How to Automate SEO Using WordPress
Before WordPress most people had to perform basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tasks. They needed so-called:
- “onpage optimization”.
- “search engine submission”
- “manual link building”
Now you automate SEO using WordPress. Hallelujah! Want more details? See below!
WordPress Let’s You Focus on Content and Social
By using WordPress you can quit SEO in many cases and focus on important things.
What do you really need? Evergreen content and socializing with like minded people.
In other words WordPress is about seamless SEO 2.0 or social SEO and content SEO.
All you have to do now is to focus on natural writing and sharing with your peers.
How does WordPress actually automate SEO? By default but you can improve it further.
WordPress is Already Optimized
WordPress is already optimized for Google and other search engines out of the box. You can rest assured.
When you use a theme that takes care of SEO best practices you do not even have to install the various SEO plugins.
A popular plugin like Yoast SEO will do most of the additional heavy lifting for you in the background though.
In essence it’s a “nice to have”. Even without such an “all-in-one” SEO plugin your blog is fine already. No joke!
WordPress Tells Google About Your Posts
WordPress tells Google about your posts immediately so that the search engine can find your content after it goes online automatically.
WordPress does not wait until you manually “submit” to Google or add inbound links to your post so that it gets crawled and indexed.
Instead it actively notifies Google of newly published posts and ideally also updates to existing ones.
WordPress pings Google and other services through Ping-O-Matic automatically. What does it mean? Publishing on WordPress is equivalent to “search engine submission”.
You can even speed it up and ensure that even updates to existing content get noticed by using so-called WebSub tools as John Muller of Google confirmed and the Google documentation also states.
WordPress Interlinks Your Posts Automatically
WordPress interlinks posts automatically both internally and externally. Your latest articles will show on top of the frontpage.
Believe it or not but before WordPress you had to manually link your latest articles on the homepage and elsewhere on your site.
Ideally you also link your “latest posts” in the sidebar in case you have one or the header/footer depending on your choice.
In SEO 1.0 you also had to manually build links to your site (e.g swap links) so that Google will notice it and index fresh content.
With WordPress you just ping blogs or rather particular blog posts you mentioned so that you get a link back to your blog.
Sadly over the years this feature has been abused by spammers so that many blogs do not allow this anymore or use nofollow-type attributes to let Google ignore or discount such links.
It often does not matter though as the blogger you quoted notices your post and ideally shares it on social media or in the best case adds your update to the original post.
Default WordPress Ranks Well by Itself
Even unchanged WordPress installations will rank comparably well. As there are 600 million of blogs out there by now you might want to try more than just the SEO basics though.
Advanced SEO and common sense social SEO and content SEO techniques I describe here on the blog can get you the additional advantage of standing out or rising above the noise level.
You can improve your WordPress SEO with some measures like changing the title order and also tweaking some underlying code but it does not matter as much as the content and the socializing.
An empty WordPress site nobody knows about won’t rank despite the best SEO.
You can automate SEO now and use WordPress instead of doing conventional SEO.
In other words you can optimize content now and socialize with your peers while rely on WordPress for the SEO basics.
Hey thanks for the shout out! Gotta love a powerful tool that makes what was once a black blox (SEO) painless for mere mortals!
You’re welcome Tris. Why bother if you can have it without fuss?
great post, I fought WordPress as a CMS for a while but when I finally started my own blog, I fell in love so fast I thought a train had hit me…
no really though, WordPress is so nice for SEO that I don’t know what I would do without it now.