What does an engaging, visually stunning, and smooth website do if it isn’t getting a good ranking for search engine results?
It has been observed that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing don’t value the website’s design and pretty images. They care about content quality, keywords, alt tags, and filenames.
Understanding the needs of the search engines for your website can bring new success. However, misunderstanding them may cause a bad impact on your business. You can choose any CMS to build a website, however, the best CMS is WordPress.
WordPress is flexible and simple to use, even if you are not proficient in coding. You can add content and make modifications easily within the website. Another reason behind its success is the availability of predefined SEO features.
Optimizing a website for SEO helps it to rank higher and reach the target audience. It brings quality traffic in an organic manner and saves marketing expenses. There are several ways present for you to improve a website’s search ranking. In this blog, some important tips are mentioned for performing SEO.
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1. Quality Content
Quality content acts as the core of your SEO. Most search engines prefer high-quality content above all other factors. Use content that is relevant and engages people. Appealing content has several features that engage readers.
- Unique content: It offers the latest information to website visitors. Integrate rich data, and use infographics and videos. This engages users and drives quality traffic.
- Simple to understand: It’s important to use internet-friendly content. Make your content in short paragraphs. Use conversational language and talk directly to users.
- Engaging: Use words that are engaging for users as excitement and interest. Content that builds trust and evokes emotion is engaging.
2. Permalink Structure
Search engines find your website content through permalinks. WordPress has a simple layout to create URL structures for every post and page on your website. You can easily change the Permalink settings as per your post title URL.
You can also build a custom Permalink to add categories to the URLs. Setting Permalink properly is beneficial for the website ranking. Having the URLs tell people what the content is all about and including keywords in it is useful for your site SEO.
3. SEO Plugins
WordPress has hundreds of plugins designed & developed by community members. A website ranking can be boosted using a plugin. An SEO plugin makes it simple to perform SEO practices without needing expert assistance. These plugins can analyze the content, and the plugins will generate SEO scores for your posts as well. It helps to manage multiple onsite SEO practices:
- XML sitemaps: The plugin helps the search engines to find all the web pages. This makes it simple to build a sitemap, allowing the search engines to crawl all the websites.
- Open graph meta tags: The plugin helps a user to add open graph meta tags. These direct social media websites to connect with the right post title, image, and description.
- Robots.txt editor: This file tells the search engines regarding which pages need to be indexed. An SEO plugin helps to generate and edit the robots.txt file to allow the search engines to index the content.
- .htaccess editor: This file redirects the users to a different URL during an error. An SEO plugin eases the management of the directories and redirects of the website.
- Importing and exporting data: If you have more than one website, you can perform the same SEO settings to be productive. You can also save the settings if you make changes.
Implementing SEO strategies needs experience, technical skills, and effort. SEO plugins help a user to carry out complex SEO practices on their website without any trouble.
4. Integrate Google Analytics
There are several ways to improve SEO on your WordPress website. But how will you measure all your efforts unless you have a tool? You can’t manage your efforts if you can’t measure. The best tool to perform this work is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics can help you track and analyze the traffic on your website. It provides complete details about your visitors that can help you engage them better. It will also share details about the devices they are using to get to your website.
Using Google Analytics, you’ll get page-level analytics to get a complete report about how pages are performing. It will tell you all the information regarding the bounce rate on your website and the keywords people used to reach your content.
One of the most significant functions that Google Analytics performs is the measurement of site speed. An optimized website takes around four seconds to load and those taking extra time lose visitors. Integrate Google Analytics to your website to know what’s running and how you can improve.
5. SEO Optimized Themes
WordPress offers a wide collection of themes that give your website a strong foundation. But the point to notice is that instead of selecting a theme that looks beautiful and appealing, go for the theme that is search engine optimized.
An SEO-optimized theme includes crucial elements like speed and code. A well-designed theme having the latest SEO practices ensures that the Google bots will wade through the source code and reach the right code.
Crucial factors to consider:
- Include Open graph meta tag to enhance social media sharing
- Proper use of meta title tags and heading
- A clean and proper structure that uses valid and proper HTML
- The right use of the canonical URL meta tag
Wrapping Up
There are several other SEO tips & techniques available out there, but the above discussed are some of the best that can be implemented on your WordPress website. It is important to give web content the best chance available of being present on the first page of the search engines.
Make the most of these above-discussed tips and drive your users from Google and other search engines. Several tools make it possible to apply SEO with limited skills. It isn’t the simplest job to optimize your website, but the results make the effort valuable. Use the strategies discussed and help your website rank well to reach the desired audience.
Image source: Freepik Premium
