If you know your way around WordPress SEO, you could grow a website that gets steady visibility, search traffic and sales, even in the midst of tight competitive keywords, regardless of your industry.
Agreed, SEO is not a walk in the park. But WordPress search engine optimization is doable. With the inbuilt search friendly WordPress platform, it is a lot more realistic to pull a decent result in a matter of weeks, compared to a number of other frameworks.
A lot of small brands do not realize this. Yet a number of WordPress powered websites are gaining prominence on search results. In this post, I’ll share some of the key optimization secrets you can use to set up WordPress optimization for your business.
Is WordPress SEO Important?
If you have a WP website then yes, WordPress SEO is definitely crucial for you. Although WordPress has an array of inbuilt features that can still get your website on the search engines; to attract increased traffic and better user experience, you need to have your website properly optimized for search visibility.
Steps to Optimize WordPress SEO
There are many ways to do WordPress SEO but I’ll be sharing the most strategic steps that will deliver the best outcomes for your website below:
Use an SEO Friendly Theme
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A theme is a collection of stylesheet and other assets that determine the look and feel of a website. While building a WordPress website, you’ll use a theme or template to build your website.
While most themes are built out of the box to be search engine friendly, not all WordPress themes are SEO friendly. Some themes are bloated, too resource demanding and incompatible with crucial plugins.
To do WordPress SEO properly, you need a theme or template that is search engine optimized, mobile friendly and easy to use on your website.
You can get to find if a theme is SEO friendly by checking the user review and ratings from other users of that theme. You can also observe its impact on your website after you have it installed and optimized.
Do a Keyword Research
It is nearly impossible to optimize WordPress SEO without implementing up well detailed keyword research to identify the key search phrases you want your website to rank for.
So, you want to start with keyword research. Find out the important search terms you want your website to be ranking for. In most cases, this is always around the services you’re offering, products you’re selling and how your target audience & customers are searching up these things on the web.
There are a number of keywords research tools you can use for this. Tools like Google Keywords tools, Ubersuggest, Ahref Keywords tools etc.
These tools give you an insight into the popular search phrases used by your target audience. With these insights, you can also glean some other vital information that will help your search optimization strategies.
In addition to using the search keyword tools, to further optimize WordPress SEO, consider also checking out other existing and competing websites to understand the keywords they are using and overall SEO strategy that is working for them.
Install & Optimize an SEO Plugin
Plugins extends the functionality of WordPress websites. I already mentioned that WordPress is built to work out of the box as an SEO friendly platform but you still need some plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress.
There are a number of plugins you can use for this purpose but some of the top picks include Yoast SEO plugin, All in One SEO, RankMath SEO plugin. You can find any of these on the WordPress directory.
After installing your choice plugin, you want to activate and then optimize the plugins with the key search optimization details that will be needed for your website.
Plugins like Yoast SEO offers tools for optimizing meta description, meta titles and other elements that can influence search visibility. It allows you to set up your website details and also connect to external web master tools like Google Search Console, Bing Web Master tools etc. via its APIs.
Regardless of your preferred search engine optimization plugin, when you optimize WordPress SEO, choose a plugin that allows for a seamless integration with other important search engine tools outside your website.
Set up On Page SEO
On page SEO are search optimization strategies that are implemented to get specific website pages to rank higher and attract organic traffic.
Since you already know your keywords, its time to use those keywords to optimize individual pages across your website, starting with your website’s home page.
For a great WordPress SEO results, pay attention to the following sections on all pages, including your content pages:
- Meta Titles: Write a compelling and keyword optimized titles that clearly reflects the content of each particular page on your website
- Meta Descriptions: your meta descriptions for each page should be concise and engaging, capturing the page’s content and keywords
- Image Optimization: Ensure that your image sizes are properly optimized for fast loading. Avoid uploading overly large image files.
- Permalink Structure: A clean URL is easier for users and search engine bots to understand. Go to the setting section on your WordPress Dashboard, choose permalinks and then opt for the post name option. Avoid URLs with numbers and dates unless it is very necessary.
Getting your on-page optimization done right can play a significant role in setting your website up for improved visibility for individual pages.
Fix Technical SEO & Improve Website’s Speed
Technical SEO ensures that your website is indexed by the search engines, crawlable by the search bots and easily accessible and usable by your users.
Naturally, search engine optimization plugins like Yoast and others do make it easy to set up your technical SEO like indexing and creation of website robot.txt files and sitemaps.
Still, it is important to ensure that your website is indexed properly. Claim your website and get it connected to tools like Google search console, Google analytics, Bing Web Master tools etc.
In addition to that, confirm that your robot.txt files and website maps are displaying all the links on your website. You can find out directly from the plugin you’re using or from Google search console itself.
Where this is not properly handled by the plugin, go ahead and have it all set up to ensure that all the necessary pages are indexed and showing up as expected.
If you have redirects set up on your website, be sure that they are redirecting exactly as expected.
Make sure that your website is easily accessible to. The entire website structure, on page links, menu structuring and the entire pages should be easily accessible.
Remember that security is still a ranking signal. Install the secured socket layer system certificates to ensure that user data is encrypted on your website.
Improve Website Speed
Speed is a very crucial ranking factor that can impact a website’s overall visibility on the search engines like Google. You want a website that is up to speed because users will always scroll away whenever the website takes too long to load.
While WordPress is SEO friendly, it is not optimized for speed by default. You have to take specific measures to get it up to speed. this includes taking measures like:
- Setting up caching: Set up a caching mechanism that easily displays your web pages to users, cutting out waiting time.
- Compressing Images: Compress and reduce image sizes before uploading them on your website to reduce page size and loading time
- Minimizing Plugins: Use only quality plugins and the most important ones.
In addition to these, your website hosting can also play a crucial role in your website speed. as part of your WordPress SEO optimization, ensure that you’re using a web host that is fast, efficient and reliable.
Fix your Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. They are a powerful ranking fact for Google SEO. Getting the right backlinks can bolster your credibility and increase your rankings across the web.
But backlinks do not come easy some times. And there are strategies you can implement to attract the right back links to your website. This includes:
- Creating High Value Content: People link to content that are valuable. As part of your WordPress SEO optimization strategies, invest in creating valuable white papers, research, reports. This kind of content can easily attract backlinks to your website.
- Promote your Content: The more your content is seen by others, the better your chances of getting backlinks. Take strategic steps to promote your content across platforms like social media, forums etc.
- Engage in Guest Posting: Guest posting allows you the chance to publish your posts, articles and content on other websites in return for a link back to your own websites. You can use this as an avenue to attract relevant backlinks to your website.
While building backlinks to your website, prioritize relevant and high-ranking websites. As much as possible, avoid spammy and low-quality websites.
Final Words
Using these strategies can get you to do WordPress SEO and get your website to rank for crucial keywords but you have to be very strategic as you go about it.
As much as possible, study your outcome at intervals to identify what’s working. Take out parts of your strategies that are not working and implement new ones.
Also, you do not have to do it alone. Work with SEO experts to fix your WordPress search engine optimization while you monitor and direct the process until you’re able to have it achieved the exact results you have in mind.
Now, it’s over to you. What are your challenges when it comes to optimizing WordPress SEO? Drop your comments below.
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