In this article, you’ll see the top key SEO tips for your WordPress website. Building a website for your business or blog would take more than aesthetics to attract online users. It’s easy to create a beautiful WordPress website, but it’s a different level when you start to think about how to boost your web traffic. Learn the key SEO tips, techniques, strategies and best practices for your WordPress website to stand out and gains traffic.
SEO or search engine optimization is one crucial tool that can help you win in the digital marketing arena. By using SEO, your website can rise to the top of search engine results ranks.
This will make your website more visible and more likely to get clicks from online users. SEO touches multiple elements of website optimization and requires some serious strategizing.
If you want to leave this part to SEO experts, you can have the team from Labs do it for you. However, as a website owner, it’s still vital that you have an idea of how SEO can be up on your WordPress website. Here are some SEO tips you should take note of:
What is SEO, and why is it important?
Search engine optimization is optimizing web pages to have them rank higher in search engine results in pages. Learn the key SEO tips, techniques, and best practices for your WordPress website to stand out and gains traffic.
WordPress SEO efforts can lead to more traffic and increased website visibility and credibility, which can lead to higher conversion rates. The top three search queries that result in the highest number of clicks collectively account for over 50% of all clicks.
Search engines have bots that crawl new and updated content. They then assign a position to it on the SERPs based on multiple criteria.
Why is it essential that WordPress SEO is optimized?
- It’s inexpensive compared to other paid traffic sources. Treat it as a form of investment that provides excellent returns.
- It provides insightful information that can be up to formulate a long-term strategy.
- Organic search is one of the largest sources of traffic.
Examine the Visibility Settings on the WordPress website
The first step is to verify if the WordPress website is visible through search engines.
WordPress has a function that prevents search engines from indexing the website. This option should be deactivated by default, but verifying if it’s true is best.
- Head to your WordPress dashboard’s Settings page, Reading.
- Locate the search engine visibility checkbox and ensure it’s unchecked.
Include your Website’s Sitemap in Search Engines: Key WordPress SEO Tips
Despite search engines automatically indexing websites, submitting a sitemap will increase the likelihood that they will include accurate and up-to-date information on your SERPs.
A WordPress sitemap is a list of all public URLs on a website. WordPress generates two different types of website maps: XML and HTML.
The XML sitemap is the one you should submit to search engines. It demonstrates the pages’ significance to one another and their relationship to the rest of the book. This information about the site’s structure helps search engines find specific content more easily.
First, you must create an XML sitemap using a plugin for WordPress SEO. In this article, we’ll utilize AIOSEO.
- Once All in One SEO is up and active, head to the Sitemap from the All in One SEO dashboard.
- Open the General Sitemap tab and click on the Open Sitemap button. The browser will open the XML sitemap in a new tab. You can utilize the URL to submit the sitemap to search engines.
- Once you have the XML sitemap, please submit it to the Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
For more information, see our comprehensive article on how to submit a website to search engines.
It’s important to note that you don’t have to share the sitemap with other search engines like Yahoo. Additionally, they’ve adopted DuckDuckGo because of its data derived from Bing’s Webmaster Tools.
Install an SSL Certificate
A secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a security protocol that protects the connection between a website and a browser. SSL encryption prevents individuals who aren’t authorized from accessing confidential information on a website.
An SSL-certified domain will enhance the security of your WordPress website, increasing its rank in search engines. When a domain is certified with SSL, its URL begins with https:// instead of http://. Additionally, the browser has a padlock icon next to the address.
Another benefit of SSL is that search engines consider HTTPS when determining a website’s page ranking.
Some web browsers have a feature that flags sites that lack SSL certificates as untrustworthy, encouraging visitors to avoid them. This is why having an SSL certificate is essential to avoid losing traffic and hurting your website’s conversion rate. Learn the critical SEO strategies, techniques, and best practices for your WordPress website to stand out and gains traffic.
Aid Your Web Host with CDN
Given that you already have a WordPress website, you probably have a reliable web host already. Web hosts are paid services that provide servers where all your website’s data are saved. It’s like your personal address in the webspace.
The downside of these web host servers is that they’re concentrated on a specific location. That is why it’s best to choose a web host with servers near your area and your target audience, or else your site will consistently fail to load.
This is detrimental to your site’s performance. And no matter how well SEO strategies are executed, your efforts will be for naught if your website doesn’t load.
Your best solution to this problem is to have a CDN to back up your web host. CDN stands for content delivery network. Unlike regular web hosting servers, CDNs have multiple super servers called edge servers spread out in various locations.
This means that the data needed to load your website to your audiences is more accessible as your website will load faster.
WordPress SEO Tips: Improve Your Website
If your website isn’t attracting your desired rate of web traffic, even if you’re confident about the quality of your content, you need to figure out what else needs to be improved. Apart from the content, you can also incorporate SEO into your website’s design. This is by switching your current WordPress theme with an optimized theme.
An optimized theme has embedded codes that are easily detected by web crawlers. When your theme changes, you must modify other website elements, such as the logo, fonts, colors, and layout.
They all have to match your new theme harmoniously. Also, pay attention to user experience. So, when you improve your WordPress site, ensure you have intuitive buttons for more straightforward navigation. Keep reading to see the critical SEO strategies, techniques, and best practices for your WordPress website to stand out and gains traffic.
Keep a Mobile and Responsive Design
Regarding user experience, you must consider that people use different devices to access your website.
That is why you must ensure your website has a responsive and mobile-capable design. With this, whenever users view your website on their mobile phones, laptops, or tablets, it automatically adjusts to the screen size, making it easier to read and navigate using WordPress SEO tips.
Consistently Make the First 100-Word Cut
SEO empowers by the use of relevant keywords. These relevant keywords and phrases must be present seamlessly in every content. Your target of concentration should be the first 100 words of your content.
Search engine spiders or crawlers usually scan through this part, so it’s best to attract them to this area of your content. Using long-tail keywords or phrases that online users are most likely to input on the search bar is worth noting.
Long-tail keywords give your WordPress site a higher chance of getting top results than short or single keywords. Learn the critical SEO tips, strategies, techniques, and best practices for your WordPress website to stand out and gains traffic.
Add SEO Plugins: Top WordPress Strategies
One beneficial aspect of using WordPress in creating a website is how easy it is to install helpful plugins that regulate and automate web functions like SEO. Installing SEO plugins makes adding and managing in-page metadata to your website’s content easier. You can choose from many SEO plugins for WordPress, but two of the most used are Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack.
WordPress SEO Tips: Utilize Meta Tags
Meta tags provide metadata or hidden codes within your website content. These meta codes make your website more detectable by search engine crawlers. You can apply meta tags to the following:
- Meta Titles – The clickable title that shows up on the search results page
- Meta-Description – Description that is present below the title
- Header Tags – Title or headings found on your web page
- Image and Alt Tags – Image links and alternative texts that show up when the image fails to load
Publish High-Quality Content
Giving them high-quality content is your best shot at satisfying your WordPress site visitors. Putting effort into publishing relevant and well-written content has its rewards. It raises your website’s credibility and reliability. Users will enjoy reviewing each piece of content and even recommend your website to their friends.
WordPress SEO Tips Conclusion
WordPress has done a great job of making it easier to create a website for bloggers and entrepreneurs. However, the work should always come from you, the website owner. Hopefully, these SEO tips should help you earn a better rank on search engine results pages and increase your WordPress site’s traffic.
