How to improve the SEO of your WordPress site?

You have created your Best WordPress site, with awesome themes & plugins. But what if the site doesn’t rank for particular keywords? Your website won’t gain traffic and ranking. How to route the traffic on your site? Then, you have to think of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your site. Even though there are many ways to route the traffic on your site, SEO is the most successful method to get high ranking on the search engine. This will help to grow your site’s performance as well as opens new opportunities. A highly-ranked site has the appearance of being more sound and reliable.

If you are completely not aware of SEO, then no need to worry. As you have created a website in WordPress, you are already on the way of SEO because WordPress platform is well-optimized for Search Engines. Additionally, there are multiple techniques & tricks with which you can improve SEO for your WordPress site. Let’s discuss them now:

1.     Implement Search Engine Optimization friendly themes:

People generally choose a theme that looks beautiful & attractive. But I will suggest you choose only those themes which are SEO friendly. WordPress offers a set of themes to your website that gives a base to your site. SEO friendly themes support 2 important things: they are Speed and the code.  With the trendy SEO best practices, a well-crafted theme ensures that Google bots will crawl through source code & find the right code.

Important points to be considered to include:

1. To improve social media sharing include open graph meta tag. Let me tell you what is the meaning of Open Graph meta tags. They are snippets of text which communicates a page’s content with social media (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
2. Use all the tags correctly including Header tag, Meta tag, Title Tag.
3. Make appropriate use of the canonical URL meta tag.

2.     Choose Your Hosting Provider smartly:

Page load time is an important factor while measuring the performance of the site. And page load time depends on your hosting service provider. Google examines websites speed while ranking the website, an ideal hosting service will assist you to rank on the top of Search Engine Result Pages. One more point to be considered here is your website gets affected by downtime and geographic location of the hosting server and target audience of the website. Ideally hosting server should be closer to your website’s target audience. Google gives an uplift to HTTPs secure sites.

Hence, the hosting provider you have chosen plays an important for SEO. Because your website performance depends on hosting provider and type of hosting that you have chosen for your WordPress website.

Hostdens has servers located in more 17 countries so that it reduces load time to reach to your target audience. Additionally, it gives 99.9% uptime, so you don’t have to really worry about downtime. If you have not yet selected web hosting service yet or want to change your existing non-reliable host then go for Hostdens.

3.      Apply dedicated SEO Plugins:

Plugins are software add-ons that permit the modification of computer programs, games, apps, web browsers, and websites, etc. Plugins help the web pages and websites were not only to appear as big textual chunks, but also they are to there to assist your content to rank better (search engine optimized). They even help to showcase videos from YouTube or other video hosting platform on your website, moreover, also help to customize fonts of your website. To improve your website’s On-Page SEO performance, Plugins used to show Google SERP snippet preview. It gives an idea of how a website will look like in search engine result pages after entering the query from users. Plugins are all of the little add-ons that optimize the content you put out as an online creator.

Top 3 Best WordPress SEO plugins:

• Yoast SEO: This is the plugin that helps to install WordPress easily. It allows you to edit snippet of your entries and pages while doing on-page SEO activity for your web pages. If you want to alter the structure of permanent links, even you can do everything from plugin without disturbing the files of FTP.

• All in one SEO pack: For beginners, it’s easy to use, creative and has advanced features like AMP support, XML sitemap support, Google Analytics support and an API for developers.

• Google Analytics Dashboard: This plugin will give you the analytics of no of visitors to your site and behavior of your audience. Install this Google Analytics plugin and connect your account with your WordPress in just two clicks.

4.      Use SEO friendly URL structure

To indicate your site’s separate pages, posts, and the content, URLs are used called Permalinks. Permalinks are links where the people click on, hence their appearance or structure matters. Clear and narrative links that express their content of the webpage are easier for search engines to make sense of and tend to get a ranking boost.

SEO friendly URLs are those URLs that contain words that distinctly explain the content of the page, and search engines and people are able to read and understand it.

SEO friendly URLs Ex. are:

https://hostdens.com/cheap-wordpress-hosting.php

http://blog.hostdens.com/why-wordpress-hosting

Notice that these URLs are readable and a user can guess what they will see on the page just by looking at the URL text.

5.      Create a ‘Sitemap’:

A sitemap is a list of all pages that your site contains generally structured as a hierarchy. It acts as a guide to new users, how to navigate on your website. Moreover, it helps search engine bots to communicate the information present on the site.  It does not mean that when you add the sitemap for your website, it will directly boost SEO, but its valuable SEO tool. It enables crawlers to see all the pages of your site and understand how they relate to one another. This makes it easier for search engines to index your site. For a WordPress site its easy process to add a sitemap. You can do this with a selected plugin or comprehensive SEO tool such as Yoast SEO.

6.      Build Your Content around Keywords

Choose the right keywords for each page and each post and use it in the title, the heading, and the content itself to communicate your topic to search engine crawlers and increase the chances of showing your content in relevant searches. But, one thing to keep mind that it’s best practice to avoid keyword stuffing in the content.

7.      Avoid uploading heavy files:

As discussed earlier, page load time is very important when it comes to SEO, so do not make your page heavy to load on the browser. Optimize the size of images, videos, heavy fonts. WordPress permits you to add the title and alt tags when you upload an image. If your site requires more photos then you need to use a gallery plugin. For ex. Envira Gallery

8.      Link to other articles from your posts:

If you want to position a post, get links and strengthen your SEO in WordPress in quick way links to other people. They will receive a pingback or notice that they have been linked and they will go to see your post, share it, comment and take you into account to link in the future. As search engines assign a score or Page Authority

Conclusion:

Building & maintaining a website easy but the most important thing is to rank the website in search engine. WordPress is one of the best ways to build your website. Many SEO professionals experienced that WordPress is the most SEO friendly. Use the above points while doing SEO of your WordPress website.