The primary objective of creating a WordPress website, whether for entertainment, awareness, product promotion, is to reach as many people as possible. You want to build an audience that can translate into visitors and later customers.
And so, optimizing your SEO is essential in improving your site’s visibility in different search engines. For that, you need to be well versed in the different factors that impact SEO.
Not only do you need to secure your website with an SSL certificate from a company like SSLS, but also have a trustworthy WordPress web hosting provider like Hostinger to make sure downtime is minimal and servers are optimized for WordPress.
Once the basics are taken care of you can start building your PageRank and domain reputation to improve your SEO rankings. Here’s how to do it with WordPress.
Importance of SEO Rankings
As a novice, once you have your website up and running, you must focus on optimizing your site for search engines.
No matter how attractive your interface looks, you cannot rank first on the search result if your content is not SEO optimized.
While WordPress offers great SEO plugins like Yoast that give you the basics of SEO, there are other tricks and tips you must know to run a successful website that drives constant traffic online.
1. Choose the Right Plan and Web Hosting Provider for Your WordPress
You must find a hosting provider that can boost your competitive advantage over other content creators. Since SEO is very competitive, always choose a web hosting provider that offers the best customer experience for your WordPress project.
More importantly, you do not want to redirect your visitors to a slow website. Search engines often rank websites based on site speed. A good host will help boost your SEO ranking as well as minimize downtime for your page.
Always choose a hosting plan that gives you optimum speed and minimal or no downtime for reliable performance.
2. Set or Change Your Permalinks
Permalinks are important in redirecting visitors to your site. And so, their appearance is important in the success of your website. Once you create your WordPress site, your posts will have strange URL links that are not SEO friendly.
The Permalinks are often permanent unless changed by switching WordPress settings. They are often numbers which are not ideal in conveying the message that will attract customers to click them.
Therefore, your main agenda is to change the permalinks into a custom one that is clear and descriptive of your content. This way, you improve the visibility of your posts in the search engine.
3. Create a ‘Sitemap’ On Google
Sitemaps often help search engines such as google to crawl your site.
However, your content is still visible even without a site map. A site map will help you prioritize the pages you want search engines to crawl.
The main reason for rearranging your content in a certain hierarchy is to communicate with search engine bots. A Sitemap is a valuable SEO tool when it comes to easy navigation for your website.
It enables crawlers to see your post and index your site. You can use SEO tools such as Yoast SEO or targeted plugins like Google XML Sitemaps to create a sitemap for your WordPress.
4. Use Heading Tags Throughout Your Content
Crawlers often pay attention to headings to understand how your content is organized.
Heading tags boost the visibility of your content. Sitemaps can redirect crawlers to your page but, they cannot navigate through pages and posts with ease without proper headings.
Always organize your content into headings for crawlers to make sense out of your content. When you add heading to your post, you break down your posts to make it easier for readers to navigate. WordPress has an inbuilt option to help you create consistent headings.
5. Build Your Content Around Keywords
Keywords are short phrases that people often type into search engines when looking for specific information.
Depending on the genre of your post you can get familiar keywords that most people use. For example, for a post on recipes, you can use keywords such as “easy recipe”.
You can use SEO tools to find the best keywords for your content. Here you will get useful keywords, backlink analysis, and ability to track the SEO rankings for your website.
6. Use a Dedicated WordPress SEO Plugin
There is no harm in improving your website’s traffic by installing a dedicated SEO plugin. Although WordPress comes with in-built SEO features, you can install plugins such as Yoast SEO to boost your SEO optimization efforts.
A dedicated plugin improves your keyword, generates the latest analysis for algorithms and a sitemap that can improve your site’s visibility to search engine crawlers.
7. Use Google Analytics
You can track your website’s performance to identify the features that need your attention in reaching your target audience. Google Analytics is a widely used tool for identifying the sources of traffic on a website.
It is a free tool google meant to help beginners in tracking important attributes that affect optimum performance for their site.
8. Choose Search Engine Optimized Themes
While WordPress offers you free themes, you should choose a theme that is SEO optimized to make your posts visible to search engines.
Do not go for an aesthetically appealing outlook if it lacks function. Instead, choose a theme written in the latest code to guarantee speed and URL linked, which are visible to the Google bots.
9. Optimize Your Media
When you are uploading either pictures or videos to your websites, always remember that they can either boot or ruin your SEO rankings.
You must use proper tagging to make your media visible to search engines. WordPress has inbuilt caption options such as change title, alt text, and add a description. You should leverage them to ensure that your media is ranked high in the media searches.
10. Make your Content Shareable
In the current generation, social media redirects more traffic to websites more than search engines. Always make your content shareable by adding a sharing button to media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+.
Wrapping Up
The bottom line is, you should always create high-quality content, which is unique, shareable, informative, and actionable. In addition to the aforementioned techniques and tips, quality content that engages users can improve your SEO ranking and boost your conversion rates. In SEO – content is still King. But – keep in mind that website speed, user experience and other stuff that comes from your WordPress web hosting provider also matter a lot.