Introduction:
The whole purpose of building a website is to attract viewers and develop traffic. Later that traffic can be converted into profit through various means. The priority is to make your website visible to the relevant users. This can be done by ranking your site on the Google index.
If your site is visible on the first page against a keyword, then your website is said to be ranked. This is done by search engine optimization (SEO) of your site. A good SEO makes all the difference if Google will recognize your site or ignore it.
In a nutshell, through SEO, your site can appear on the first page. SEO of your website can be done through keywords, quality content, alt tags, file names, and much more. We’ll be explaining some essential tips regarding optimizing your site. Let’s dive into it one by one.
- 1. Set your permalinks:
- The URL or address of your site or page is called permalink. This is what the user enters on their search bar to get to your site. Search engines use these permalinks to reference your site.
- In WordPress, you can go to Settings >> permalinks, to access the settings. It is a good practice to change the default settings to post names. This is easy for users to remember, and search engines index it easily.
- An Example:
- Bad Permalink: www.yoursite.com/?p=4352 (Default in WP)
- Good Permalink: www.yoursite.com/this-is-simpler-to-read (Post name option)
- 2. Using SEO Themes:
- Choosing pretty and lavish themes are not always necessary. You may think that themes are only for the design on your site. Well, you’re wrong. Some themes are made explicitly to SEO optimize your site.
- A good SEO theme has two main components; code and speed. A well-written code of a theme ensures that Google bots will fire through the code and find the best code.
- Important points to keep in mind:
- A clean structure that employs valid HTML
- Correct use of URL meta tag
- Proper use of titles and headings
- Incorporating open graph meta tags
- 3. Creating Sitemaps:
- The whole structure and guide to each page on your site are called a site you’re your site can have numerous interconnecting pages. These site maps are essential to search engines for indexing. You can easily create Google XML site maps with a plugin called Google XML sitemaps. This free to use plugin automatically creates a sitemap of your whole website.
- 4. Optimizing your media content:
- Almost all sites contain media content, such as images. Correctly utilizing media content on your website can prove beneficial or detrimental to your site. When you upload an image, WordPress gives you the options to edit its title, description, alt text, and even add a small caption. You can use this to your advantage and add relevant keywords to it, so Google ranks your site. Uploading a random named image is a bad SEO practice.
- 5. Using Google Analytics:
- Google Analytics is a powerful, free to use the tool provided by Google that gives you deep insights regarding the traffic on your site. This tool gives you all the data about traffic source, amount of traffic, and many other attributes. By analyzing the insights, you can make relevant changes to your site to reach the targeted audience. It automatically collects data and allows you to create custom reports, and most importantly, help you study the behavior of your users.
- 6. Hosting:
- One thing is sure that Google ranks sites that load quicker. Sure, you can optimize your home page by clearing the clutter, but there is another solution. As you know, traditional hard drives are much slower than SSD’s.
- It is always an excellent option to use Hosting providers that use SSD’s on their servers, instead of traditional hard drives. Fastcomet is an example that uses SSD’s on their servers so you can opt for them.
- 7. Using SEO Plugins:
- Like there are plugins for different features, there are also plugins, especially for SEO optimization. WordPress offers numerous plugins that SEO optimize your site. These plugins help you add Meta description, Meta title, Meta tags, keywords, and much more.
- Additionally, these plugins help create an XML sitemap of your website. Overall, they enhance your website's on-page SEO. With SEO plugins, you can significantly optimize your site.
- 8. Making your site shareable:
- You can add social media sharing buttons to your website through widgets and plugins. This dramatically increases the credibility of your website. Not only is this good for the reliability of your website, but it can also drive more traffic.
- Social media is vast and has grown tremendously. People use different social media platforms to stay connected. Adding a share button to your site will allow users to share it on the social media profile. This will ultimately bring more traffic to your site.
- 9. Publish high-quality, written content:
- This factor is independent of what type of website you are running. Publishing high-quality content is crucial in ranking your site and getting noticed by Google.
- Keep Google aside; you want to impress your users as well. You need to compel your users to read your articles or blog posts and stay longer on your site. This can only be done by producing quality content.
- Identifying Quality Content:
- It should be atomic:
- Atomic means single or one. The content you publish relevant to any topic must be one and only one. You can’t replicate your data on different pages, as that is considered copying. One type of data should be available on one page only.
- Free of plagiarism:
- Plagiarism is also considered cheating. You can’t steal someone else’s content, copy-paste it, and call it a day. You need to write your content. Even if you’re writing something that is inspired by another site, you should write it in your own words, thoughts, and expressions.
- Shareable:
- Shareable content also relates to quality content. When you write an entertaining, informative, or controversial content, then readers are tempted to share it. Providing them with a shareable link will only increase your traffic.
- Relevant & Informative:
- Readers are looking for precise information regarding their problems. Giving them a clear and concise answer can be valuable to SEO of your site. You don’t need to beat around the bush and write very long articles. Short and relevant answers also go a long way.
- 10. Use correct heading tags:
- As a beginner, you may not know about using heading tags. There is no hard and fast rule for using specific tags. Each tag in each heading depends on the type of content you are writing.
- There are a total of 6 tags ranging from H1 to H6, where H1 is the largest heading tag. H1 is used for headings or titles. This tag must be clear, concise, and short. Readers firstly read this and then proceed down. Next, H2 is used for additional heading, then H3 for sub-headings, and this carries down till H6.
- Using heading tags is very important for the SEO, but also has another perk. These tags also increase user engagement and retain their attention for longer times.
Verdict:
These are just a few but powerful techniques you can use on your WordPress site to boost your SEO. Doing SEO on your website is not an easy task. To rank your website, you’ll need to put maximum effort.
