It’s pointless putting so much time and effort into making a beautiful WordPress website only for it to have no search engine optimization. All major search engines are carrying all the pretty pictures and designs on your site as well bringing your titles, keywords, meta tags and several other things. Having some understanding of what these terms mean, will put you in the best situation. Not knowing what they mean, could be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful business.
What Is Search Engine Optimisation?
SEO is basically the process of generating traffic to your website through a search engine like Bing, Google, and Yahoo. This is done organically which means unpaid. The idea is to get your web page listed as high up in the rankings as possible so that you can generate traffic from it. SEO can target many kinds of search, such as video search, image search, and post search.
Here at I have listed 5 best WordPress SEO tips which are the things that end users should not make a habit of overlooking.
Choose the Right Hosting
Your first thought is probably, how does that help me with SEO? Well, the reality is that the major search engines don’t really care who is hosting your website. But what they do care about is the security and performance of your website, which is heavily influenced by the company hosting it.
Before you choose your hosting provider for your WordPress website, you should ensure these 3 things that they offer:
- Performance: A faster website is a better website. You want your hosting company to offer, at the very least HTTP/2, PHP 7+ and some form of caching.
- Security: If your website is hacked, it will adversely affect your rankings in the search engine. So you want to go with a hosting company that performs around the clock security checks, has its own firewall and provides additional security features.
- SSL Certificate: SSL certificates are designed to add an additional layer of security to your website and also help with rankings. You want a host that will provide you with an SSL certificate and help you get it up and running.
Use Permalinks
Permalink is a term used to describe the URLs of your posts and pages. In simple terms, they are what end users type into the address bar when they want to access a specific page of yours. They are also used by other websites when they want to link to content on your site.
The WordPress content management system comes with its own default permalink settings, which it allows you to change. You can usually find these settings in Settings > Permalinks.
What you want to do is change the default permalinks to post name: /%postname%/ because it is much easier for the end user to remember and type into their browser address bar.
Create a Sitemap
Your website may have hundreds of different pages, but to ensure that the major search engines are able to find all these pages, you’ll need to tell them your site’s structure using a sitemap. Creating a sitemap is not difficult at all. There are many plugins that you can download and use to automatically generate a sitemap for your site, which will help search engines index your site’s content.
Optimise Your Content
One of the most important aspects of SEO involves the optimization of the content of your site. Writing content that is high quality can be quite difficult. In fact, you may decide that you want to hire a freelance writer to help you there. That way, you can spend most of your time focused on the operations of your business.
Here are some important components that go into having great content:
- Update old content when new information is made available.
- Create a routine of publishing new content to your site. Search engines like websites that are active.
- Link to other useful web resources. This may include content on your own website, as well as other websites out there.
- Include multimedia in the content of your pages. You want infographics, audio, charts, and video, to make your content more appealing.
- Answer any questions your visitors may have. Spend some time looking over comments and helping people where applicable.
Keyword-Rich Titles and Meta Tags
Your title and Meta description is what will appear on the results page of the search engine. The search engine uses the title of your content to match your content with the query of the end user. The more relevant the title and description of your content is, the more likely it is to appear in the search engine results.
There are many WordPress plug-ins that you can download and use to help you in SEO point of view, such as Yoast SEO.
