Optimize your site for search engines (SEO)

Your WordPress.com website is optimized for search engines by default. However, there’s more that you can do as a website owner to influence how people find you through search engines like Google. In this guide, you will learn how to optimize your WordPress.com site for search engines.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to techniques you can use to help ensure that your site ranks high in search engines such as Google and Bing.

To ensure your website gets indexed in search engines, review your site’s privacy settings. Your site must be set to public, and the checkbox for “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” should not be checked.

A public site ensures your site can be seen by search engines, but keep in mind that it can take search engines between two to six weeks or more to discover a new website.

There is a difference between being indexed by search engines (appearing somewhere in the results) and having a high ranking (appearing on the first page of results). Ranking in search engines means the search engine has decided your website closely matches what the person is searching for. Search engines use various criteria to determine if a site should rank high for a specific search request.

Ranking higher in search engines can take time. Here are some tips you can use to help influence the process:

• Research your keywords: Figure out what keywords you want to come up in searches for. For example, if your site is about boating, you might want to show up for terms like “boats,” “sailing,” and “crew.” Work these keywords naturally into your post titles, headings, content, and URLs.
• Describe your images: A search engine can’t “read” an image, but it can read what an image shows if you provide it with descriptive image alt text.
• Post new content regularly: The more you post, the higher your search ranking. Search engines like sites that update frequently. You don’t necessarily need to post every day or every week – find a cadence that works for you and stay consistent.
• Share your site: Automatically share your posts to social media when you publish, and reach a larger audience. The more organic traffic your site gets, the better it looks to search engines.
• Verify your site with search engines: Verify your site with Google Search Console and other search engines. This step isn’t necessary for your site to be indexed, but it can accelerate the process and give you useful insights to learn from.

A meta description is a short summary that appears in search results. Search engines use this information to help users decide if your page matches what they’re looking for.

Search engines will typically pick up the excerpt you have added to a page or a post or will create a meta description based on the content of the page. Plugin-enabled sites have additional options for controlling meta descriptions.

Follow these tips for effective meta descriptions:

• Include your target keywords naturally in the description.
• Describe what users will find on the page.
• Keep the description short (between 150-160 characters).
• Make each page’s excerpt or meta description unique.

Note: Even with an optimized meta description, search engines may still choose to display different text based on the search query. This is normal behavior and not something you can control.

This section of the guide applies to sites with the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plan, and the legacy Pro plan. If you have a Business plan, make sure to activate it. For sites on the Free, Personal, and Premium plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.

Our higher-level plans include additional SEO tools for more control over your site’s SEO. You do not need plugins for your site to be indexed and ranked in search engines. However, if you have a plugin-enabled plan, SEO plugins offer an alternative suite of tools to manage your site’s optimization.

Yoast SEO is a popular plugin that offers features like optimizing content for specific keywords, creating custom meta descriptions and titles, and analyzing your website’s performance. Yoast SEO also has a paid Premium version with additional features such as internal linking suggestions, content insights, and a redirect manager.

If you install an SEO plugin, it will replace the built-in tools provided by your plan. Installing more than one SEO plugin at a time is not recommended, as multiple plugins with the same function can cause conflicts or errors.

Watch our recorded webinar below that will show you how to do effective keyword research for your site’s SEO, or visit our Introduction to SEO course to walk through the steps to optimize your site for search engines.

If your site isn’t appearing in search results as expected or you’re experiencing other SEO issues, see our guide to troubleshoot SEO issues.