Improve your WordPress SEO – With over a third of all websites using WordPress, the publishing platform is well-designed for SEO. However, if you want your website to rank higher than your competitor’s site, you still need to put in some work yourself. Let’s take a look at how you can improve your WordPress SEO.
Why choose WordPress?
WordPress is a powerful platform that offers easy ways for anyone to build a website and manage content without having to learn code.
It’s a flexible platform that has thousands of plugins and themes at your fingertips! WordPress also has specific features that help it stand out from other platforms, such as the use of tags and categories.
Choose the right hosting platform
What does hosting have to do with SEO? Well, search engines like Google prioritise user experience above many other factors. When you use a good hosting platform your website loads fast- a critical SEO factor. There are also other things that your hosting provider affects as well, for example, what happens if you lose your website data or get hacked?
A good hosting platform will help you recover your content with data backup solutions. They can provide you with an SSL certificate as part of your hosting package which creates a positive trust between your website and Google, and your human users too!
Optimise your tags and categories
In WordPress, you can organise your posts into tags and categories. This makes your posts easy to find and organise and also builds context for your content.
Categories are broad groupings of your post. Tags allow you to add more specific topic tags to a blog post. For example, if you own a digital marketing blog like us, a category might be ‘SEO’ and then you can use tags like ‘keyword research’ or ‘google trends’ to help your readers find specific content.
To use tags more effectively, you need to plan and organise your content. Think about ways you can group your posts. Every time you make a post, categorise it correctly so that it makes sense and creates context.
Customise your permalinks
improve your WordPress SEO – Your permalinks are the URL’s or addresses that your pages and posts ‘live on’. One of the first things you should do when setting up your website is to make sure your permalinks are user-friendly.
On your dashboard and under settings > permalinks, make sure that you select the ‘post name’ option for displaying your posts. When you do this, your URL for a post or page will match the title of your post.
Optimise comments
When you have user activity and engagement on your website, you generate more backlinks to your website, get more traffic and as a result, create good SEO signals.
You can make your website even more engaging by allowing people to comment on your posts. However, you’re likely to receive spam comments which create a poor user experience and make your website look bad.
Every WordPress site comes with an automatic download of Akismet. A plugin that filters spam comments. Using a plugin like this and captcha tools is a great way to build good comments on your blog.
Use a good SEO plugin
One of the best steps you can take is to invest in a premium SEO plugin for your WordPress website. This gives you a tool that can automate a number of SEO tasks and make sure that the technical aspects of SEO are taken care of. When picking an SEO tool, you want to make sure you choose one that does the following;
- Adds an XML website that lists all the pages on your website. An XML sitemap tells search engines what content is available and how to find them.
- Connects to your Google Search Console easily so you can get data about traffic and the users who are coming to your site.
- Optimise your posts by letting you add a title, description and keyword focus, An SEO plugin can help you preview what your website looks like as a snippet in a search result. This helps you add the right kind of content to get more clicks.
If you don’t have the relevant knowledge to do these steps manually, it’s a great idea to find a plugin that does it for you!
Do you want to improve your WordPress SEO?
Working on your SEO is an ongoing process. You need to keep building content and doing research to help your audience find you. It’s important that you create the solid foundations of a successful SEO set-up so that you can create the best chance of your website ranking from the very beginning.
Do you need some help getting started? We understand now every business owner has the time to dedicate to SEO tactics, which is why we offer a range of bespoke SEO packages, tailored to your specific needs. Interested? Get in touch with our team by calling 01752 746890 or emailing us at info@electrondigital.co.uk.
