WordPress is the most used CMS on the market. What are the key factors behind this success?

There are several reasons for its success:

• Its ergonomics: At the time, WordPress was by far the easiest CMS to use on the market, much more convenient than Drupal, Joomla or PrestaShop. This is less true today, but it is still a relatively easy tool to access for everyone.
• WordPress core maintainability: you can update the CMS with almost no risk, and above all without having to do any additional development (which was not the case with its competitors where updating a major version systematically required a development phase) . Be careful here, I am talking here about the update of the CMS, not its extensions and themes.
• His community: of course, the size of the community also had a decisive impact. There is practically a theme or a plugin for any of your needs!

Natural referencing is the sinews of war for site owners. What are the basic elements to optimize to improve the SEO of your WordPress site?

The basic element to set up is to install an extension to manage the different SEO aspects of your site. By default, we cannot manage basic elements such as a Title, a meta description tag, a noindex or even a redirection.

There are many extensions for this: SEOKEY (which I develop with my SeoMix agency), Yoast, RankMath, All In One SEO, etc. Once installed and configured, you have in your possession a reliable tool to manage your visibility.

Afterwards, it’s up to you to do the work: write good content, put it in the right place, fill in your metadata, add internal links, etc.

Beyond the SEO basics, what else can WordPress site owners improve on?

First and foremost: security. WordPress makes up 43% of the global web (source: WordPress), so hackers are on the prowl. By itself, a secure site will not improve SEO. But, this avoids reducing it to nothing. Install security extensions, and above all, follow the existing tutorials on this subject on the Internet.

Next, think speed. Again, the SEO impact is low, but it will help crawl and indexing while improving the user experience: installing a caching plugin and another on image compression is a good start.

The next step: the user need. It is imperative to do an SEO audit for your WordPress site, in order to understand its market, know the user needs and know which keywords, content and functionalities it will be necessary to work on.

Once these needs are known, it’s up to you to integrate this into WordPress with a tailor-made structure: this requires training in web writing on the one hand, and on the other hand the establishment of a structure and a suitable mesh. You will most likely need to create new types of content (the “Post Types” in WordPress), each classified differently (with the “Taxonomy” of WordPress). We can thus create Productsof the Clientsof the Eventsand these could be categorized by “Theme”, “Location”, “Power”, etc.

There is nothing worse in WordPress than mixing everything in articles and categories, without visually and functionally differentiating content that often has nothing to do with it.

In your opinion, what are the essential tools and plugins to use in SEO?

Here is a small list of practical tools and plugins that we currently recommend:

A site’s SEO performance is dependent on Google’s algorithm updates. What is the right approach to take when faced with this constraint?

Quite simply, do an SEO watch to find out what are the current and future changes. Then, it is up to you to adapt your strategy and your site if necessary. On the other hand, keep in mind that Google’s ads are not always true: always think about testing these update ads.

What are the specialized sources to follow to stay informed about WordPress news and discover good practices on a daily basis?

To do your monitoring on WordPress, there are different sources. First, I advise you to follow the news of the heart of WordPress, in particular that of the Make site to know what is happening in the heart of the CMS.

Still in English, I recommend the excellent WPTavern. In French, I would turn to the WPMarmite site or that of WP Formation. At SeoMix, we also broadcast our monitoring via the bi-monthly newsletter #VeilleSeoMix (a mix of SEO, WordPress and web monitoring).

And finally, to train: always test everything by yourself (tools, methodologies, extensions, etc.).