Your website’s success depends on traffic. To make that happen, search engine optimization, or SEO, is crucial for attracting readers, clients, and customers to your site. Below are some of our favorite tips for improving the SEO of your WordPress website.
Improve Your WordPress Site Speed
Site speed is important for a lot of reasons. People will tend to leave if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, for one.
But it’s also important to Google.
Google penalizes slow ones. So if your site is slow, speeding it up can remove the penalty and improve your rankings.
Optimize Your WordPress Site For Mobile
Mobile has long overtaken desktop in the number of users browsing online. And it’s only going to continue increasing as phones get better and voice search improves.
Google reward mobile-friendly sites with better rankings.
Keyword Rich Site Titles And Taglines
Every part of your site can play a role in boosting your search visibility, and that starts with the site’s name. When you install a new WordPress theme, its Appearance tab offers the option to set the title and tagline, both of which are searchable. Adding keywords wherever possible in these two lines can help make your site more search friendly — especially if your domain name itself doesn’t actually contain keywords or a description of your site.
Ensure All Your Images Have Alt Text
Did you know that Google image search accounts for 10.1% of all Google’s search traffic? Adding alt text to images is a super easy and simple way to take advantage of some of that traffic. Plus, Google uses alt text to determine the topic of a page, so it can even help your search rankings on non-image search.
Link Management
Every page and post on your site has its own unique URL. Adding keywords to these permalinks can help to make individual pages searchable. From the Settings tab in your dashboard, select Permalinks and choose a structure from the available options that include elements of your post and page titles — which should also contain keywords relevant for your niche.
Quality links help to boost search rankings, and this includes internal links, as well as backlinks from external sites that reference your site and its contents.
Use a Dedicated SEO Plugin
If you’re new to WordPress, you may not yet be familiar with plugins. These are small pieces of add-on software you can install, which add new features and functionality to your site. In fact, there are many plugins designed specifically to improve your site’s SEO.
For even better results, you can also opt for a comprehensive SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, which will add a whole suite of optimization-focused features to your site.
Focus On Quality Content
If you want to see success with your SEO efforts, you need to focus on creating quality content rather than trying to cheat the system.
There are plenty of ways to achieve this goal. For example, consider what your target readers want or need most, and focus on providing those things with your content.
