7 Ways to Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress SEO
Improving your WordPress website or blog’s SEO is crucial if you’re looking to generate more traffic to your site.
In fact, you just have to check out WordPress’ own list of ‘powerful features’ on their homepage in order to see that they are proud of the fact that the digital platform is SEO-friendly.
But this doesn’t mean that simply launching a WordPress website is sufficient in order to rank at the top of the search engines. You are still required to understand the correct SEO tactics to use as well as how to implement these. But the wonderful news is that WordPress makes this easy to do and makes it quite easy for beginners to grow their traffic from Google.
Steps to Boost Your WordPress SEO
Choose Your Hosting Provider Carefully
Since Google takes speed into account when ranking sites, a good host can help push you to the top of the SERPs. Your host also affects the amount of downtime your site experiences and the physical distance between digital servers and visitors — both of which are ranking factors.
If you haven’t created your website yet, you’ll want to choose a host that’s reliable and has a reputation for excellent performance. Even for an existing site, you may want to consider switching hosts if your current provider doesn’t meet these criteria.
Pick a Theme That’s Optimized for Search Engines
Your theme is one of the most important choices you’ll make for your WordPress site. It determines your site’s appearance and layout, can provide new functionality, and also plays a role in its SEO. For example, your theme can affect your site’s speed — which is vital. The way a theme was developed also matters since clean code gives your site the best chance in SERPs.
Use a Dedicated SEO Plugin
If you’re new to WordPress, you may not yet be familiar with plugins. These are small pieces of add-on software you can install, which add new features and functionality to your site. There’s a plugin to help your site do just about anything — including rank higher in search engines. In fact, there are many plugins designed specifically to improve your site’s SEO.
Change Your ‘Permalink’ Structure
Permalinks are the permanent URLs that point to your site’s individual posts, pages, and other content. They’re what people will use to reference and link back to your site, and their appearance matters. Clear, descriptive links that describe their content are easier for search engines to make sense of and tend to get a ranking boost.
Use Heading Tags Throughout Your Content
While a sitemap is useful for helping search engine crawlers see how your site is organized, it doesn’t help them make sense of the individual content. For that, you’ll need to use heading tags. These are formatting options you can apply to section headings within pages and posts.
Incorporate Useful Internal and External Links
Google and other search engines don’t consider your website in a vacuum. Instead, they look at how well it’s connected, both internally and to other sites. Using plenty of links throughout your posts and pages tells crawlers how they relate to similar content. It also encourages other people to link back to your site — which in turn communicates to search engines that your marketing content is valuable!
Optimize Your Images
Images are important for just about any website. They provide visual appeal and context, plus they help break up text and make it more readable. As you’ve probably guessed, they can also have an impact on your SEO. For one, the quality and size of your images can affect your pages’ loading speed, which is a ranking factor. Also, crawlers will look at certain information attached to images — such as filenames and ‘alt text’ — when trying to index and understand your site.