How to stop waking up in the middle of the night thinking about WordPress SEO?
In the middle of the chaos between developers arguing about how WordPress is adapted or not for an efficient SEO, marketers, talking about all the great tools of SEO in the world just wondering about what’s your favorite, and business owners asking you: Do I need to pay money to appear always first on google?
In all of this, you may sit there helpless unable to pick teams, unable to formulate straight opinions. Well, I hope after reading this article some things may clear up, and you’ll be talking more confidently in the room.
Now first things first, no one will be Google’s first result just by magic, without hard work for a long period of time, so tell people around you that results take: time, technical skills, precision, a good marketing strategy, and wisely spending money.
SEO is Search Engine Optimization, it’s all the things you need to do or not in order to convince search engines that your website deserves to be one of the first results for certain specified keywords.
Now let's not forget that the masterpiece when we talk SEO is traffic, we need to work on SEO to have more traffic to our website, and in the same way, traffic raises our chances with search engines, so in a way, it’s a loop, a loop we can not escape. there are so many ways to have more traffic, such as paying search engines such as google to advertise our website, which we call SEA (search engine advertising), or using social media to collect the right niche of people who share interests in your content, organic or sponsoring, then direct them to the website.
But in this article, we won’t be talking about advertising your website, or finding a good strategy for your brand, we’ll leave that to digital marketers (if you’re one good luck though), we want to clear things about necessities that need to be made inside the website (WordPress website of course) if I’m a website creator, and I don’t know much about marketing, how I would do my job and also leave room for specialists in branding to do theirs, how to close the gap between marketing and web development. Well Here are some steps I find necessary:
1- SSL Certificate: Yes that little padlock next to your domain name can save you a lot of trouble, not just avoid some little pirates' attempts to hack your website, but also help convince your clients and search engines that your website is safe, which leads to having more traffic.
2- A good hosting plan: a minimal loading time is a great deal that you shouldn’t neither should your client underestimate, but you must pay for it, seeking the cheapest isn’t the best investment. a dedicated server is always the best solution, especially for online shops, and e-learning websites with a lot of stocked data, but even if you take a shared hosting pay attention to the power of the server, the provider usually mentions it or makes a comparison between the packs with stars or drops of water.
3- Responsivity: A visible website on all devices is very important, not just for human users, but also for search engine robots, they’re smart enough to judge if some parts of your text are unreadable. so do this right, and if you have doubts, you can always check it in the Google search console.
4- Permalinks: settings > permalinks > post title . Make sure to always keep your permalinks on the post title, because that spares you any strange characters or numbers in your links, and keep them clean and SEO friendly. But keep in mind to change this at the beginning of the creation of your website to avoid broken links issues, or make a copy of your website before you do it.
5- Titling your Images: title, alternative, and description fields must always be filled for every image in your media library. how? first, write down what the image is representing, picture you’re explaining it to someone blind, then always mention the name of your company in, and your location if there is a physical building that you wish for people to visit. ex: if you’re a shop named herClothes in Atlanta, for a red cocktail dress picture write: A red cocktail dress with all sizes | herClothes, Atlanta Georgia.
6- Meta titles, descriptions, and keywords: Must be added to each page, product, or post on your website, the best plugin for it is rank math, it gives you the chance to do all of this, and give you a rank according to the content of your page. pay attention though to the first keyword, it has more power than the rest, and make sure to write it exactly the same way in the meta title and meta description.
7- internal links: One of the other free tools to increase your SEO rank is to make as many as you can (at least one on each page )links between pages, ex: a contact button on the home page, or check our products on the About page. You can check with the rest of your team to discuss your sell strategy, and to decide which page you would like to direct your clients to the most.
8- Google analytics: this tool won’t increase your SEO rank but help you keep an eye on it, and analyze it deeply, which page people stay on the most, they’re from which region, which age, which sexe …, all of those pieces of information can help you know your niche, which can help also saving a lot of money when it comes to your advertising.
