Trying to improve your WordPress SEO is important for increasing traffic to your website. Unfortunately, the majority of WordPress SEO guides are just too advanced for fresh users to get started.
If you really are concerned about growing your web traffic, you must follow WordPress SEO practises.
In this WordPress SEO guide, we’ll be sharing with you the best SEO tips that you can use to easily improve the SEO of your WordPress website.
You might have heard industry experts saying that WordPress is quite seo friendly. And this is the actual reason why a lot of users prefer WordPress over other CMS platforms.
There are plenty of things that you could do in WordPress to improve the SEO of your site.
So without any further ado, let’s get started.
What is SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It’s basically a popular practice used by website owners to improve their search engine rankings.
There’s no way you trick Google or the system. All you need is to create a site that has optimised formatting and code to make it easier for search engines to find your website.
For instance, if a user searches about a content, if your content is search-engine-optimised, it will show in the top results which will increase your site traffic.
Why is SEO important for your WordPress site
As we all are aware of this fact that search engines are a great source for bringing organic traffic to your WordPress website. Search engines like Google use algorithms to rank your website and drive eCommerce conversion.
Unfortunately, these advanced algorithms are not that good. That’s why you need to help the search engines to understand what your site content is all about.
If you have not optimised your site content then it’s impossible for search engines to find your content and rank it higher. As when audiences search about some information that you write on, your website won’t show up in search results because of which you’ll lose a lot of organic traffic.
Therefore, it’s highly essential to make your website SEO friendly so you can improve their search engine rankings organically.
Six actionable tips to improve the SEO of your WordPress website
Choosing a quality hosting provider
First things first, if you really want to improve the SEO of your WordPress website then you need to make sure that you choose a quality hosting provider. While choosing a hosting provider keep all the elementary things in your mind such as site up time, speed, and security.
Bear in mind, your page loading speed directly impacts upon your search engine rankings. If your website takes too long to load, that will send a negative signal to Google.
We understand cheaper hosting options seem tempting, however with cheapest options you’ll suffer a lot in future.
For this reason, we highly recommend Liquid Web and WP Engine. These are two reliable and quality hosting service providers and we assure you they won’t let you down.
Using SEO-friendly WordPress theme
When you set up WordPress, most certainly you’ll use the default WordPress theme ‘Twenty Twenty’. However, you’ll still get hundreds of thousands of themes to choose from.
All WordPress themes are designed to alleviate and enhance the visual appearance of a WordPress site.
Unfortunately, not all WordPress themes are SEO-friendly even if they claim to be the one. Themes come with bundles of unnecessary plugins and scripts which can affect the page loading speed of your website.
Before installing a WordPress theme, we suggest you run it’s demo on web.dev to analyze if that particular theme is seo-friendly or not.
Installing a WordPress SEO plugin
Another thing that could help you to improve the SEO of your WordPress website is using an SEO plugin. Fortunately, there are plenty of options available. The two most commonly used SEO plugins are All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO. Luckily, both are free and easy to use SEO plugins.
But you need to remember that a plugin’s job is to make it easier for you to optimise your site. It cannot optimise your website. And to do so you need to adhere to the best seo practices.
Checking website’s visibility settings
WordPress allows you to disable your site from showing up in search engine results by turning off the visibility. It means your website won’t rank. This setting is usually used by developers when they’re updating a website or fixing any bugs on it.
If by mistake you left it ticked, you need to go back to the setting and un-tick the box.
Researching keywords
Before you start creating content for your website, it’s vital you carry out proper keyword research to optimise your content. Before you start the SEO process, you need to first conduct keyword research to optimise your on-page and site content.
You can use software like Semrush to research keywords that you must include on your site.
Whether you’re just starting out or trying to rank your website, you need to conduct keyword research.
Create optimised and unique meta descriptions and title tags
Your title tags and meta descriptions say a lot about your website and they also influence your search engine rankings.
To craft your title tags you can either add custom texts or you can use snippet variables, or both of them.
Learn how to use keywords to optimise your tag titles and meta description. As this will indirectly affect your click-through rate. Take some time to come up with interesting and enticing meta descriptions (don’t use more than 160 characters).
Conclusion
There is no denying that WordPress is among the most SEO-friendly CMSs available, which is among the reasons for its popularity. That is not just user-friendly, but it is also simple to incorporate a variety of SEO techniques by using a limited range of incredible plugins.
You’ve made a wise decision if you’re using WordPress. By taking the steps outlined above, you will be well on the way to outranking your rivals.
Happy Optimising!