Ultimate Tips To Improve the SEO of your WordPress Website
Since many of us run WordPress websites, it is critical that we are aware of what we can do to improve its performance. In my experience, there are several simple steps you can take to improve a WordPress website’s SEO performance.
The following are some simple but effective steps you can consider taking:
Make sure your WordPress site is secure.
Use strong passwords: You should make sure all usernames and passwords are not easy to guess. This includes both the main administrator account and those of other users who have access to the admin panel. You can use a service like Better WP Security to create complex passwords for all accounts on your site.
Use SSL: It’s important that WordPress is properly configured to keep your site secure. The most common vulnerability is hackers gaining access to the database by guessing weak usernames and passwords. You should also have an SSL certificate to encrypt data sent back and forth between your WordPress site and visitors’ browsers. This will prevent hackers from intercepting the information, which could lead to identity theft or financial fraud.
Download and Install WordPress SEO by Yoast
One of the most powerful WordPress plugins you can install is “WordPress SEO by Yoast,” which helps you improve your website’s SEO performance in several ways.
Once you’ve installed this plugin, click on “SEO” in the left sidebar. This will bring up the main settings page.
Here is a complete tutorial for Yoast SEO > https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo/
Use Google Search Console
Search Console isn’t a silver bullet for SEO problems, but it’s a good starting point. And it won’t hurt to address some of the issues it flags, even if you don’t think they’re a big deal.
In addition to Search Console, there are many other tools that can help you improve your site’s SEO performance. In particular, don’t overlook the importance of quality content and user-friendly design.
A common mistake is to focus on technical improvements that have little or no effect on user experience. While technical fixes are important, there’s almost always an opportunity to make bigger improvements by optimizing your site’s content and design.
Optimize Your Page Load Speed
Search engines, such as Google and Bing, use page load speed and other factors to rank a website. For example, Google’s algorithm considers more than 200 factors and attributes when ranking websites.
Page load speed is one of those factors. In fact, the faster your website loads, the better it performs in search engine results pages (SERPs). That means you need to optimize your WordPress website’s performance right away.
Create a Sitemap for the website
Every website owner should have a sitemap (a list of the website’s pages) for their WordPress website. It helps the search engines crawl the site easily, and therefore gives you a better chance of being ranked higher in the SERPs.
If you have a large website, with hundreds or thousands of pages, it is almost impossible to manually create a sitemap.There are several free plugins can help with this. The most popular plugin is Google XML Sitemaps. It works great, and you can install it directly from within WordPress.
Make your site easy to navigate
When visitors land on your website, they should be able to navigate to any page with no more than two mouse clicks. In other words, navigation needs to be clear and simple. This is important for two reasons:
First and foremost, it’s important for SEO. Search engines look at how easy it is to navigate a website when assessing its ranking. If your site is difficult to navigate, the search engine will likely give preference to another webpage that makes it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.
Second, it’s important from a user experience perspective. Visitors will only stay on your site if they can easily find the information that they’re looking for without getting frustrated.
Be Careful About Your Choice of Keywords
One of the biggest mistakes people make when building their WordPress website is not thinking enough about what keywords they’re using.
Using the right keywords and keyword phrases on your website is essential to improving your SEO. The wrong keywords might be too competitive, or they may attract the wrong type of visitors. So make sure you think carefully about which keywords you want to target and how they will best improve the content of your page. Use Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner Tool to help you find good keywords.
You don’t want to get too fancy with your keywords. It can be tempting to use a long list of keywords in an attempt to show up more frequently in search engine results, but there are some risks to this approach.
First off, it can come across as spammy — especially if you try to stuff every possible variation into your content. This can also cause problems with your readers because they may see the same information repeated over and over again, which can make them lose interest in what you have to say.
Secondly, using too many keywords is actually against Google’s policies, and will result in penalties for your site. It’s better to pick one or two strong keywords per page and stick with them than to go overboard and end up getting penalized.
Only Publish Quality Content
Your content should be well-written, free of spelling and grammatical errors, and relevant to the reader. This is because Google uses its search engine spiders to scan your site and assess the quality of your content. If it finds poor quality writing or plagiarized content, it will rank your site lower in the search results.
The simplest way to ensure you publish top-notch content is to check each post before you publish it with a grammar checking tool like Grammarly and ask yourself these questions:
Does my content answer the question(s) my target audience is asking?
Is my content original?
Have I included links to other external sites? Have I included at least one outbound link?
Have I formatted my content with headings and subheadings?
Is it simple for a user to read my content on mobile devices? Is it fast-loading?
Avoid creating duplicate content
It is important for you to realize that Google does not like duplicate content at all and there are penalties in place for this type of thing. Duplicate content is when multiple pages of your site have the same or very similar content. Search engines don’t like this because it makes it difficult for them to decide which version of a page to show in search results.
When duplicate content exists, some search engines may filter out all but one version from their results, so having multiple copies of the same or similar content on your site could mean that only one copy actually appears in search results when it could have been displayed multiple times.
The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast will automatically make sure you have no duplicate content on your site. It should be at the top of your list if you’re looking for ways to improve a WordPress website’s SEO performance.
Update old posts with new content
It’s not uncommon for bloggers and webmasters to forget about old blog posts after they’ve been published. However, revisiting and updating your old blog posts can be a great way to drive more traffic to those pages.
If you have a post that’s more than 6 months old, consider updating it by adding new information or statistics to the existing content. This is an easy way to breathe new life into your old blog posts.
Optimize page titles and meta descriptions
One of the most important parts of on-page SEO is making sure that your page title and meta description are optimized for your target keywords. Both of these elements appear in the SERPs, so making sure that they’re optimized is critical for getting more traffic to your site.
To do that, you’ll need to go into your WordPress dashboard and find the “SEO” section. There are two plugins that are commonly used: Yoast SEO and All in One.
Look for something called “Page Title” or “Meta Title.” If you use Yoast, it’s possible that it will automatically take the title of your post or page when setting up the page title tag. This is not ideal because it’s too generic, so make sure to make changes to it so that it includes a keyword and call-to-action.
Your meta description should include a keyword as well as a call-to-action. If you don’t want to set up a custom one for each page, you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO or All in One that will create a meta description based on your content if you leave the field blank.
Build Quality Backlinks and Make Sure That They Are Indexed
Link building is one of the most effective ways to improve a website’s SEO performance. This is because links serve as votes of confidence for search engines. The more quality backlinks your website has, the better your chances of ranking higher in search engine result pages (SERPs).
While you may have heard that link building is dead and that it can even get you penalized by Google, that’s not entirely true. Links are still the most important ranking factor and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. However, there are better and worse ways to build links.
The right way to do it involves creating high-quality content on a regular basis and then promoting it to other relevant websites in your niche. If they find it worth sharing, they’ll publish it on their blog with a link pointing back to your website. That link will count as one vote in favour of your website’s authority and relevance.
Now, here’s what comes next: Google needs to index those backlinks so they can start working. To do this, you basically need to submit them through Google Search Console or any other indexing service, like Indexification.
Guest Posting Should Be Part of Your SEO Strategy
Despite being around for more than a decade, guest posting has never lost its relevance and effectiveness as an SEO strategy. Posting on popular blogs in your niche can provide you with quality backlinks and a boost in traffic. To ensure that each guest post is successful, it needs to be well-researched and written with authority on its topic. When linking back to your site, make sure it’s relevant to the content of the article. Your goal when guest posting is to build relationships with the blog owner and its readers, so make sure you don’t come off as spammy or salesy when linking back.
Internal linking strategy
Internal linking is one of the most overlooked aspects of on-page SEO. When done correctly, this strategy can help direct a ton of the traffic to your website’s most important pages.
Internal links are those links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They are commonly used in main navigation, related posts, or blogrolls. These links help search engines determine what pages are most important for a given domain.
When you create an internal linking strategy, you want to be sure to link relevant content together. For example, if you have a post about types of web hosting, be sure to link to it from other posts about web hosting. This gives your site more link equity (ranking power) and makes it easier for users to navigate your site.
To improve your internal linking strategy, consider using the following tips:
Use SEO-Friendly URLs
Find Broken Internal Links and Fix Them
Include Target Keywords in Anchor Text
Create More Effective Navigation
Consider Using AMP Pages
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open-source initiative designed to make the web faster and better optimized for mobile devices. When you publish an article on your WordPress site using AMP technology, it creates a lightweight version of that page accessible from Google’s mobile search results.
These pages are usually served directly from Google’s servers, which means they load really fast.
The AMP plugin is built by Automattic, the same team behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce. It makes it easy to integrate AMP into your own website without needing to touch any code.
Responsive Design for All Devices
Responsive design refers to a website that dynamically changes to fit the device a person is viewing it on. A responsive site should look good on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. The content and structure of the website will remain the same, but the size, positioning, and responsiveness of the website will change depending on what device you are using.
Responsive design is essential for any WordPress website because search engines favour websites with mobile-friendly designs. More people than ever before are using their smartphones to browse the internet and make online purchases; Google has even changed its algorithm to favour mobile-friendly sites. You can find out if your WordPress site is mobile-friendly by running it through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Improve Time Spend and Reduce Bounce Rate
The only way to know for sure if your SEO efforts are paying off is to monitor your performance over time. Track changes in your keyword rankings and organic traffic, and keep an eye on your competitors’ performance as well. Useful content and user experience is the key to getting your visitors to spend more time on your website.
When your website visitors spend more time on your website, it improves your website performance in Google search results. Also, when people spend more time on your site it reduces the bounce rate which is one of the signals used by Google to determine how valuable and relevant each page is (perceived quality), which increases organic ranking.
I hope this article helps you guide your SEO efforts to a right direction. Please leave a clap if you found this article useful and leave a comment.
