So WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is what you’re looking for? Well, here’s some expert advice from someone who has worked on WordPress for over 20 years.
WordPress was originally a blogging tool but it has evolved to become a genuine all-round CMS. Personally. I found it a little clunky back in 2003, with all the manual updates and regular errors. I even evaluated it against other CMS in 2005 as a solution for a huge information website, but it lost out to Joomla! Typo3 and Drupal did too, but WordPress was only the runner up.
Today, I love WordPress. I’ve also used Joomla!, Drupal, Duda, Squarespace, Shopify, and various other platforms, but WordPress is a solid CMS and great for SEO. It has grown up to be a really mature platform with a huge supporting backdrop of devs. And that’s why it’s the number one CMS in the world.
Can You Do SEO on WordPress?
Yes. Out of the box, WordPress is a good Content Management System (CMS) on which to do SEO.
The great thing is that you can just get on with SEO’ing your WordPress website without any tools at all, if you want to. There are limitations, though.
However, the tools just make things a lot easier.
Can You do WordPress SEO Without an SEO Plugin?
Yes. With a vanilla WordPress install, you have (almost) everything there already in order to just get on with the basic SEO principles. And for beginners and small businesses, if you know how to perform basic SEO then it’s really as easy as that.
WordPress natively uses your page and post titles as the H1s, and there are dropdowns in the editor for all the other headings (H2-H6). Plus you have the basic text formatting tools such as bold, italics, ordered and unordered lists, and indents. These are all you need for basic text formatting.
The “page slug”, which is the URL of the page, is editable without an SEO plugin, so you can remove “stop words” here to make a more succinct resource locator.
The HTML <title> tag of your page and the HTML <meta> description tag are not editable without either a little technical knowledge. It’s a convoluted process to make these editable, which I won’t go into now.
Title tags are autogenerated from the post name + site name. So if these are relevant, succinct, and short, they’ll work straight away.
Descriptions are another matter though – if you can’t or haven’t been able to modify the PHP or functions file to get these to work, then they’ll stay empty. And then there’s the fact that Google can and sometimes does ignore meta descriptions, and may even generate a more relevant snippet from your content to better serve a user’s search query.
So, apart from the auto-generated titles and slightly more complex meta descriptions, a raw install of WordPress has a rudimentary level of what you need for basic SEO in the CMS. If you can write and format logically structured content, then it should go straight into WordPress, and you can then conduct all the basic SEO tasks and you’re done.
After all this I recommend that you do use a WordPress SEO plugin.
SEO plugins for WordPress don’t magically do all the SEO work for you, they are merely tools to help you do your SEO work quicker and more efficiently. Personally and professionally, I use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
Other SEO plugins are available like RankMath and All in One SEO. I’ve used them but have greater familiarity with Joost de Valk’s plugin, so Yoast is my go-to.
Some Tips for Basic WordPress SEO
Settings
Make sure that the WordPress Settings are correct. Have the correct Site Title, Tagline, Administration Email Address, Site Language, and Time zone. There’s nothing worse than a hastily set up WordPress website in US English (When you’re a Brit) and not in the London timezone. Of course, if you’re from elsewhere, set these up appropriately.
Once these are all in place you should never need to change these again but at least you’ve got them right from the outset.
Settings > Reading
Next, make sure that the Search Engine Visibility box is unticked. This setting allows you to develop a website without it being crawled and indexed before it’s ready.
I’ve seen developers leave this ticked after launch and it simply adds a disallow all instruction to the robots.txt file. I once started work on a website that had this in place for a couple of years! No wonder they suddenly had a rush of rankings and traffic when I fixed this simple WordPress setting.
Settings > Permalinks
The native WordPress permalink structure isn’t useful for SEO. Having a “query equals page/post ID” as in /?p=123 is meaningless to anything other then a machine or a perceptive web developer with a great memory. But why should you need to?
The best advice here is to select the semantic structure, the ones that include words separated by hyphens. These URLs are meaningful and readable. From a user experience (UX) perspective, links are easier to remember and share plus there’s the subtle psychology of having that perceived relevance and cognitive confirmation.
Other bonuses include the professionalism of clean semantic URLs, and a potential positive impact in your SEO efforts.
One last word on which permalink structure you use: The Day and name option places your pages and posts in a logical, hierarchical, and virtual path/folder structure as does the Month and name option. Whilst these are “neat and tidy” they also nest pages deeper in the link structure.
For example, on this website, the Day and name permalink structure would look like:
/2025/03/14/sample-post/
However, when you look at how far away you would theoretically need to click away from the homepage, the structure strats to look more like:
/one-click/two-clicks/three-clicks/four-clicks/
This is a longer URL than just
/sample-post/
Plus, this example doesn’t even cover the fact that URLs are nested under parent URLs, so this could also have been:
/blog/sample-post/
The Day and month option, whilst wonderfully accurate, also dilutes the semantics of the URL with less meaningful data.
The /year/month/day/ structure is also only valid on the day you write the page or post, so an evergreen article under this setting will have a fixed point in time. There’s also an issue if you ever had to update or change the URL, particularly the date – do you really want to be doing all those 301 redirects when you could have had the perfect URL in the first place?
So the advice here is to think about, plan, and on paper at least, test your URLs.
It’s also important to point out here that these permalink structures apply to posts, a bit of a remnant from the days when WordPress was primarily a blogging platform.
With this in mind you may also wish to create your own custom structure. For nearly twenty years I’ve used a variation of the hierarchical logic to create date stamps for news stories/blog posts. I used to have very similar regular post titles, so the date was a great differentiator.
The format I’ve always found useful and successful has been
/YYYYMMDD-post-name
You can create this as a custom permalink structure in WordPress by using the native rewrite tags:
/%year%%monthnum%%day%-%postname%/
So bear all this in mind before committing to your final structure. It’s best to get everything correct from the outset so that you avoid having to work on time consuming redirects later.
WordPress SEO Plugins
I use the free version of Yoast SEO, it boasts that it’s the
“#1 WordPress SEO Plugin”
and I’m cool with that.
In fact I’m more than cool with that because it’s the first and only WordPress SEO plugin I use and I’ve not found the competitors to be quite what I need.
The other plugins are All In One SEO (AIOSEO) and Rank Math [Rank Maths, surely? – Ed]
AIOSEO also likes to boast that it is
“The World’s Best All in One SEO Plugin for WordPress”
whilst Rank Math has this in it’s homepage title –
“Best Free WordPress SEO Tools in 2025”.
I’m not here to test nor promote any of the WordPress SEO plugins in particular. There are plenty of other resources out there testing AIOSEO v Rank Math v Yoast SEO, so I’ll leave you to go and explore those options if you wish.
However, I’ve used the free version of Yoast SEO extensively and found that it is more than adequate for everyday SEO requirements.
Yoast SEO
I’ll do a very quick run-down of Yoast SEO and apologise for not listing nor analysing AIOSEO or Rank Math, because I neither have the time nor the knowledge of thm to furnish you with a comprehensive enough comparison.
SEO Analysis
Yoast analyses content for SEO best practices and provides real-time visual feedback using a “traffic light” system. Green is good, orange means you need to make a few improvements, whilst red indicates that you need to put a lot more effort into your post or page.
However, and this is probably the most important thing to understand about the plugin – it only indicates what it has computed are the best practices. Just because you enter a single focus keyword and then write an OK post whilst following best practice SEO in its creation to get a smile-inducing green light, that does not mean that your piece is perfect nor make any promises that it will be crawled, and indexed efficiently, ranked, let alone highly, nor generate clicks, traffic and consumption.
There are so many SEO “ranking factors” to consider and Yoast SEO is just gently letting you know if you are roughly on the right track. It very much depends on the quality of your on-page focus KW and the effort you put into it plus the external factors such as server speed, overall site build quality, how the competition are doing etc.
Use Yoast SEO’s analysis as an indicator of your efforts please.
Readability
This is a cool feature that conducts a readability analysis of your webpage content. The term “readability” refers to how easily your content can be read by your audience.
Basically, the readability analysis score is also on the “traffic light” system and Yoast analyses a number of factors such as sentence length, whether you use active or passive voice, paragraph length, subheading distribution, and transition words.
These are all really basic but highly useful indicators of the readability of your copy. Again though, caveat emptor: Do you know the reading capabilities of your intended audience? Is your written content for a highly technical, well-educated, and sophisticated cohort, or is it supposed to have mass appeal?
The Yoast SEO plugin does offer a word complexity analysis but that’s only available in Yoast SEO Premium, the paid version. I’ve had access to this version in the past on some websites but cannot remember using this feature. Fleisch Reading Ease was part of the free plugin in previous versions but seems to have migrated to the premium version.
All that said, the free plugin features are more than sufficient for daily SEO work. I personally need to try and be less verbose but it’s a characteristic of my written output that seems to have been well received.
XML Sitemaps
The plugin automatically generates XML sitemaps. These are essential for helping the search engines to crawl and index your website’s content efficiently.
In both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools you can submit XML sitemaps so that these search engines know exactly what you intend them to index.
Additionally, the Yoast SEO plugin allows you to change the visibility of some XML sitemaps. I’ve seen numerous WordPress websites designed, developed and launched, that include far too many unhelpful XML sitemaps that may have been generated by WordPress themes and plugins.
HTML Title and Meta Description Editing
At last, we get to the simple act of being able to have complete and easy control of your HTML <title> tags and meta descriptions.
WordPress will still generate Page Title + Site Title text for your <title> tags, but you will have the ability to override this. What’s more, Yoast SEO will let you know if your title is too short or too long, and it will evaluate your “score” against whether you’ve used your focus keyword in the title.
With the meta descriptions, these are still left blank, so it’s up to your inner SEO expert and writer to describe the content of the page for your users, again, being marked up or down for using the focus keyword or having too short or overlong text.
Snippet Previews
The snippet previews that the plugin displays are an absolute godsend. Not only do you get to craft excellent titles and enticing descriptions, but you can see how they might look in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Better still, you can see the desktop and mobile versions, because these are served slightly differently for the screen sizes.
This real-world, real-time simulation gives you the opportunity to assess your search result, and you can professionally critique what you’ve entered. Is it too spammy? Is it relevant? Does it accurately describe what the searcher will find on the page? Would I click that result if it appeared for my search query?
Canonical URLs
If you have potential duplicate content, e.g. identical or very similar posts, pages, or products, you can assign canonical URLs to indicate to crawlers that you understand this and thus have a canonical URL to point to.
A canonical URL is the “preferred” version of a webpage. So if there is a “source” or “master” page, then by assigning it as the canonical URL you are telling search engines that it is the page that you would rather be crawled and indexed.
Your crawler will love you for this as it makes their job more efficient and your site should benefit from not blowing its “crawl budget”.
Basic Schema Markup
Schema markup allows you to add structured data to your pages. This is really helpful for semantic SEO which is becoming ever more important in the age of generative search.
Schema markup is code that uses a standardised vocabulary to define different types of content such as, for example:
- Articles
- Local Business
- Products
- Events
- Reviews
What schema markup does is describe the nature of your content so that search engines can “understand” it.
Last year I worked on a website that was supposed to help the business owner attract job candidates. They posted vacancies on their website and had previously “hoped for the best” with clicks.
Obviously this wasn’t going to happen with just a vanilla webpage with a job on it, so I suggested schema markup to clearly identify the pages as job listings using the JobPosting schema type.
Combined with an XML sitemap for the job listings, generated by the posting plugin, and the addition of the schema data, the jobs were indexed in Google and some aggregator sites were pulling in the data to their job boards too. Win-win.
Conclusion
Yes, you can do WordPress SEO with a fresh install.
However, you can conduct WordPress SEO far better with a plugin like Yoast SEO.
If you’d like me to work for you then let’s discuss me being your WordPress SEO consultant on 01252 692 765 and I’ll be happy to deploy my expertise.