SEO is pretty much important to the success of any online business. WordPress websites on their own are designed to be decently SEO-friendly out of the box. How you can then turn this ‘decent’ to ‘excellent’ is what we’ll be discussing here. So, if you’re hoping to boost SEO and drive more traffic to your WordPress blog, here are the most important things you should consider;
1. Setting Your Permalinks
Simply put, the permalinks are the URLs of your website posts and pages. Along with being recognized by your users to view relevant pages while navigating your website, they would also be used by other websites and search engines to link your WordPress blog. WordPress websites come with permalink settings that enable you to change these addresses easily. You’ll find this under ‘Settings’, and then ‘Permalinks’.
2. Google Analytics
This free-to-use analytic tool from Google is very important to your websites’ SEO. It keeps track of your site traffic, letting you know the source, the behavior of visitors, as well as many other relevant details. If not for anything, this will help you monitor your site’s success while it can also provide insight into areas where you should improve to boost traffic.
3. SEO Plugins for WordPress
Yoast SEO and other popular SEO plugins like the All in One SEO Plugin are very important SEO solutions. These plugins are great for WordPress websites’ on-page SEO. These plugins would help you in adding and optimizing several areas of your content such as the Meta title, Meta tags, Meta description, keywords, and others.
4. Creating a Sitemap for Your Site
Google XML Sitemaps is another great plugin you can use to automatically generate a sitemap for your WordPress blog. Doing this makes it easier for search engines to index your site for search ranking.
5. SEO-optimized Themes
WordPress has a lot of apartment related themes from which you can choose. While you’ll want something that is both eye-catching and beautiful, ensure you do not choose one that will compromise your SEO choices. Choose from some of the latest designs, offering you the best of both code and speed. As far as your on-page SEO is concerned, your WordPress theme would wield some kind of influence. This article on WordPress SEO techniques explains this and a lot of other things.
6. Adding Social Sharing Buttons
The power of social media continues to grow and you can easily take advantage of this to boost SEO. Integrating social media sharing buttons of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others can be really helpful if you’ll boost your site traffic. Most of your site users would usually be active on one or more of these social media platforms.
7. Engaging and High-quality Content
The ”content is king” cliché has been used severally to prove the importance of user-engaging and high-quality content to SEO. Whether or not you agree with that cliché, quality content still remains one of the easiest strategies for ranking your WordPress website on search engines. When we talk of quality content, we mean content that is engaging, informative, actionable, shareable, and free from spelling and grammatical errors.
8. Appropriate Use of Heading Tags
You’d usually see these heading tags, H1 to H6 in your editor, but you need to understand how they work for your site’s SEO. The H1 tag would be used for your blog post, while the H2 tag will be used for additional headings. The H3, H4, and subsequent tags are to be used for subheadings. If you are able to keep these clear and informative, it will enhance user engagement while still boosting your website’s SEO.
9. Appropriate Use of Links and Anchor Text
You may have been told how links to other posts as well as links between different posts on your website can help boost your SEO. What you may not have known is that search engines would usually verify how relevant such links are to the content on which they are shared. The anchor texts to these links, if crafted appropriately, will help search engines easily understand the relevancy of the links referenced on your post. This is good for SEO as a spammy usage of links may get your website penalized.
10. Optimizing your media content
You’ve been told just how powerful videos, images, and other media files can be in boosting your website’s SEO. While just uploading these media content is not just enough, there are a few things you’ll want to do to take full advantage of this. Before you upload any media content, endeavor to change its title, add the small caption and description as well as the alt text. As simple as these things are, they’d greatly help in boosting your WordPress website’s rank on search engines.
11. Optimizing your website for mobile use
The number of mobile users continues to soar and search engines would prefer websites that are easily navigable for mobile users. This reason is why your choice of themes has to be really great so the majority of your end users who would be browsing on mobile devices would get the best experience. Optimizing your WordPress website for mobile use would also help to boost your site traffic as well.
12. Boosting your website speed with a caching plugin
Caching plugins help your WordPress websites load pages faster. Along with this, they’d also reduce the load on your web server. They mostly function by caching both static and dynamic contents and so they are able to decrease your page loading times. WordPress plugins like W3 Total Cache would make your website faster. Along with boosting your site’s rankings since search engines love faster websites, this still goes on to enhance user experience.
13. Boost site performance with a CDN
Medium to large WordPress websites, especially those with lots of static contents on them can take advantage of CDN to boost site performance. This works by caching your content among the various servers on its network from where it then serves your users through the closest locations to them. Because the page loading and response time will get a boost, things will be sped up and this as you’ve known, is good for SEO.
14. Switching your hosting provider
If after you’ve tried all possible means to speed up your website performance and it still lags, you may then have to consider the role of your hosting service provider in this. If your current hosts’ servers are implicated in the slow performance of your website, you may then have to switch to hosts with faster servers.
15. Blocking Spam Comments
Spam comments can seem very annoying to your audience and on top of that, they aren’t good for your website’s SEO. To prevent your web pages from being flagged for spam by search engines, you’d be better off with entirely preventing the actions of spammers. This will ensure your website does not get flagged for spam comments. This and a lot of other things that could boost your WordPress site’s SEO are discussed in this valuable post.
All fifteen tips above have been shown time and again to be very useful and will go a long way to boost your WordPress website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Although these tips are not limited to only the fifteen above, applying the above would definitely make significant changes in your quest to boost website traffic and SEO.