What Is WordPress?
WordPress powers more than 42% of the web. Yes, almost half of all websites. This astonishing figure is helping anyone from business owners to bloggers share their content with the world, whether that be for financial benefits or simply connecting with an audience.
WordPress is one of the most popular management systems used today. But why exactly is everyone using this platform to fuel their website? Well, not only is its simple functionality incredible for customising your site as you please, but it is also backed with a range of features and plugins for users to effectively optimise their WordPress site for increased visibility. In this article, we will explore our top 10 WordPress seo tips for your business, and show you how to implement this into your site.
What Is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimisation) involves optimising various on-page and off-page elements on your website in order for Google to rank you highly in the results page. There is a large list of areas that will affect your ranking factor, and simply using WordPress isn’t alone enough to get you gaining more organic traffic. However, there are a range of SEO tactics that the platform has made easy for you to implement, and hopefully contribute to the growth of your business.
Our Top 10 WordPress SEO Tips
1. Optimising Titles, Slugs, & Meta Descriptions
When creating new posts and pages on your WordPress website, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to assist you with optimising the content. This plug-in will help you with writing titles and descriptions that are fully optimised for Google, and will give you a score in the process to show you which areas need improving. From the specific results, you can then directly alter areas that will have an impact on your SEO, to ensure that you have the capability to rank higher.
As shown below, you will be presented with a bar loading from red to green. To have the best chance of getting visible online, you want your content to be reaching the green area of the bar. There are then further results presented from the plugin that will tell you information such as whether you have used your keyword appropriately, and whether more links are needed within the page content.
2. Carrying Out & Implementing Keyword Research
Keyword research will enable you to become visible for specific search terms you are looking to target. You will want to focus on keywords that your target audience are searching for, to make sure that you are becoming visible to people directly looking for your services. With this information, you can then optimise blog posts and pages so that their chances are increased for ranking highly for those search queries. This process will involve not only the use of your keywords, but also creating engaging & eye-catching content to keep visitors interested.
3. Including Internal & Outbound Linking
Within your page content, always make sure to include internal and external links. This will help Google understand which pages in your website are of most importance and help with navigation for visitors. Internal linking improves your site user experience and can contribute to decreasing bounce rates. It is also a highly effective tactic for lead generation, as you can direct people to converting pages.
Outbound linking is then the process of linking to a different website, which shows Google that your content is of a high quality and backed up by other resources. It also presents that you value your audience and are providing reliable content for them. 41% of SEO experts consider link building to be the most difficult part of search optimisation!
4. Appropriate Use Of Categories and Tags
Optimising categories will have a great impact on your SEO, especially if you are an ecommerce site. This is where you need to make sure that there is no duplicate content, or duplicate tags. When selling products, people can make the mistake of optimising every product page competing for the same term. Make sure to differentiate these for their uniqueness, and add an internal link back to the main category page.
5. Adding Alt-Tags To Images
WordPress makes it easy to add alt-tags, titles, captions and descriptions to any imagery you add to your website. Not only do alt-tags enable search engine crawlers to understand the context of an image meaning it can be indexed appropriately, but they also help with accessibility for visually-impaired visitors using screen readers.
6. Using SEO-Friendly URLs
When creating pages and posts to share, you can then edit the URL to overwrite the URL created in the settings permalink section for each published. Here, you will want to include your keyword, along with a short hyphenated description of the exact content.
7. Submitting Your XML SiteMap
An XML sitemap is a file which lists your most important pages to enable Google to easily track and crawl them. This is incredibly important for your SEO, as it will help Google rank specific pages in search engines for the most appropriate search terms. This file can be found through the Yoast SEO plugin. Here, toggle to general and then access features to turn on XML sitemaps and save. You can then click the question mark to view your sitemap and integrate it easily with webmaster tools such as Google Search Console.
8. Optimising Page Headings
When adding content to your website pages or posts, always make sure to correctly use heading tags to present hierarchy. Ranging from H1 – H6, your H1 tag will tell crawlers and visitors what the page is about and is of the highest importance. These heading tags will have a direct impact on your ranking positions, and will help communicate to web browsers on how to correctly organise and display your content.
9. Optimising Your Site Speed
Your page loading speed is vital in engaging visitors within seconds. People will click onto your competitors if they cannot find what they are looking for quickly, and Google will notice this too! A few ways that you can speed up your page loading speed is by making sure all imagery uploaded is compressed to a smaller file, videos are not directly uploaded but rather included as a link, and that you don’t have any unnecessary plugins and themes installed.
10. Uploading New Content & Updating Old Posts
WordPress has made it easy to upload and edit content, so make sure to keep content up-to-date and consistently add new posts. This is key to increasing your website traffic, Google recognises websites that are regularly active and will then crawl this fresh content to index. If you are writing high-quality content, Google notices that you are adding valuable information for your readers that will increase your chances of ranking highly. Uploading new content also gives you the chance to target new keywords, which will make sure you are placed in front of the right audience.
Boost Your WordPress Website With Audeo
At Audeo, we offer a range of SEO services for WordPress, and offer web design and development services from scratch. We have experience in working for a variety of sectors, creating tailored strategies that have proven highly successful for each client we have worked with. Our SEO services for WordPress include keyword research, content marketing, link building and ongoing support for your site health. We can help manage all SEO aspects of your site, or directly target anything you are specifically looking to work on. Get in touch with our team on hello@weareaudeo.com to start landing more clients today.
