Driving as much organic traffic as possible is the primary objective of every website. No matter your agenda is to sell any products or services or to inform the public about something. SEO is all about increasing the visibility of your website and let it resonate its message in intended social circles. This is the collection of strategies and techniques that help you rank your pages higher in result pages of search engines.
WordPress, as we know is the most popular content management system in the world as it prevails over 70% of web. In this article, we will provide meticulous information about how to improve your wordpress website for SEO. We will briefly explain seven fantastic ways that lead to success.
Select The Best Hosting Provider Possible
Quality of hosting is critical for successful SEO. This is because good speed is not possible without a reliable and efficient hosting provider. The good host takes you to top of SERPs. Bad host results in increasing the duration of downtime.
Choose a host with a good reputation. If you have chosen the wrong one, it is still not late. Switch instantly.
Before, Choosing hosting keeps in mind the 5 most important factors of a WordPress hosting:
- Server Requirements – It has to meet WordPress’s latest server requirements (PHP 7.3+, MySQL 5.6+, HTTPS support, and Nginx or Apache with mod_rewrite module).
- Speed – If your hosting site loads or runs faster, it’s great. And if loads slower then you might need to replace your hosting site(if you can’t analysis your present site speed, know from Pingdom).
- Uptime – When you find out that your site uptime is down under 99.95%, you should change your hosting site right then. Uptime is one of the main principles for taking a web host.
- Customer Support – You must get the support of WordPress related queries, most probably by 24/7 live chat or any other msg option.
- Pricing – Cheap is good, but the performance (uptime and speed), will not be compromised. And the most important goal is transparency. Pricing must be reasonable, equitable and upfront.
As far, in my opinion, I recommended
- DigitalOcean – The developer cloud
- wordpress.com – Recommended by WordPress
- HostGator Website Hosting Services
- WP Engine for Managed WordPress hosting
Go For WordPress SEO Friendly Theme
Picking the right wordpress theme is the most important decision. Theme you opt should be wordpress SEO friendly theme. Theme is what defines appearance, layout and functionality of your website. It also improves speed, so keep SEO in mind when picking theme. Some themes may offer special SEO designed features. Nevertheless,your selected theme should be wordpress SEO friendly theme. If it were SEO yoast support theme, it would be great plus. It means that theme supports great SEO yoast plugin.
Download The Dedicated SEO Plugin
Plugins add new functionalities to your website and dedicated plugins help you rank higher in search engines. Plugins specifically designed from SEO perspective, help create sitemaps and improve SEO of website. We recommend you to install Yoast SEO plugin, which is above all. Also, keep in mind that the theme you use should be SEO yoast support theme, or in other words, it should support SEO yoast plugin.
Mold Your Permalink Structure & Develop XML Sitemaps
Permanent URL’s that point to the individual posts, pages and other content of your site are called permalinks. People use them to link back to your site, so their appearance holds utmost significance. They must be clear and descriptive enough for search engines to understand the content and make sense of it. That would result in boosting the ranking.
URL’s based around numbers and characters are not ideal. Search engines cannot extract any information from them.
If permalinks include name structure of the post, the probability of higher ranking boosts up. It is easy to change your permalink structure or create a custom one. All you have to do is to visit your site’s back end and navigate to Settings > Permalink.
The list of all pages and other content is called sitemap. It is usually organized in a hierarchy to help search engines crawl the website and quickly grasp what the website is all about. Therefore, it indirectly supports the SEO campaign. Use any dedicated plugin to add sitemap on your WordPress website.
Work Hard On Content
Content is the king. Without quality content, it is impossible to progress, as search engines use it as key parameter to determine the credibility of the website.
The goal of search engines is to provide relevant information to their users. Therefore, they use complex algorithms to rank the pages. Here are few content tips to help your SEO goals.
- Structured Content – If content is well organized and easy to read, both people and search engines will love it. Use headings and images to engage the user. Breaking up your content in smaller chunks increases readability, and that finally results in increasing chances of ranking. Keep your target audience in mind and provide the content that resonates the most.
Also, do not forget to optimize your images, as they are an important part. Optimize their size to increase the speed of website. Every image must be given a unique and descriptive filename and alt text to assist search engines.
- Build Around Keywords – Select a unique keyword for every post and page. Include it in title of post and content as well. The density of the keyword in all words should not be less than 2.5%. Spend some time in keyword research and find the best keyword available. Do not over-optimize by shoving the keyword hundreds of time, even if it does not make sense. Build the content around keywords wisely.
- Write long form content – Google pays special attention to length. Long-form content is more likely to be comprehensive, so Google prefers it. Though it does not mean that short-form content can never ever be ranked in any scenario.
- Update Content – Our world today is continuously evolving, so our content goes outdate after sometime. Update it at the right time, or someone else will take over you.
Incorporate Useful Links
No search engine ever considers website with zero links. Embed useful internal and external links in your website. Including quality links in pages and posts reveal how they relate to the same content. Internal linking is good from a sitemap point of view.
Just like keywords, links should not be forcefully introduced. Include them where they make sense.
Use Responsive Design
Another factor to keep in mind is responsiveness. The design of your website should be responsive, which means that it should adapt to the screen and resolution of every device. Select a responsive WordPress theme.
Good Luck
An SEO campaign is exciting yet challenging. You do not need to be a geek to perform it. Knowing the basic techniques and strategies, we just mentioned in this article would help you out. However, remember to be patient. SEO takes time. Choose the best WordPress theme and plugins and create quality links. Eventually, your website will show up in the top 10 results of search pages.
