WordPress is one of the most popular and widely used platforms for websites. It forms the foundation of more than 30% of all websites on the internet and holds 60% of the CMS market share. WordPress is flexible and easy to use, even if you don't know how to program. You can add your own content and make changes to your site easily.
Another reason why it's so powerful is that it's easy to incorporate SEO best practices into your site. Optimizing your website for SEO helps it rank higher for key search terms. It brings more traffic to your site and saves on marketing expenses. There are many ways available for you to improve your site's search ranking. Carry out the recommendations here to jumpstart your site's visibility.
1. Leverage content.
Good content needs to form the core of your SEO. Search engines like Google reward high-quality content above all other factors. Create content that is helpful and engages people. Standout content has certain features that appeal to readers.
- Unique content: Unique content offers the latest information or presents information differently. Provide rich data, and use media like infographics and videos. They engage users and drive more traffic.
- Easy to read: It's important to make your content internet-friendly. Make your content easy to scan by creating short paragraphs. Use conversational language and speak directly to users.
- Shareable: Use words that create emotions in users such as excitement and interest. Content that evokes emotion is shareable and builds a greater reach for your work.
Structuring your content and using other best practices also improve your SEO. Use heading tags such as H1 for titles and H2 and H3 for relevant subtitles. Maintain consistency in your heading tags so that search engines can index and understand your content.
Use long-form content. Even though quality should be your priority, creating long-form content also matters. How long should your posts be? It depends on the context. Posts that answer hard questions can go over 1,000 words, but lighter topics are fine with just 500 words. Create fresh content regularly. Update your existing information to keep it relevant as technology and markets evolve.
By using these SEO content strategies, you'll be able to optimize your site at a foundational level.
2. Build internal and external links.
Linking to other content on your site helps search engines find all the content in your domain. It's good practice to create internal links to relevant posts and pages within every blog post. Adding internal links will improve navigation and ensure that search engines find your other posts. Getting external links to your site from other reputable sources also improves your site's ranking. You can get external links by creating content that good sites will link to, helping you improve your blog SEO.
3. Set up your Permalink structure.
Permalinks are the URLs that tell search engines where your content lives. WordPress makes it easy to create URL structures for every post and page on your site. You can change your Permalink settings so that your post title generates the URL. You can also create a custom Permalink to add categories to your URLs. Setting your Permalink correctly early on is beneficial. Having your URLs tell people what the content is about and even including a keyword in it can play a crucial role in your site SEO.
4. Use SEO plugins.
WordPress has thousands of plugins created by its enthusiastic community members. You can boost your WordPress SEO by adding a plugin. An SEO plugin makes it possible to apply complex SEO best practices without needing expert knowledge. An SEO plugin can analyze your content, and some plugins will generate an SEO score for your posts. It will help you manage several essential onsite SEO practices:
XML sitemaps: A sitemap helps search engines find all the pages of your site. An SEO plugin makes it easy to create a sitemap, allowing search engines to crawl all the pages of your website
Open graph meta tags: An SEO plugin helps you add open graph meta tags. These tags tell social media websites to link to the right title, image and description from your post
Robots.txt editor: A site's robots.txt file tells search engines which pages to index and not index. An SEO plugin helps you generate and edit your robots.txt file to allow search engines to index your content
.htaccess editor: One use of the .htaccess file is to redirect users to different URLs, such as in the case of an error. An SEO plugin can make it easy to manage the directories and redirects of your site
Importing and exporting SEO data: If you have multiple sites, you can apply the same SEO settings to all of them to save time. You can also save your settings and revert to them if you make changes.
Implementing SEO strategies takes experience, technical knowledge and effort. It can be challenging for someone without SEO skills. SEO plugins make it possible for anyone to carry out complex SEO practices on their website.
5. Add Google Analytics.
There are many tips you can use to improve SEO on your site. But how will you know what's working unless you can measure it? You can't manage what you can't measure.
You can use one of the most powerful tools available to track your SEO that's also free: Google Analytics.
Google Analytics can tell you how much traffic your site is getting. It can give you details about your audience that can help you target them better. It will also show you the devices they are using to get to your site. Using Google Analytics, you'll find out page-level analytics that can show you how different pages are doing. It will tell you about the bounce rate on your site and the keywords people use that bring them to your content.
One of the most important features that Google Analytics can help you measure is your site speed. Sites that take more than four seconds to load can lose visitors and virtually never get them back. Add Google Analytics to your site to understand what's working and how you can improve.
6. Optimize your mobile site.
Google has implemented a mobile-first indexing policy. What this means is that it will index the mobile version of your site first and then the desktop version. Create content and implement UX and UI principles for mobile screens from the very beginning. Make sure the WordPress themes you use are responsive and attractive on smaller screens. Optimizing your mobile site is something that every business needs to do as more and more people access information from their phones.
7. Use the best hosting plan.
Hosting matters because it affects the performance of your site. A good web hosting platform will make it easy to host a WordPress site, often creating it with a single click. Choose a hosting service that gives you the quickest loading time and has security measures, especially for WordPress. Load time and security features affect your ranking and can make or break conversions. It's also important to take customer service and scalability into account. You should always have the option to scale up seamlessly if you get a sudden rise in traffic.
Stand out with WordPress SEO.
Using SEO, an e-commerce site can drive up conversions, a membership site can increase subscribers, and a blog can get more readers. Several tools and techniques make it possible to apply SEO with basic online skills. It isn't the simplest task to optimize your website, but the rewards make the effort worthwhile. Use the strategies given here and help your site rank well to reach more people.