Whether you’re launching a WordPress website and you want to make an impact, or you have an existing one that you’ve been ignoring. I’ve rounded up 10 of my favourite SEO tips that will enable you to gain some quick and long lasting wins. These SEO tips will give your website a much needed boost, which will result in a better search engine ranking and an improved experience for your users.
Many people find maintaining their WordPress website intimidating, but starting with your websites foundations such as hosting, CDN, theme choice, and caching you’ll be off to a flying start.
Once you have your foundations in place you can start to make small changes that will build on top of this to give you big results. Changes include cleaning up your categories and tags, fixing permalinks, dealing with pesky spam comments, and improving your meta data.
All of these things combined will help put you ahead of your competition. By employing these top 10 SEO tips you’ll speed up your website and improve the structure and associated data of your content. This will make your website more search engine friendly resulting in better rankings, more visitors and a higher conversion of fans and customers.
1.Web hosting
Setting up website hosting is the first key to a successful website. If you have a slow, unresponsive website, there is no doubt that your bounce rate will increase and you will lose users. So before you leap into hosting service providers, it is important to ask about support for plugins, the type of backup support they offer, staging environment, volume of bandwidth and the operating system they use.
Web hosting choice shouldn’t be a fast decision. You should have time to think and analyse different options before you settle for a single web host especially if you are a beginner. Although you don’t need to be a web developer to self-host a site, you shouldn’t treat the choice light-heartedly. It is one of the most important decisions in your websites life.
2. CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is popular among those people who want to boost the speed of their website. A CDN changes the way a site handles static content such as JavaScript, CSS and images. A CDN caches your static content to create faster loading pages and it reduces the response times to provide a better user experience, which also helps you rank higher in the search engine results. If you have used a CDN before, you may have noticed that it is legitimately the fastest and easiest way to improve your site speed, which helps with your search engine rankings.
3. SEO friendly theme
Although not everyone tries to find SEO friendly WordPress themes, there are some business owners who make an effort to do so which is a good thing. What most people do is try to find the theme that looks the prettiest. You can however clear out your bookmarked themes in no time by going with one that has clean and fast code, a limited number of CSS and JavaScript files, a simple layout and a responsive design. Making use of Schema Markup is also beneficial since it tells the search engines the part where the most relevant content can be found.
4. Cache Plugin
With a simple click, you can improve your websites speed by making use of a caching plugin. If you are looking for the ultimate launch checklist for top SEO results, this should be on your list. Unlike other plugins, caching is rarely regarded as an unnecessary download. After you have activated your plugin, remember to go over to the settings area and enable your cache.
5. Categories
It is advisable to noindex your categories to avoid making it difficult for Google to know which content to show for results. It is important to understand that your categories are always broad topics of your blog posts within WordPress. So think of categories as your table of contents. In WordPress, to be relevant to search engines, you should categorise your posts to avoid ending up in the uncategorised section which helps no one.
6. Tags
Before, tagging your content in WordPress meant that you were confused or keyword-obsessed. However, your tags must undergo a resurgence that exceeds keyword stuffing whether you understand the basics or want to fix your current tag status. To be safe, you should consider the following:
- Remember not all posts need tags
- Delete underused or overused tags every month
- Keep the tags precise
7. Permalinks
Permalinks are beneficial in many different ways. Apart from just structuring your URLs with keywords, they also increase search rankings and create short links among other benefits. It is important to understand that the default setting is not SEO friendly. This is why it is advisable to always update your settings.
8. Spam comments
The good thing about the newer versions of WordPress is that they are nofollowing links that are posted in comments. Your site can be damaged by a whole slew of spam comments crammed into one blog post that doesn’t have any relationship with the topic. SEO experts recommend that you disallow anonymous posting and also use CAPTCHAs to block automated spamming. You can also disallow hyperlinks or use The “nofollow” attribute to be safe.
9. Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions
Every successful website has a story behind its creation but there are common features that make a good SEO friendly website. They include the Yoast SEO plugin, and make use of it’s meta title and meta description fields. There is no doubt that you will have improved SEO results by using the features within this plugin. It has been proven that meta titles and descriptions increase traffic and engagement. This is why they are among these 10 WordPress SEO launch tips to help get your website seen.
10. XML Sitemaps
The Yoast SEO plugin also includes a sitemap feature which you should activate.. If you’re a beginner and would like to be relevant to the search engines, you need to have a sitemap. It contains all your posts and pages in a simple list which makes it easy for search engines to read.
Although keeping up with the pace of WordPress technology may be rough, knowing what to do to make your content popular should be your first priority, the rest will just fall into place.
