WordPress is the simplest and the most popular way to create your website or blog. According to statistics, more than one in four websites you visit is likely to be powered by WordPress. It is an open-source content management system. It is the tool that makes it easy to manage critical aspects of your website. The most significant benefit of WordPress is that it is free and that it is open-source software.
Improving your WordPress SEO is very crucial for getting more traffic to your website. To increase your website traffic, you should consider WordPress SEO practices. WordPress is the website that makes sure that the code it generates follows the best practices. However, there is much more one needs to do to maximize the SEO efforts.
Basics of WordPress SEO
SEO can get technical. However, it doesn’t have to be. You should learn a few SEO steps to optimize your site, and then it will give you a boost in website traffic.
WordPress also has a built-in option to hide your website from search engines. The primary purpose of this option is to give you the time to work on your website before it is ready to go to the public. Sometimes, this option can also get checked accidentally, and it could make your site unavailable to search engines. If the website is not appearing in the search results, you should ensure that the option is unchecked.
Following are the WordPress SEO steps to set you up for Success-
1. Add XML sitemaps in WordPress
An XML Sitemaps is the formatted file that lists every page on the website. This also makes it easy for search engines to find your content. When you add an XML sitemap, it does not boost the search rankings of the site, and it helps you find the pages quickly and start ranking them.
2. Add your site to the Google Search console.
The Google search console is known as the Webmaster tool, and it also offers a set of tools by Google to give website owners a look at how the search engine sees their content. It also provides reports and data to help you understand how your pages appear in the search results. All this information also enables you to understand what is working on your site and what is not. The Google Search Console also alerts you when something is wrong with your website.
You should add a sitemap to your website. Once you add a sitemap, after a few hours, you will be able to see some stats about the sitemap. It will show the number of links in your sitemap, how many of them got indexed, and the ratio of images and web pages.
3. Optimizing your blog posts for SEO
Novices make the mistake of thinking that installing a WordPress SEO Plugin is all needed. SEO is a vast and ongoing process; you should be able to keep up with it if you want to see maximum results. All the top SEO plugins will allow you to add an SEO title, a Meta description and a focus keyword to every blog post and page. This also shows you a preview of what users will see when they look up your website on Google.
4. Doing keyword research for your website.
Many people who are new to WordPress use their guesses to figure out what all topics people are looking for and what they should add to their blogs and their websites. Keyword research is the technique that is used by content creators and SEO experts. It also helps you discover the words users enter in the search engines for finding content, products and services in your industry.
5. Properly using categories and tags in WordPress
WordPress is the tool that allows you to sort your blog posts into categories and tags. This makes it way easier for you to manage your content by topics. The categories and the tags also help the search engines understand your website structure and content. The categories are meant for the broad grouping of your posts. The tags are more specific keywords that describe the contents of an individual post.
By using specific tags and categories for your website, you make it easy for the users to browse your website. Many people make use of the On-page SEO services that are the SEO services which help you optimize your website for improving its visibility in the search results on Google and other search engines.
6. Make internal link a habit
Search engines are the ones that assign each page to your website. It is important to create your own content from the other blog posts that you have created. You should interlink your own posts and if you have multiple authors, you should create a pre-publish blog post checklist. It will help you boost your page views and it also increases the time users spend on your site and it will also improve your SEO score.
7. Optimize the WordPress comments
Comments can be a very strong indication of user engagement on your website. You should see to it that your comments are real and not spam. The spammers submit comments with bad links which could really affect and ruin your search rankings.
You can also split comments into multiple pages so that your website does not get burdened by them.
8. NoFollow external links in WordPress
Links are the elements that help search engines decide which pages are important. When you get linked to a website, you are passing some of your site’s SEO score to that link. For getting good searching rankings, you should also make sure that you add the ‘Nofollow’ attribute to the external links.
9. Full posts vs summaries
WordPress is the tool that displays and links to your posts from a number of pages like home pages, tags, author pages and category archives. It shows the full article on all these pages. However, showing full articles everywhere can affect the views of your page. The most popular way to resolve this type of issue is by showing summaries and excerpts instead of full articles.
10. Speed and security for WordPress SEO
It is very important to boost the speed of the site for better performance and rankings. Following are some of the measures that you can take-
- Optimize your site’s speed and performance
According to famous research, an average human’s attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish. Web usability experts believe that users decide whether they want to stay on the site or leave within just a few seconds of visiting any website. This brings out a message that as a website owner, you only have a few seconds to present your content and engage the users that stumble on your site.
User experience is so important that search engines like Google prioritize the websites that are faster in showing results for a user’s search query.
- Optimizing images in WordPress for SEO
Images are the elements that tend to be more engaging than text as they are more expressive. However, they take time to load. If you are not careful with the size and the quality of the images, they can completely slow down your website and hinder its performance.
You should make sure that you use images that are optimized to load faster. You should also use descriptive titles and tags for your images. These are the tags that help the search engines understand what your image is all about. You can optimize an image by naming it in a short and crisp way, and you should also optimize all the attributes carefully and choose the dimensions of your image carefully. It is also important for you to choose the right file type and optimize your thumbnails properly.
- Safety and security of your WordPress website
Google blacklists the websites that have Malware and when a site is blacklisted, it does not show up in the search results at all.
It is not at all difficult to keep your WordPress site safe. You should start using SSL/HTTPS. It is a typical technology that encrypts the connection between a user’s browser and the server they are connecting to. This also adds an additional security layer to your WordPress site. The websites that are secured with SSL are also indicated by a padlock sign in the address bar of the browser. It also makes your website more trustworthy. It protects sensitive information.
Wrapping up
Any internet marketing plan should be built around WordPress SEO. A thoughtful approach to SEO will result in a better user experience overall in addition to helping your search rankings. And your top priority should be giving your audience a remarkable experience.
Then, you want to give your visitors extra value. That is essentially what WordPress SEO is all about. Even while Google will give us credit for adhering to a few technical rules, search engines are ultimately more successful when they provide customers with a good experience. If you can manage to achieve it, search engines will reward you for doing the same thing. Follow the above mentioned tips and you will be amazed with the results.