inbuilt features in WordPress are which make it so useful for SEO.

SEO Plugins

Just like we use libraries to properly number and reference a large number of books and store them in specific places for easy retrieval, similarly, websites and blogs are also registered in virtual libraries. This is referred to as indexing, and it allows a webpage or blog to be located more easily by a search engine. Having a blog or a website without indexing is akin to writing a great book but simply keeping it at home instead of speaking to a publisher or publicist, in which case no one else in the world would read and enjoy the book.

Simple Code

WordPress is an open source platform for the code; therefore, whenever programmers spot bugs or flaws in it, they can step in and improve the code. The WordPress code has been improved in so many instances by additions and modifications to its code that the speed, features, and security of WordPress keep improving continually. Apart from code improvement, WordPress offers several roles like administrator, editor, author, contributor, and subscriber. The simple and user-contributed code used in WordPress makes it easier for search engines to index a website more easily, and catch the attention of the crawlers of those search engines.

Tags and Categories

Categories can be thought of as a list of contents that the website has. It lists out the various sections (or chapters) that the website contains. Tagging is like the index page at the end of a book. A website should have the perfectly balanced categories and tags, which continue to hold the interest of the visitor, but at the same time doesn’t needlessly increase the number of tags and categories just for the sake of doing it. Ideally, a post should have not more than two to three categories, and not every post should have tags on it. WordPress offers the ability to the person writing the blog or creating the website to structure it properly with the help of categories and tags.

XML Sitemaps

Every website needs to have a list of the different pages inside it, in decreasing order of importance. This list is called a sitemap for that website, and a sitemap can be of two types – HTML sitemap which is for the use of the visitor to the website, and XML sitemap which is intended for the use of the search engines and their crawlers. An XML sitemap which has the list of URLs in great detail can be indexed by the search crawlers much faster, thereby reducing the time it takes for a server to respond to the website. This is a very useful feature provided by WordPress.

Meta Descriptions

One of the Tayloright experts we spoke to referred to meta descriptions as advertising copy. It is the meta description that shows up as the first few lines describing a website on a search engine results page. Therefore, it would be the deciding factor if the visitor would click on the website or not. It is not only crucial for a webpage to feature at the top of the search results pages, but once it happens, the meta description should be attractive enough for the visitor to click on it. This is one of the advantages of using WordPress.

Title Tags

Just like the meta description is an advertiser’s copy, the title tag can be called the headline. If a meta description can evince the visitor’s interest, but a title tag can mean the difference between the visitor staying or leaving immediately. WordPress would allow the creation of attractive and pertinent titles that can draw visitors and prompt them to click on the link when it features on a search engine results page.

Permalinks

WordPress gives you an option where the language for describing permalinks can be changed. Permalinks refer to the URLs found on the top of the websites. But these URLs are often a complicated mix of alphabets and numbers, which doesn’t help crawlers to read them. Therefore, this option of WordPress makes the search engine crawlers do their work more easily.

Each of the WordPress features listed above makes a website more SEO enabled, adding to the usefulness.