WordPress SEO Without Traffic Lights: The Ten Things That Measurably Count

SEO plugins love handing out points. That's tempting because it looks measurable — but Google doesn't award points for keyword density. What a plugin can really influence is a shorter list, and here it is in full.

What a plugin actually controls

• The title and description shown in the search results
• Whether a page gets indexed and which URL counts as the canonical one
• Structured data for rich results
• The sitemap Google finds
• Redirects when a URL changes
• Preview images for social networks

Everything else — content, relevance, linking, freshness — is up to you. A plugin that promises more is selling a traffic light.

1. Titles: think in pixels, not characters

Google truncates titles by width, not by character count. “Illustration” and “Wohnungswahl” both have twelve characters and take up completely different amounts of space. If you count characters, you're working with an approximation.

In practice: put the most important part first and the brand name at the end, and give every page its own title. Two pages with the same title compete with each other.

2. The description is ad copy, not a ranking factor

It doesn't affect the position, but whether people click. Write it like a sentence that speaks to someone who's searching right now — not like a list of search terms. Around 155 characters are shown.

3. One H1, then structure

A page has one H1 — usually the post title. After that, H2 and H3 structure the text. That's not a trick but readability: someone skimming the text can tell from the subheadings whether they're in the right place.

4. Internal links are the most underrated lever

A page that nothing links to is a dead end for Google. Link from within running text, with link text that says what's coming — not “here.” A new post should be reachable from at least two existing pages on the same day.

5. Structured data: complete or not at all

Incomplete markup is worse than none: Google reports it as an error and still doesn't show a rich result. That's why a tool should output nothing as long as required fields are missing — and say which ones they are.

Check a sample page in the Rich Results Test. Whatever doesn't appear there doesn't exist for Google — regardless of what the plugin displays.

6. The sitemap: one, and reachable

WordPress comes with one, and so does every SEO plugin. Two at the same time are just confusing. After setup, check that exactly one is reachable, that it contains the right content types, and that nothing in it is set to noindex.

7. Redirects: the one place where you can really break something

When a URL changes, you need a permanent redirect (301) to the target with matching content — not a blanket redirect to the home page. Two mistakes come up again and again: chains across several hops and loops that go round in circles.

Export your redirects before you switch SEO plugins. They're the only thing whose loss hurts immediately.

8. What doesn't belong in the index

• Internal search results pages
• Attachment pages for individual images
• Thin archive pages, such as author archives when there's only one author
• Duplicates caused by filter and sort parameters

9. Images

Descriptive file names, alt text that describes rather than stacking keywords, and a file size that matches the display size. The last point counts twice: it's also the biggest lever for load time.

10. Patience, and the right metric

Changes take weeks, sometimes months. The most useful metric isn't the position for a single term but how many different search queries your site reaches at all — that number grows sooner and fluctuates less.

Frequently asked questions