13 Simple Ways To Boost SEO On Your WordPress Website
Simple and Effective Ways to Boost WordPress SEO
SEO is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your WordPress website. SEO involves using techniques to help your website rank higher in the SERP. If you want people to notice your website, then it should appear in Google searches.
There are many benefits of SEO like greater visibility and improved traffic. High-ranking websites are considered more trustworthy and credible. You can offer your visitors more useful information as SEO focuses on creating quality content.
A WordPress SEO consultant can help you to optimize your website. Or you can follow these simple ways to improve your WordPress website’s SEO:
1. Begin by selecting a hosting provider that is reliable and offers excellent performance. The hosting provider you select is vital for SEO. A good host can push your website on top of the SERPs as Google takes speed into consideration while ranking. A good host will have low downtimes and provide good speeds.
2. For your WordPress website, selecting a theme is most important as it decides your website’s appearance and layout. It can also play a role in SEO. Your theme can affect your website speed and the way it is developed also matters as a cleaner code can give your website a better chance in the SERPs. Pick a theme that is built with SEO in mind. Choose SEO-friendly themes.
3. There are many plugins available that help to improve your website’s SEO. They are software that you can install to add new features and functionalities to your website. For best results, select a plugin like Yoast SEO that provides a whole suite of optimisation features.
4. Permalinks are URLs that point to your website’s individual pages, posts and other content. People will use these to reference and link back to you, so their appearance matters. The permalinks should be clear and descriptive and describe the content on the page. This will make it easy for the search engines and the users to understand and will also offer a boost to your rankings.
WordPress offers a number of automatic permalink options. A few of them are based on ‘Plain’ and ‘Numeric’ options, but they are not the ideal ones. The best ones are the ‘Post Name’ structure, as they communicate clearly what the link content is about. You can easily change your website’s permalink structure and create a custom one.
5. A sitemap is the list of all the pages and other content on your website arranged in a hierarchy. Their main function is to communicate information to search engine bots. Creating a sitemap will not boost your rankings, but it will be used by the crawlers to see all the pages on your website and how they relate to each other. This makes it easy for the search engine to index your website.
To add a sitemap of your WordPress website, you can use a dedicated tool like Google XML Sitemaps or a comprehensive tool like Yoast SEO.
6. To make search engines understand your individual content, you will have to use the heading tags. Heading tags are formatting options that you can use to add section headings to your posts.
The main advantages of using this are the content becomes easier to read when it breaks into sections and the crawler uses the heading to understand what the content is about. When you create posts and pages do not forget to use the headings tags.
7. Keywords are short phrases that describe your content’s topic. You should build your content around your keywords. You should use keyword research tools and find your relevant keywords. SEMrush is one such trusted tool.
Use the keywords in your titles, headings and content. This way, you will be able to tell the search engine about your topic and increase the chance of showing up for relevant searches.
8. Using plenty of relevant internal and external links will tell the search crawlers how they relate to similar content. When people link to your website, it tells the search engine that your content is valuable. Add links naturally and point readers to high-quality websites that rank highly in the search results.
Do not use too many links or point links to irrelevant content, as your website ranking may suffer.
9. Your website should look good and perform well on any of the devices used by the users. For this, you should use a responsive web design so that it can adapt to the divide being used. If your website is responsive, then it will increase the chances of it appearing high in the SERPs.
For a WordPress website, the best way to use a responsive design is by using a theme that supports it.
10. One of the important parts of your website is images, and they can also impact your SEO. The quality and size of your images can affect your page’s loading time. Page loading time is a ranking factor. You should optimise your images and other media so that they do not negatively affect your website.
Crawlers will look for certain information attached to the images, like the filename and Alt-text. Addressing these two points will help your SEO.
11. Search engines consider long-form content to be useful. The more comprehensive your content is the better it will be able to communicate the topic to the crawlers. Longer content is also valuable to readers and encourages them to spend more time on your website.
When you create content, make it in-depth and try to use the skyscraper technique. In the skyscraper technique, you need to improve on the existing content and make it much better and more comprehensive.
12. Google considers the frequency of content when it decides how to rank your pages. Old content may be ranking high, but a boost is given to new and fresh content as it might be more relevant to the searchers. If you want your website to consistently rank well in the SERPs then you should add new content regularly.
Updating older content prompts the crawlers to re-evaluate it, and this is given more prominence than the content that never changes.
13. If you want to see your SEO efforts succeed, then you need to focus on creating quality content. There are different ways to achieve this, like finding out what your target audience wants and needs the most. You can provide them with what they want through your content.
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