Improve the SEO in your Wordpress website
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In simple terms, SEO works by demonstrating to search engines that your content is the best result for the topic at hand. You might be wondering why is this important, and the answer is simple, the better ranked your content is in search engines, the more views your content gets. It’s a marketing thing. Therefore, I am going to give you a bunch of tips to keep in mind when you’re trying to improve the SEO of your Wordpress website.
1. Create a sitemap.xml
In simple words, a sitemap is a file that lists URLs of a website. This file can be generated in either Yoast SEO plugin or external pages such as PRO-Sitemaps.com. This file tells the search engines your website structure, even though the internal linking isn’t flawless. This file should be typically placed in the root directory of your domain. For example, https://yoursitedomain.com/sitemap.xml
And this is an example of how your sitemap.xml should look like.
2. Create a robots.txt
The robots file is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers. A web crawler, or commonly known as spider, simply browses the world wide web while indexing pages, so users can search more efficiently. This file consists of a set of rules that tells search engines which pages access and index on your website.
3. Send your sitemap.xml to Google
By sending this file to Google, we are specifying where it can find the pages (remember that this file is just a list of the URLs of your website). According to Google, you should alert about a sitemap only when it’s new or updated. There are several ways to send it.
- Send it directly to Google Seach Console using the Sitemaps tool
- Inserting the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml - Using ping functionality to ask google to crawl your sitemap. Send an HTTP GET request like this:
http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=<complete_url_of_sitemap>
4. Minify code files
Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters from code without changing the way that code works. By doing this, you can boost your website speed and therefore, it will be better ranked. In the minification process unnecessarily characters are usually things like: whitespace characters, new line breaks, comments, block delimiters. Minifying code can reduce the file size by 30–40%. Sometimes even as much as 50%. Concatenating files also helps reduce the load on your server and network. If you’re using Wordpress there are many plugins you can use, otherwise you can check out other tools for minification, for example.
HTML: https://github.com/kangax/html-minifier
CSS: https://github.com/cssnano/cssnano
JS: https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS
This is how your minified javascript file should look like
5. Images
Images are very important in your website. It is well known that a picture is worth than a thousand words. Users would rather see an image before reading a long text. They not only attract attention but also trigger emotions to the users. They can easily explain something to the users. So, it is important to keep in mind these tips when you’re adding some of them in your website. Google itself acknowledges the importance of imagery and shares some helpful tips on image optimization on their guidelines for image publishing.
- Use unique images that are page-relevant
According to Yoast, If you use an image just to use an image and get a green bullet in our SEO plugin, you are doing it wrong. The image should reflect the topic of the post, or have illustrative purposes within the article. And If it’s an original new image it’s even better for SEO. Therefore, avoid using the same old free images everyone is using for that product.
- Use the highest quality format possible
Search engines prefer high resolution images and high-quality content. Sites with images poor in resolution affect your SEO. If the images are formatted incorrectly, they can also appear distorted on certain devices. This doesn’t help to sell your page’s content. Keep this in mind, for commerce situations JPEGs will be your best bet and PNGs can be a good alternative to both JPEGs and GIFS If you are only able to get product photos in PNG format.
- Reduce the size
Google recently set the mobile-first indexing approach, which means they predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. By scaling down large image files, you can increase your page speed, which is crucial for mobile viewing. There are countless tools to reduce the image size, some of them are: JPEG Optimizer, Optimizilla, ImageOptim, Kraken.io, Compressnow, Trimage.
- Organize multiple images for optimal view
How you organize your images is as important as which images you choose. Try to create a story in the user’s mind. For example, if you’re showing a house you can start off by showing a picture of the living room and move forward to the rooms inside. Basically, follow the local order by which a prospect would travel through the home. Try not to leave gaps in your image story.
- Use a descriptive caption in your images
Captions are crawled by search engines. It also tells the story of what’s unfolding in the image. Anyone using keywords associated with your caption will find your page listed in the search results.
- Use “Alt text” to maximize accessibility
Search engines cannot see an image as humans do, so “Alt text” helps search engines to understand what your image and content is about. It not only offers accessibility to visitors who are unable to see the image but also improves your website’s users experience. Some advices to keep in mind when writing a good alt text are:
- Describe the image as specifically as possible
- Keep it short, use your keywords
- Don’t use images as text
- Don’t include “Image of” or “Picture of” in your alt text
- Don’t forget longdesc, which is a tag for more complex images that require a longer description.
6. SEO Plugin
If your website is developed in Wordpress you better use YOAST SEO plugin on its premium version. This plugin provides a bunch of features to boost your SEO. You can use key-phrases in your pages and posts, easily change the page title and description, tell google what exactly your page is about, preview of your content, readability check and much more.
7. Configure the plugin
Once the plugin is installed and activated, it needs be configured. You can start off by following the YOAST SEO configuration wizard. This tool, will display some questions regarding your website and particular things will be determined according to your responses.
The content that you write should be extensively covered by the Yoast SEO metabox. This tool will help you to optimize the quality of your content. This box can be found at the bottom of your editor of every post and page. It provides several tabs that I will explain here.
In the first tab you can add your key-phrase (this will be explained later in this guide). In the snipped preview you can have a look at how the plugin displays the page on Google and other search engines. This will show you a mobile and desktop version. You can configure the meta description to clarify what your content is about and let the people know that your content is what they are looking for.
Sadly, writing a key-phrase doesn't guarantee that you will rank for that key-phrase. However, this plugin can help you optimize the quality of your content based on the key-phrase that you chose. In the SEO analysis snippet, you will get some information regarding the enhancements that should be done to improve your content’s quality. This helps you pointing out the title, outbund links, internal links, keyphrase length, density etc.
In the second tab, the plugin analyses that the content your are providing is easy and nice to read for your audience. Not everyone has the skills to provide creative and readable content, therefore, using this tool can help you not only to write better content, but also to make it clear and concise for the public.
Finally, the social tab. This tool helps you to configure how your content looks like when it’s being shared on Facebook or Twitter. You can change the title, image and description. The more attractive a shared post looks like, the more likely it is that someone will share it. That’s why this should never be left behind.
8. Choose your key-phrases wisely
Keywords or key-phrases are the main words you’d like the page to rank for in Google. This is important, because depending on the keywords you choose, you can generate or lose customers. It’s crucial to know which are the most important words for my business. You could ask some questions to yourself to discover the keywords, for example.
- Which service is my business offering?
- What words would the people use to search my business?
- Am I generating content based on these words?
Also, there are fundamental places where we should use these words. For example:
- The URL
- The title
- The meta description
- In the content in general.
To set your keywords, go to the desired post or page, then, in the SEO tab the first input field will be the one where you can add the specific key-phrases or keywords for that page.
9. Check out your website loading speed
There are sites that give you a general diagnostic regarding your site performance, speed, warnings, errors and a general feedback of your website health. This might help you focus on those things for SEO improvement. For example, in Google PageSpeed Insights your site should score above 90.
Also, SiteChecker Pro, can help you analyse your page to check if the size of your images are suitable. It analyses your ALT images, the length of your texts, titles, meta descriptions, internal and external links and much more.
