Last updated - July 8, 2022
If you are planning to launch a new blog or website to promote your online business, then it’s crucial to follow the best SEO practices to get targeted traffic to your website. This is true even for WordPress sites as you need to engage your prospects and drive them to your website. The key to achieving success with WordPress website is to use the best SEO and site development strategies to improve its online visibility.
Check out our video on WordPress SEO to understand the basics:
What makes SEO so important?
Search engines such as Google and Bing use complex algorithms that is useful in determining what makes sites valuable for ranking high on search engine pages.
These systems are constantly evolving but still the key elements of SEO remain the same including quality links, relevant keywords and the quantity of useful and valuable content on the site. For example-Google now uses mobile responsiveness as a key factor for ranking websites for promoting long and quality content.
Generally, websites that rank high on SERP have improved visibility with higher traffic that appear more trustworthy and credible to the website visitors. The focus is more on producing quality content using SEO and visitors get access to more useful and relevant information.
Optimizing WordPress site
Thus, even WordPress websites can also be optimized for SEO to improve search visibility among visitors. Right from the title of the site, permalinks, posts, pages and media-it’s now possible to make your WordPress website more SEO friendly using the Admin dashboard and settings panel that offer various customizations tools available within WordPress itself.
You can also use numerous SEO plugins such as Yoast, JetPack and All in One SEO Pack which are available using third party developers across the world.
Top SEO techniques for improving visibility for your WordPress site
You can try the following techniques to improve the visibility of your WordPress site.
Choose for search engine optimized themes
WordPress provides a wide range of themes that may be used to give a solid appeal to your website. Choose themes which are optimized for search engines than those that look more attractive and aesthetically appealing. Themes need to be SEO friendly as they may contain all the functionality for improving your SEO. SEO optimized themes are designed with two things in mind-speed and code and a well-written theme uses the best SEO practices to ensure that Google search engine can provide high rankings.
Choose the right hosting provider
Search engines such as Google use speed as a point of reference for ranking websites which means having a good host can increase your website rankings on the SERP. In addition, your host can also have an impact on the downtime experienced by your site along with the physical distance between your visitors and servers.
Enable SSL on Website
HTTPS is also one of the ranking factors used by Google to rank websites. There are some cheap SSL certificates which may be offered by reputed and reliable certificate authorities and SSL providers that may be used for securing your websites against cyber intruders and improving the chances of boosting your SERP ratings.
Set your Permalink structure
Permalinks refer to the permanent URLs that point towards your website’s individual pages and posts along with other content. They are mainly used to reference and point back to your site, so their appearance is important. Links which are clear and descriptive make it easy for search engines to find content and provide a huge boost to rankings.
There are numerous permalink options offered by WordPress such as Day and Name, Plain, Month and Name, Numeric. Custom structure including Post Name which is a better option as it communicates clearly about what the linked content contains which makes it easy to understand.
Do a good keyword research
Keywords are vital elements of every SEO strategy. Of course, you always wish to make your website equipped with proper keyword search instead of any random search. Instead, you want it to be displayed when visitors are looking for something related to your website/business. This makes it important to optimize your web page for specific keywords. Use free keyword search tools including Google’s Keyword Planner or paid tools such as Moz to get information on most popular keywords that are used by your visitors.
Install SEO plugin
If you choose WordPress for your website, then there is no need to use HTML while making updates. On the other hand, you need to use the right plugins that can provide the right functionality that you may require for your WordPress site. Use an intuitive interface that offers the right plugin options such as Yoast, SmartCrawlSEO etc.
Use a sitemap
The search engine needs to know that your website page exists in the first place before it can show itself in the search. The search engine bots crawl the web continuously to search and index pages. It’s possible to speed up the process of indexing all the pages on your website by creating and submitting a sitemap. It’s recommended to use plugin of your choice for generating a sitemap for your WordPress site before submitting it to the main search engines.
Include useful internal and external links
Search engines such as Google lay emphasis on how websites are connected using internal links and to other sites. By using lot of links throughout the posts and pages, the crawlers know how these links may be related to similar content so that they can be link back to your site. On the other hand, if you use too many links that may point to irrelevant pages, your search rankings are likely to come down.
Conclusion
If you want to create a solid WordPress site that can guarantee great results with high performance, its essential to focus on boosting your SEO strategy by ensuring faster load times, high speed and using the right keywords. SEO is competitive and takes time but if done well and implemented can help in driving targeted traffic to your website and help in building your online presence.
Use the above SEO techniques which we have shared for your WordPress site and see some valuable traffic coming to your website.
