Websites created in WordPress have great advantages as they are usually easy to maintain. However, people tend to make a lot of mistakes when it comes to site optimization for search engines, which often results in low rankings on Google. And something like that can significantly affect the online business’s popularity and ability to get more clients.
How to Improve SEO of Your Website in WordPress in a Few Simple Steps? Share on X
But the good news is that, if your site runs in WordPress, you are more likely to improve your SEO practices without putting in so much effort. That said, you can make a useful combination of WordPress plugins and the best digital strategies to take your website’s online performance to the next level without breaking a sweat.
In this article, we’ll dive into the best ways to improve SEO practices on WordPress websites and ensure long-term success in the online world.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization and it involves a process of improving a website’s rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines organically. It means that SEO strategies do not rely on paid advertising but on free methods that help webpages reach the top of Google’s first page.
The SEO process contains dozens of ranking factors, including high-quality content, high speed and performance, visual elements, user experience, responsive web design, security, and more. So, if you want to rank higher on SERPs, it’s important to optimize your website according to the latest trends in SEO.
Let’s find out how!
Improve Your Website Design
Search engines like Google pay attention to website design, which is why they consider it when it comes to rankings. Your site design consists of several parts, including images and videos. While free stock photos and videos can be a pretty convenient choice when it comes to enhancing your webpage’s overall design, the original content is always a better option. If you are not a skilled photo designer or editor, you can hire professional freelance photo editors who can create high-quality and cost-effective images for your website. That way, you can have unique visual content that will help your WordPress website conquer the first page of search engine results. Choosing people instead of machines ensures a better understanding of your brand, your goals, and your business personality. Best of all, it guarantees excellent results.
And if you want your visual content to rank better, it’s essential to enrich it with adequate alt tags – it will certainly help search engine bots crawl your visual content and increase the chances of appearing in front of your target audience.
Choose the Right SEO Plugins
WordPress is known for its rich selection of SEO plugins that let websites achieve their goals more effortlessly. Thanks to a broad range of add-ons specifically created for WordPress websites, you can improve your SEO practices even if you’re not an SEO expert yourself.
There are tens of thousands of plugins that allow you to generate XML sitemaps, implement necessary meta tags, choose key phrases and keywords associated with your business, and keep up to date with the analytics that helps you come up with the most useful SEO strategies that place your WordPress website in front of your target group.
You can always count on plugins like Yoast SEO and SmartCrawl Pro to improve your rankings and get to know your SEO status. However, don’t overuse WordPress plugins – while they can be extremely useful, having plenty of plugins installed can affect your website’s speed and performance, as well as its overall security.
Boost Your Link Building Strategies
Link building plays a vital role in your WordPress website rankings. It refers to both internal and external links, meaning that your website should contain both links that lead to other pages within the site and links that go to other pages on the web.
Link building helps your website increase its site authority and makes sure that the user can navigate your page more easily. If your blog post contains links that lead to trustworthy domains across the web, you are more likely to boost your rankings; and if you create strong internal linking, your site will be more coherent and you’ll reduce the risk of orphan pages.
WordPress offers easy-to-use functions that allow you to insert links to other pages in a few clicks. That said, all you need to do is highlight the text where you want to insert the link and paste the URL of the page there. So, you have no excuses!
Use SSL to Secure Your Website
Security is an essential aspect of your digital journey and it should not be taken for granted. Besides being one of the most important SEO ranking factors, security also decides whether the users will explore your website or not.
If your website URL starts with HTTP instead of HTTPS, you might be in trouble. Namely, Google tends to lower the rankings of websites that lack basic security requirements as they open the door to many malicious activities deployed by hackers. If your webpage does not have an SSL certificate installed, it means that all the data shared between the client and the server can be accessed and stolen by unauthorized third parties.
However, the latest versions of WordPress come with a pre-installed SSL certificate, so you don’t need to add it manually. Keep in mind that the importance of SSL lies in its encryption and security, which keep the users’ data safe from hackers and other perils that dominate the web.
Never Give Up
No matter if you run your site on WordPress or any other CMS, it takes time to improve your SEO strategies and achieve long-term success in the online world. Search engine optimization is a complex and ongoing journey that never ends, which is why you should never give up, even if you don’t see results right away.
WordPress will always be a convenient choice for both beginners and professionals, but it does not guarantee good results on Google. For that reason, it’s important to keep up to date with the latest trends in the WordPress community and adapt your strategies to the newest changes.
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General FAQs
WordPress makes it easy to structure, manage and publish your content in an SEO-friendly way. That’s why it’s considered the best CMS for search engine optimization.
With a decent SEO plugin for your WordPress website, the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic will be a breeze. An SEO plugin offers you tools and powerful features like audit checklists, sitemaps, and content insights to optimize your website.
Yoast SEO is by far the most popular WordPress SEO plugin. It provides you with an overview of how well optimized your content is, both when it comes to SEO and readability. With Yoast, you get a clear idea of how well you’re using keywords, and what your content will look like in search engines.
