SEO Tips for WordPress Websites
WordPress is known as the content management system (CMS) with built-in SEO benefits for its sites. While that is true, you can achieve even greater SEO performance by building upon the foundation WordPress has created by utilizing the plugins, tools, and best practices at your disposal.
Check out the tips below to maximize the impact and reach of your WordPress site with SEO.
Getting Started with WordPress SEO
| Choose a reliable provider to host your site. A reliable provider ensures the site’s speed, uptime, and security, all things that can impact your site’s SEO. | |
| Select a WordPress theme that performs well for SEO by testing the theme in Google web.dev before installing. | |
| Make sure your WordPress site is mobile-friendly by choosing a theme with a responsive design that adapts to the dimensions of the user’s screen. | |
| Choose a free WordPress SEO plugin. There are almost endless options of WordPress SEO plugins to choose from. We use Yoast SEO, but All in One SEO is another popular choice. | |
| Make sure your site is visible to search engines. Do not select the ‘discourage search engines from indexing your site in Settings » Reading. | |
| Use SEO-friendly URL structures that reflect the page or post content for both users and search engines. A simple way to accomplish this is to automatically create URLs that include the name of new posts. Go to Settings » Permalinks and select the Post Name option. If your website is more than six months old, only change to Post Name if you are currently using the Numeric option. | |
| Choose whether or not to use WWW in your website address. We recommend using it, and implementing a www resolve so that search engines don’t recognize “www.example.com” and “example.com” as separate sites. | |
| Once live, check your site health by going to Tools » Site Health to review your status and consider the recommended improvements. |
Optimize Your Content
| Research the keywords that your audience is searching for. With an understanding of what your audience is seeking out online, you can create optimized content that will lead your target audience to your site. | |
| Write content that your audience wants to read. Utilizing your keyword research, write engaging content that is relevant to your audience’s interests. Make sure that your writing is easy to skim or read so that it is accessible to both your site visitors and search engines. | |
| Optimize your SEO options for each page and post. Maximize the SEO impact of your content by including page/post titles, subheadings that organize the content, meta descriptions, permalinks, and keyphrases that reflect the topic you are covering. | |
| Provide descriptions and alt attributes for all media content. Text descriptions of media content improve your SEO while also adding to the accessibility for users. | |
| Don’t compete with yourself by overusing the same keywords and duplicate, or near-duplicate URLs. | |
| Add structured data that describes your content in the code that search engines need to accurately read your site. We typically do schema markup for contact information featured on sites like addresses, phone numbers, and emails. Using the schema definitions provided by schema.org, you can provide context for all of the content on your site and improve the ability of search engines to feature your content. |
Optimize Your Site Structure
| Make your site easy to navigate with an organized hierarchy of content. Start with a clear and concise menu on the homepage, then add a limited number of categories for individual pages and posts to fall under. For a larger site consider adding additional subcategories. | |
| Connect content within your site by hyperlinking relevant pages and posts within your site. Called contextual internal linking, the additional information helps users and search engines alike understand how content across your site is related. | |
| Maintain your categories and tags across all of your pages and posts. Categories group a range of content while tags are keywords that describe a specific post. | |
| Manage the archive pages that are automatically created for each category, tag, and author, as well as date-based archives. By going to SEO » Search Appearance you can choose which archive pages to disable and which of the enabled archive pages to be indexed by search engines. | |
| Add breadcrumbs to pages and posts to make your site easier to navigate by providing a linked hierarchy of the path all the way back to the homepage. | |
| Manage your XML sitemaps to let Google know that updates have been made to your site that you want to be searchable. Large and complex sites may also benefit from an HTML sitemap where users can navigate through the entire site on a dedicated page. |
Improve Your Site’s Speed and Security
| Test your site speed. We recommend Pingdom, which breaks down the technical side of its report, allowing developers to pinpoint specific pain points that can be addressed. Aim for a site speed of four seconds or less. | |
| Optimize images to improve your site speed and SEO ranking, and to reduce storage and bandwidth. Plugins like Smush Image, Optimus, and EWWW Image Optimizer are great options for tools that can help you quickly optimize the images on your site. | |
| Regularly backup your site just in case something goes wrong, so that you can quickly get your site back up and running. | |
| Set up a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) that encrypts the connection between a user’s browser and your website server. An SSL certificate is required to operate a store on a WordPress site and the padlock signals trustworthiness to users. |
Utilize Analytics
| Integrate your site with Google Analytics by either creating an account or logging into your existing account, adding the new site property using your exact web address, and adding the Global Site Tag to every page that you want to track. | |
| Set up Google Search Console in almost the same way as Google Analytics by either creating an account or logging into your existing account, adding the new site property using your exact web address, and verifying your site. | |
| Add additional tools like Foureyes Omni-Tracking to get a fuller picture of how individuals are finding and engaging with your site. Track every form, chat, and phone call with patented user-level website tracking. | |
| Pull monthly reports to monitor the performance of your site, your site’s progress toward accomplishing your predetermined goals, and how, if necessary you may need to adjust your strategy |
Do you need a hand with your site’s SEO? With SEO solutions from Adpearance, this is all a part of the monthly optimization work we’ll manage for you. Are you thinking about moving your site to WordPress? We can help! When you build a website with Adpearance, we consider SEO as part of the build so you can be assured your site will rank highly and perform well in search engines. Please reach out anytime or schedule a free digital analysis to get started.
About the Author
Adpearance is the digital marketing company obsessed with generating quality leads. Our solutions combine cutting-edge technology, premium tracking, and an expert team to transform business results.
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