The Best Ways To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress is used to power over 455 million websites throughout the world. WordPress Themes are a free website builder and open-source content management system with a plugin architecture and templates. Over half of all websites with content management needs prefer it because of its amazing versatility and plug-and-play functionality. WordPress is used by top brands such as eBay, Sony, Samsung, IBM, CNN, and Reuters, demonstrating its breadth and applicability.
A WordPress-powered website, like any other, necessitates SEO. The practice of increasing a website’s organic traffic and rating on search engines such as Google and Bing is known as search engine optimization (SEO). This entails producing high-quality content, maintaining a strong local search presence, and monitoring a website’s technical health.
According to 70% of marketers, SEO is a better way to generate sales than paid advertising. Optimizing your WordPress site will give it a leg up on non-optimized sites and help it rank higher. SEO is a changeable framework with rules, processes, and marketing approaches in this sense.
Here are some of our best WordPress SEO tips for increasing traffic and sales.
WordPress SEO Fundamentals
“Just like flowers need the correct climate to thrive, WordPress works best when it’s in a rich hosting environment,” according to WordPress. A website host is a business that leases out internet hosting services and technologies. Although alternative hosts are available, WordPress recommends Bluehost, SiteGround, and Dreamhost.
As part of its strategy, a reliable website host includes speed, support, scalability, and an SSL certificate (security). SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a standard technology that allows a web server (host) and a web browser to establish an encrypted connection (client). It ensures that all information sent between them is kept secret.
A padlock icon appears before the URL on SSL web pages, as well as a “S” in HTTPS. It is the industry standard for online security around the world. And you’ll need it because 85 percent of online buyers avoid unsecure websites, which means you’ll miss out on more than 80% of prospective leads if you don’t have one.
The speed of your website has a direct impact on its search engine ranking. A two-second loading time is considered acceptable by Google for eCommerce websites. SEO success will be hampered by low uptime and security vulnerabilities. While it may be tempting to go with the cheapest web host, we strongly advise against it because you will most likely experience performance problems.
You’ll also want to make sure that your website’s structure is navigable and easy to understand, both on the backend for search engines and on the frontend for people, once it’s up and running. “A good site structure should: group thematically similar information together, highlight [the] most important pages, [as well as] keep content clean and arranged in a logical hierarchy,” according to SaaS platform SEMrush.
Shoppers shun websites that aren’t secure.
The 2022 Best Tips for Improving Your WordPress Website’s Search Engine Optimization
Although WordPress is an SEO-friendly platform, you’ll still need to use the right SEO methods to reap the rewards. To begin, we recommend concentrating your WordPress SEO efforts on the areas below in order to increase your ranking and organic visibility.
Choose an SEO Plugin for Your WordPress Blog.
A plugin for WordPress is a piece of software that “plugs into” your WordPress site. Plugins, such as Yoast SEO, allow users to construct any type of website, from eCommerce storefronts to creative portfolios, by adding or extending current functionality on their site.
Extension modules for content management systems, browsers, and software solutions are known as SEO plugins. They add specific functionalities to the source program that help with SEO, site analysis, and internet marketing.
Specific plugins that increase a site’s SEO are listed below:
Yoast SEO: This software gives organizations the tools they need to improve their content’s readability by raising it to the highest SEO standards.
Search Engine Optimization Press: This WordPress plugin creates customer HTML and XML sitemaps, increases social sharing, and optimizes SEO in a simple, fast, and powerful way.
Redirection: This free WordPress SEO plugin aids in the management of redirects, preventing users from seeing 404 errors.
Internal and external broken links have an impact on a website’s performance. Broken Link Checker locates and corrects broken links as well as missing images.
W3 Total Cache: This optimizes user experiences by increasing server efficiency, caching all aspects of your site, and reducing download times.
Google Search Console is a tool that allows you to manage your website’s search results.
Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is a free web service provided by Google that assists in the monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting of a WordPress site’s appearance in Google Search Results.
With a Google Search Console account, you can track how the search engine giant sees your site and then optimize its organic ranking. Viewing referring domains, mobile site performance, rich search results, and the most popular queries are all part of this. Some server faults, site load, and security issues such as hacking and malware can also be resolved.
Google Search Console is one of the most underappreciated but effective SEO tools available, providing information on the following and more:
Confirmation that Google can find and crawl your website
Analysis of search engine traffic
Popular search engine keywords for which your website appears
How frequently do people visit your website?
How to fix search-related issues, such as usability on mobile devices
Whether you’re at risk of using unethical SEO techniques
Create an XML Sitemap and submit it.
Crawler bots from search engines identify web pages in one of two ways: by visiting all of the links on a website and repeating the process for each page visited, or by visiting pages listed in a sitemap. An XML sitemap is an organized list of all pages on a website that search engines can crawl (read). It’s written in a machine-readable format and isn’t meant for people to read.
Sitemaps are an add-on to standard web crawling. They’re helpful because search engines can’t identify and index a page that isn’t linked to anything else. In this case, a sitemap can be useful. Sitemaps are useful for large websites, those with poorly interconnected pages, and new websites without backlinks.
When crawling a website, the fundamental benefit of having a sitemap is that it notifies search engines which pages are the most significant. Technical SEO relies heavily on sitemaps. They give Google information about your website’s pages, videos, and other files, as well as the relationships between them, allowing it to intelligently read and rank it in search results.
Examine Your Website on a Variety of Browsers and Platforms
Cross-browser testing is the process of ensuring that your website and web apps are compatible with a variety of browsers and devices. Your website should work for all users, regardless of the browser device or additional assistive features they use, as part of WordPress SEO best practices. You’ll need to make room for the following:
Bing, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer are examples of different browsers.
Devices of various capabilities, ranging from low-cost smartphones to high-end smart TVs, may run on browsers with restricted capabilities.
People who utilize assistive technologies such as screen readers to access the internet.
Base functionality, design, accessibility, and responsiveness should all be evaluated during WordPress site testing. A thorough test will show usability flaws and where they may be fixed, as well as improve productivity and assist avoid potential hazards. While it is critical to design your WordPress website in order to increase brand awareness, create leads, and drive sales, it is also critical to ensure that it functions properly.
Base functionality, design, accessibility, and responsiveness should all be evaluated during WordPress site testing. A thorough test will show usability flaws and where they may be fixed, as well as improve productivity and assist avoid potential hazards. While it is critical to design your WordPress website in order to increase brand awareness, create leads, and drive sales, it is also critical to ensure that it functions properly.
Examine Your Loading Times
Visitors spend less time on websites when page load speeds slow down their interactions, making the experience less appealing and increasing the risk that they will abandon the site. The ideal loading time for a website is two seconds (so says Google). If it takes more than 3 seconds, 40% of users will abandon the site. Unfortunately, we live in an era where online competition and quick gratification are at an all-time high, therefore no company can afford a poor web page loading time.
“As page load time climbs from one second to five seconds, the likelihood of bounce increases by 90%,” according to Google insights. Bounce rates are classified as follows by Monster Insights:
A score of 80% or above is considered to be extremely poor.
70% to 80% is considered poor.
The average is between 50 and 70 percent.
It’s great if you can get 30–50%.
A tracking inaccuracy of 20% or less is most likely.
Improved server response times can be achieved by compressing pictures, consolidating files, and enabling browser caching. The templates used by WordPress can potentially slow down the loading process. Some include dynamic components, sliders, widgets, and social symbols, which look nice but aren’t always the best for SEO. Thankfully, there are a plethora of lightweight themes to choose from.
Selecting basic WordPress themes, which are expressly developed with load speed in mind, is a simple solution. StudioPress, Themify, CSSIgniter, and Astra all have well-coded and optimized themes for both novice and expert WordPress users.
Google Analytics can help you identify the average bounce rate for your industry. Add “bounce rate” as a measure to plot along with users to view this metric in the Behavior Site Content Landing Pages report.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Mobile devices account for 63 percent of Google’s organic search traffic in the United States. The backend of WordPress is fully mobile responsive. A webpage that has been optimized for mobile devices automatically reformats itself. It not only guarantees that webpages display properly on smaller screens, but also that sites are easier to navigate with larger navigation buttons and pictures that are properly proportioned to the screen size.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, visitors are five times more likely to abandon it. As a result, mobile interfaces must account for the thumb zone, which means critical information and buttons must be placed in the “safe zone” where users’ thumbs interact with the screen the most.
Advertising and pop-ups should also be mobile-friendly. While these are useful on desktops, they might be inconvenient on mobile devices, resulting in a negative user experience. Certain pops are required by law, such as age verifications and GDPR cookie opt-ins, but unless you have a pressing need for them, we recommend skipping them. Furthermore, Google penalizes intrusive web pop-ups by lowering their ranking.
On small screens, real estate is limited, so every piece of content should contribute to your brand’s message. Concentrate on content rather than quantity, delivering only the most important details and appealing calls to action. Don’t forget to think about navigation as well. The majority of smartphone users can traverse simpler menus with ease.
Organic mobile device search
Permalinks that are SEO friendly should be enabled.
A permalink is the full URL for each particular post, page, or piece of information on your website that you see—and utilize. The domain (www.businessname.com) and the slug (e.g., /store/) are the two elements of a permalink. They play a key role in the structure of a website and can help it rank higher in search engines through SEO.
Effective permalinks are brief and descriptive, so site visitors and search engines can figure out what a webpage’s general content is just by looking at it. Permalinks that include two to four keywords that are relevant to the page perform well. For example, https://bestbaking.com/bake-bread/ is the permalink of an article titled “How to Bake Bread from Scratch: The Ultimate Recipe.”
Because this is the maximum amount of characters Google displays in its search results, we recommend keeping permalinks between 75 and 80 characters long. Permalink SEO best practices include omitting dates, substituting hyphens for underscores, and inserting categories and keywords.
Generic terms (also known as stop words) like “is,” “to,” and “in” are ignored by search engines, wasting permalink space. For optimum SEO benefits, merely cut the permalink to three of the four most crucial descriptive keywords.
Every post and page you create in WordPress is given a unique permalink. For instance, www.bestbaking.com/?p=6647, therefore make sure to optimize it before releasing your material.
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Boost Your Web Essentials
Core Web Vitals are a set of factors that Google considers to be critical to a webpage’s overall user experience. They are used by the search engine to precisely gauge user experience. These metrics are related to page load time, interactivity, and content visual stability as it loads:
The largest contentful paint (LCP) defines when a webpage’s major content is fully rendered on the screen. Slow server response time is the most prevalent cause of bad LCP. Large-size components and unneeded third-party scripts, particularly JavaScript*, can drastically decrease page loading time and can be removed to optimize LCP.
First input delay (FID): This is the time (in milliseconds) between when a user interacts with a website for the first time (for example, by touching on a button or clicking a link) and when the browser replies to the interaction.
Website responsiveness is frequently hampered by images and scripts that download in a haphazard manner. This score can be improved by reducing JavaScript execution time, cleaning up third-party scripts, and limiting main thread work.
Cumulative layout shift (CLS): This metric assesses a website’s visual consistency and indicates whether it performs as expected by users. Fonts, pictures, videos, contact forms, and buttons on a visually unstable website may change as it loads.
This occurs when visible elements are forced to relocate due to the addition or resizing of another element on the page. Layout shifts can be avoided by adjusting the size characteristics of on-page items, leaving enough space for advertisements and embeds, and selecting transform animations.
Always keep the user experience in mind while making updates to your website, as this is what the vast bulk of Google’s ranking factors are focused on. Remember that, while Google controls 92 percent of the search engine market, you shouldn’t ignore alternative options.
*JavaScript: Also known as JS, JavaScript is a programming language that, along with HTML and CSS, is one of the internet’s basic technologies. On the user experience side, almost 97 percent of websites employ JavaScript to define web page behavior.
Keyword research should be a part of your content creation process.
The process of determining which words and phrases your target audience uses while searching for information and websites on the internet is known as keyword research. A keyword might be a single or two words, a phrase, or a question. Keyword research is crucial because it allows you to create content that is relevant to your target audience.
If you own a bakery and your keyword analysis suggests that many customers are looking for “chocolate cake recipes,” you can create content and marketing materials related to chocolate cake.
In principle, this improves your SEO search ranking by answering people’ questions. As a result, phrases like “how to make a chocolate cake,” “best chocolate cake,” “easy chocolate cake,” and so on may appear in your content.
Proper keyword research is critical for validating and refining your digital marketing strategy with accurate data. It is the cornerstone of WordPress SEO and aids in the evaluation of:
Search volume by keyword: The exact monthly search volume for each term entered.
Competitiveness: Based on your industry’s competitive landscape, how difficult it is to rank for a keyword.
Bidding cost: Find out how much the typical cost-per-click is for each keyword so you can plan your PPC ads properly.
A good keyword research tool will provide consumers options they may not have thought of and will provide data that is specific by country. SEMrush and All in One SEO for WordPress are two SEO plugins with keyword research capabilities that can help you enhance your SEO and organic traffic.
Make it a habit to link internally.
Internal links are clickable connections to another page on the same website. They’re useful because they assist people traverse a website, construct information hierarchy, and distribute link equity (ranking power) among multiple sites. This is why the internal links are abundant in the SEO-friendly site architecture.
Search engines require content on individual pages in order to efficiently list pages in their enormous keyword-based databases. A crawlable link structure allows them to discover all of a website’s paths, allowing them to locate and rank all of its pages.
If page A is linked to page B, and page B is linked to page C, Google will be able to quickly follow the website’s structure. If page C isn’t linked to either A or B, the search engine won’t be able to find it or even know it exists. It won’t matter if your content is excellent or if your keyword targeting is spot on.
Locating pages on your site that rank for comparable topics and ensuring they link with a descriptive anchor text is one of the best ways to uncover internal linking chances. The total amount of keywords you rank for, as well as your target keyword ranking, can both benefit from increasing the number of internal links pointing to a given page.
Use SEO tools such as SEMrush or Surfer.It’s no secret that even the most prestigious digital marketing firms, such as Comrade Digital Marketing Agency, use SEO plugins because of their numerous advantages, which include:
Provide information on the SEO tactics used by competitors who use WordPress.
Manual audits can be automated to save time.
High-converting keywords for web copy and content marketing are revealed.
Assist in tracking SEO progress and KPIs.
When reporting on ROI, make it simple to visualize and comprehend data and provide efficient communication tools for stakeholders.
SEMrush, Yoast SEO, Surfer SEO, and RankMath are just a few examples of software that can help you enhance your WordPress SEO.
SEMrush is a well-known all-in-one software suite for increasing internet exposure and gaining marketing insights.
Yoast SEO is a WordPress SEO plugin that was created with WordPress Surfer in mind. To ensure high-quality content, SEO optimizes written material and creates content strategy.
With built-in advice based on SEO best practices, RankMath makes it simple for anyone to optimize their content.
It’s crucial to note that utilizing an SEO plugin doesn’t guarantee that your content will appear higher in search results. Keep in mind that SEO is a fluid and continuing activity. If you’re not sure how to optimize your content, a Yoast SEO plugin or something similar can help because it can give you a lot of information about your target demographic and traffic sources.
Pay attention to 5-star ratings and user reviews when selecting a reliable plugin. Details, as well as support requests and technical information, will be provided by each plugin. Always test a WordPress SEO plugin before installing it to ensure that it accomplishes your goals and does not conflict with other plugins or cause your website to crash.
Titles and headings should be optimized.
Headings and titles are crucial for SEO because they aid search engines in comprehending the content of a website page, making it more user-friendly. The needs of search engines and humans are balanced in a well optimized SEO title and heading, making it appealing to read and beneficial to keyword rankings. It achieves visibility on search engine results pages and maximizes traffic and leads when done correctly.
Content headers aid in content organization. The following is how Search Engine Journal recommends using the website and content headings:
H1 tags are used to highlight the most significant text, such as the content’s main concept or title.
Subheadings are frequently used with the H2 and H3 tags.
Finally, H4, H5, and H6 tags can be utilized to give those subsections more structure.
Because Google looks at headers, it’s vital to utilize keywords sparingly to help with SEO without coming across as spammy. If possible, attempt to front-load your keywords (i.e., put them first) so Googlebots can read them right away. Aim for headings of 50 to 70 characters.
Optimize Your Photos
Web image optimization ensures a quick page load time. A two-second delay can boost a website’s bounce rate by 103 percent, which is why it’s critical that the photos on your WordPress site be shown in the correct format, dimensions, size, and resolution. The following are some examples of image SEO in WordPress:
Using alt-text that is relevant and accurate
Image captioning with relevant keywords
Image compression
Before submitting files, make sure they’re properly named.
Using images that are responsive
Taking advantage of photographs as a source of backlinks
Adding photos to your XML sitemap is a simple process.
Consider it from the user’s point of view. Nobody appreciates waiting for a slow-loading website. When you optimize your photos, you reduce the likelihood of users abandoning your site. Image optimization is an SEO-friendly approach that is particularly important for large eCommerce sites with enormous inventories of product photos.
Make sure the length of your blog is just right.
The ideal blog length, according to a HubSpot study, is between 2,100 and 2,400 words. Longer blogs provide more value to readers and provide more options for backlinks, calls to action, and lead magnets. The more interaction you provide, the more time users spend on your website pages, which increases your Google rating.
A larger word count allows you to include more keywords without keyword stuffing and helps Google understand what the text is about. As a result, you may organically optimize text and give more relevant, high-quality information. You may even increase traffic to posts you’ve already authored by using intelligent internal backlinking.
In addition, if a post or page is too thin, that is, if it has too few words, Google will penalize it. It’s vital to adopt search engine-friendly tactics that provide results if you’re going to establish a solid content marketing plan. Readers and search engines both need to connect with your blog entries. Conducting keyword and target market research will aid in the development of an appealing and adaptable content marketing plan.
Conclusion
Improving the SEO of a WordPress site entails a variety of practical chores, ranging from optimal coding and formatting to best practices for authoring and publishing online content. It’s not simply about one or the other; you’ll need both for a successful digital marketing plan. Building a WordPress site provides you all the tools your company requires to compete online.
Scavyer Graphix Digital Marketing Agency specializes in web design and digital marketing, including WordPress SEO. Clients who work with us get a 175 percent increase in traffic and a 150 percent increase in monthly leads. By improving traffic and conversions, our WordPress SEO solutions produce significant and measurable outcomes. Each of our SEO packages is designed to satisfy a specific set of business goals. We propose using our free SEO audit as a first step in enhancing the search results of your WordPress website.