What’s the point of spending all that money on building a WordPress website or e-commerce store if it’s not visible to your target audience in the search results?
If you know how to use it well, WordPress is one of the best content management systems for search engine optimization. In this article, we’ll give you ten simple ways to boost the SEO on your WordPress site.
How do you improve technical aspects of SEO?
1. Choose SEO-friendly hosting
When choosing your hosting provider on WordPress, select one that is SEO-friendly. While your hosting company doesn’t directly affect your search engine ranking, it has the potential to influence other SEO factors like your website’s speed and security.
When selecting a hosting company for your WordPress site, consider these key elements:
- Uptime: Uptime refers to the time the site is up and available for users. Check that your hosting provider has good uptime because websites with frequent downtime are less visible on Google.
- Speed: Website speed is a key element in determining how your site ranks on search engines. 53% of internet users will leave your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. This will increase your bounce rate and negatively impact your search engine ranking.
- SSL: Invest in a hosting provider that provides an SSL certificate. This will increase the credibility of your website, which will help it rank better on Google.
If you’d rather not deal with these technicalities and prefer to let a professional web developer handle your site’s SEO, contact our team, and we’ll help you get seen.
2. Make an informed decision when choosing a theme
There are thousands of themes available on WordPress. Most of them can help you build a stunning WordPress site or e-commerce store. However, when you’re looking to list on Google, there’s more to consider than just the site aesthetics. Choosing an SEO-friendly theme lets you avoid slow and bloated sites, which is key to providing a good user experience.
When picking a theme for your WP site, choose one that has:
- A clean code
- Fast loading time
- Plugin compatibility
- Stunning aesthetics
3. Build a responsive website
Your website visitors might access your site from a tablet, a smartphone, or a laptop. If you build a responsive WordPress site, it will adjust to the user’s screen size, giving them a better experience.
Having a mobile-optimized site is a critical factor for SEO. Since the majority of web users browse using smartphones, Google predominantly uses mobile-first indexing.
4. Pick a theme that supports most plugins
On WordPress, you can access thousands of unique plugins to improve your site’s aesthetics, increase functionality, and add useful features such as payment gateways.
When selecting a theme for your WordPress site, pick one that works well with additional plugins.
5. Use advanced SEO plugins
Using the best SEO plugins on WordPress can help you boost your site. A good SEO plugin should help you generate tags and meta descriptions with the right keywords.
For example, Yoast SEO, one of the most widely used WordPress plugins, helps you with keywords, meta tags and descriptions, URLs, XML Sitemaps, Schema Markups, and more. You can choose between Yoast’s free and paid versions based on your budget and requirements.
6. Optimize your permalink structure
The permanent URL to each page on your site should be structured correctly to help search engines crawl and index your site.
If you’re wondering how to create an effective URL, keep the following tips in mind. An SEO- friendly URL should:
- Be relevant and descriptive
- Be easy to read and understand
- Include target keywords
- Avoid underscores and use hyphens instead
- Avoid dates or years
For example, if your link reads: www.example.wordpress.com/sdwandqw443, search engines will find it difficult to index your article correctly. However, if it reads www.example.com/best-SEO-techniques-for-WordPress, it helps search engines understand your article is about the best SEO techniques for WordPress.
7. Improve page speed
We’ve already established that page speed is integral to SEO, but how can you improve your page speed?
Here are our top tips:
- Optimize your images using a plugin like Optimizilla
- Use a CDN like Cloudflare or MaxCDN to improve page load times
- Avoid using too many plugins, and ensure the ones that you select are compatible with each other
- Leverage browser caching using plugins like the W3 Total Cache plugin
- Clean up your database
You can also hire a professional web developer to analyze your page speed and implement a customized plan to improve it.
How do you optimize on-page SEO?
Here are some quick tips to ensure that each page on your WordPress site is properly structured and contains the necessary elements to optimize it for search engine rankings.
1. Use proper headings throughout your content
For search engines to accurately index your site, your meta tags and descriptions are no doubt important, but your overall content should also follow an understandable chronological structure. As a rule of thumb, each page should have one H1 and then H2s, H3s, and H4s following in chronological order.
- H1: The Best Pet Toys To Purchase Online Now
- H2: Best Dog Toys
- H3: Bones
- H3: Chew toys
- H3: Rubber balls
- H2: Top Cat Toys
- H3: Interactive cat toys
- H3: Catnip
- H3: Plushies
- H2: Things to Consider When Purchasing Toys for Your Pets
2. Add internal links
Internal linking on your website helps establish relevance between different pages and encourages visitors to spend more time on your site, improving search engine rankings. It also helps to distribute link equity, from your most important pages to inner ones, what SEOs call “link flow”.
It’s important to pay attention to the anchor text being used for internal linking. The anchor text should be descriptive yet concise and avoid generic words like “click here.”
Moreover, your internal links shouldn’t appear forced. Instead, they should fit well with the rest of the content. If a link isn’t flowing naturally in a particular paragraph, rewrite it or place it elsewhere.
3. Add external links to authoritative websites
External links to authoritative websites enhance the credibility of your site and increase the value of your content for your visitors. While linking to sites with a high domain authority is helpful for SEO, it’s more important to ensure your links and sources are relevant.
Bonus WordPress SEO Tip
Ensure your WordPress website does not have a sitewide “no index” tag that will prevent it from appearing in search results. Sometimes, your site might default to the “no index” mode while you’re developing it, so check your settings to ensure that search engines are able to index your site.
The Auq team has years of experience in technical and on-page SEO techniques as well as high-quality content creation. Get in touch with us to start boosting your site’s SEO today!