A crucial part of digital marketing is ensuring that your website is visible to anyone who is searching for solutions online related to your industry. After all, a website doesn’t serve its purpose if there are no visitors to it.
There are a lot of things you can do to get visitors to your website. One of them is the most obvious. In fact, you should not launch your website if you are not doing WordPress SEO. Basically, it is optimizing the WordPress site and observing SEO measures from the backend of your website.
In this article, we will share a few simple but important tips you can do within the WordPress platform to ensure your top spot in the search engine results pages.
1. Install SEO Plugins
WordPress is a robust platform. It has a lot of functionalities. But, remember it was not originally made for SEO purposes. It is CMS by nature and there are only a few basic SEO functions that the platform can perform.
Fortunately, WordPress can be connected with a lot of plugins that provides SEO functionalities. One of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress is Yoast SEO.
The plugin allows you to properly optimize your pages and posts in WordPress by providing a checklist of the technical things you need to work on such as your title tags, meta tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and a lot more.
There are also plugins that let you access a drag-and-drop builder to create stunning websites that comply with SEO standards.
2. Update your Permalinks
Aside from the keywords, the next important thing in SEO is the permalinks and URLs of your pages and posts.
Permalinks should contain your keywords at the very least. Moreover, they are important in creating a more organized structure to your website.
Setting permalinks is very easy in WordPress. All you need to do is go to the Settings tab on the left sidebar of your dashboard and choose Permalinks.
Generally, you can pick from a pre-defined template of permalink structures. But, it is always recommended to choose the “/%postname%/” option, especially when your post titles contain your keywords. Ultimately, this will be helpful to both the search engines and your visitors.
3. Create a Sitemap
We have already mentioned how important it is to maintain an organized structure on your website. Google actually uses a sitemap to parse the website and find web pages that are worthy of being indexed. So, make sure you create a sitemap for your website.
You can easily create a sitemap in Yoast SEO. Alternatively, you can consider using another plugin called Google XML Sitemaps too.
4. Use Google Analytics for Tracking
If you have started digital marketing and SEO, you already know how important it is to measure your progress using Google Analytics.
The minor issue here is that it is not that efficient going back and forth from your WordPress Dashboard and your Google Analytics Dashboard to study your metrics.
So, consider installing Google Analytics in the WordPress platform. This will allow you to access the data in your Google Analytics account right inside the WordPress environment.
5. Install SEO Themes
Did you know that the choice of theme to use for your website actually impacts the SEO functionalities of your WordPress website?
There are themes that are created for different purposes. Some are for e-commerce websites and others for creating portfolios. So, it is important that you properly choose a theme that will give you more room and opportunities to implement SEO.
We advise you to spend time going over the different themes in the marketplace. Take a closer look at the features of a theme and compare them with one another before choosing one that best suits your specific needs.
6. Implement Media Optimization
People now prefer to see more visual elements and only digest bite-sized information when they visit a website. The problem is that putting a lot of videos and images on your website would cause it to load very slowly.
Moreover, if you do not optimize your images and videos right, all your other SEO efforts will go to waste. So, how do you actually optimize them? It is fairly simple.
Every image or video you upload to WordPress will have an alt-text and this is where you want to put your keywords.
Also, do not forget to optimize the size of your images. Make their size smaller and their dimensions just right for where they need to be placed on your website.
This will make sure that your website will load quickly and will not interfere with the customer experience. Remember, the happier and more satisfied your customer is while browsing through your website, the higher your chances of being on top of the search engines are.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are still a lot of WordPress SEO tactics you should do if you want to ensure higher rankings in no time.
So, do not be in a hurry and discover what WordPress has to offer when it comes to helping you with SEO. Be patient because it will take time and it will be a trial-and-error process that will demand focus and attention.
About Ritu Sharma:
Ritu Sharma is the Content Insights Manager at SEO Services Company PageTraffic, one of Asia’s most award-winning & recognized Digital Search Marketing agency. She has been the spear head of many successful Content Marketing Campaigns for PageTraffic.
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