One can increase traffic and earn great revenue by making improvements in WordPress SEO. WordPress is not exactly SEO friendly. WordPress requires to be SEO optimized so that bots can rank the website correctly. SEO plays an important aspect in terms of marketing one’s business. The combination of WordPress and SEO is the best among all the content management systems.
Basics of WordPress:
- On-Page WordPress SEO: It helps the search engine to understand what is your content related to a particular keyword. This method helps to optimize the page on WordPress based on the targeted keyword.
- On-Site SEO: This is more of a technical method that helps the bots to crawl and index the website. It includes factors like page speed, and Robots.txt.
Checking the setting of WordPress Visibility
Firstly, log in to the WordPress admin panel and then settings>Readings, and then check the “Search Engine Visibility” is unchecked.
WWW versus Non-WWW
Sometimes users get confused about which domain to use WWW or NON- WWW during WordPress installation. You can choose anyone but stick to that and this setting can be configured by Setting>General.
- Add your WordPress Website to Google Search Console:
Google Search console is a freely available SEO tool by Google. This will help to keep all the important data and will help in the fast SEO optimization of your site
- Implementing WordPress Sitemap:
A sitemap is an XML file that consists of important links to your site that helps bots to find the page faster. You may install the WordPress Sitemap plugin by simply going to the plugin and then generating a sitemap for your site.
Go to Google search console and then Bing Webmaster Tool and then submit. Verify your site and then submit a sitemap. This will help in indexing your web pages.
- WordPress Permalink:
The default permalink of WordPress is not SEO friendly. Here SEO friendly refers to the URL that is easy to read. On the other hand, the non-friendly URL consists of numbers that are complicated to read. Always try to use a search engine-friendly URL. Go to settings>Permalink and then select /%postname%/ as your permalink structure.
- Implementing Breadcrumb Navigation
For on-page, SEO breadcrumbs are an important part and are known to show significant improvement in WordPress. You can enable breadcrumbs in WordPress SEO plugins. Here is the image that describes how can you enable breadcrumb in Yoast SEO.
Breadcrumbs benefits:
- It helps in reducing the bounce rate.
- Gives improvement in search engine visibility.
- Gives a nice user experience.
- Targeting the keyword:
You can optimize the blog or the page for the Targeted Keyword. This is a very important aspect of WordPress SEO as this will help in driving the traffic. This method is called On-page SEO.
- Performing Keyword Research:
Keyword research involves searching the keyword for the WordPress website. These keywords must be strategic and valuable so that it gives you a profitable return. You can also keyword research tool to find the keywords.
- Using Focus Keyword:
The on-page SEO plugins offer this feature Focus Keyword and this feature helps you to determine whether the article you have written on the website is optimized by the keyword.
You can use this by adding the focus keyword in the settings of your plugin in the post editor section as in the below image:
The Plugin will automatically provide you with the following suggestions:
- The density of keywords.
- Outbound Links.
- Internal Links.
- Keyphrase introduction and distribution.
- Keep a regular check on the broken links:
Broken links are also called dead links and are known to hurt the ranking of the website. WordPress provides you with the option of plugins:
- Broken Link Checker.
- WP link Status.
- Improving the internal Linking in WordPress:
Internal Linking can be defined as linking one page with another. You can also combine this with the anchor text technique which will improve the website ranking at a greater level. You can also add internal links manually in WordPress. It also works as add on Page SEO and helps the search engine to crawl better.
- Using Structure data mark up:
Structuring the data helps a better understanding of the content by the search engine. You can use the WordPress SEO technique IMHO to have structured data. This technique will in better performance of your website.
- Using SSL and HTTPS:
SSL certificate helps to use the HTTPS Protocol providing you a secure data transmission between the website and the user. HTTPS help in better ranking as it has been made official by Google declaring it as the ranking signal.
Most WordPress hosting companies provide a free SSL Certificate, you can use the paid certificate in case you have e-commerce.
- Avoid the copied content Penalty:
Overall WordPress rank score is sometimes affected by duplicate content. This condition occurs when more than one URL of your website page displays the same content as this happens when you set the archive pages to index. In such cases the search engine gets confused and hence this causes a duplicate content penalty.
- Replytocom and URL Parameter:
This is one of the biggest issues in WordPress SEO. If you see your comment box reply link, it will display data like this.
http://domain.com/%postname%&replytocom=1#respond
In such cases sit can get penalized by Google panda. You can fix this problem with the WordPress SEO Yoast permalink option or another option is to go to the setting in Google console and use the URL parameter.
- Search Intent Optimization:
There are situations despite writing high-quality content, the website is unable to attract traffic. This problem can be solved using search intent optimization. In this process you need to do the following:
- Have a depth analysis of the search result about the targeted keyword.
- Find the results that are preferred by Google.
- All you need to do is use the new information to optimize the meta title and description.
- Image Alt text and Sitemap:
Adding images to the blog can make them more presentable and pleasing for the viewers. Alt-text is used by search engine bots to understand what is image all about. Remember while using the images make sure to denote them with meaningful names. To create ALT text for your images, you may use the SEO-friendly images plugin.
- Optimizing Loading Speed of WordPress:
As soon as you start adding the plugins and themes, the database gets expanded and this slows down the loading speed of the WordPress Website. There are a few things you can do to optimize the loading speed of the website:
- Use an Image Compression plugin:
These plugins automatically compress the image without degrading the quality of the image on WordPress Website. Shortpixel is the plugin that helps in optimizing the loading speed of the website.
- You can also use the Google analytic sit speed feature or cache plugin that helps in improving the loading speed.
To have a better rank in competitive terms you’ll have to put in offering the best content. You can do a lot of stuff with WordPress SEO. The guide provides you with both technical and content tips that will help in the long run. Keep yourself updated with the newest content, fresh ideas, and creativity to keep up with the pace of competition. You can easily implement the steps listed in the guide and check them by applying them to your website to achieve a good ranking.