WordPress website SEO is crucial to generating traffic. Pay attention to WordPress SEO to improve your ranking on search engines. According to experts, WordPress is SEO-friendly, so most people choose it for blogging and website creation. There are many ways to improve SEO, but best practices should be used to get great results fast.
We will share how to use WordPress SEO best practices to increase organic traffic to your websites.
WordPress SEO
WordPress is a web content management system. It was created as a blog publishing tool but evolved into support publishing a wide range of web content, including traditional websites, mailing lists & Internet forums, media galleries, learning management systems, membership sites, and online stores.
Available as open and accessible source software. It is one of the most popular content management systems used by 43.1% of the top 10 million sites in 2023.
SEO stands for search engine optimization, a strategy to increase traffic to your website by ranking higher in search engines.
It’s not about tricking search engines into ranking your website higher; it's simply about creating a website with optimized code and formatting that makes it easy for search engines to find.
When people type in the search bar for topics you write about, if your content is search-engine-optimized, it will appear higher in the search results, increasing website traffic.
Importance of SEO
Search engines are mostly the most significant source of traffic for websites.
Search engines use advanced algorithms to understand & rank pages in search results. But those algorithms aren’t perfect and need help from you to understand what your content is about.
If your content isn’t optimized, search engines will not know how to rank your website. This will result in your website not appearing in search results when people search for it.
WordPress SEO Best Practices
Learning a few WordPress SEO best practices will help improve and give a noticeable boost to your website traffic.
Site’s Visibility Settings- a built-in option to hide the website. The purpose is to give time to work on the website before it goes public. Uncheck this option if your website does not appear in the search engine.
SEO-Friendly URL Structures—SEO-friendly URLs clearly explain the content and are easy for humans and search engines to read. The URLs should be readable so a user can guess what will be on the page just by looking at them.
The Best SEO plugin- WordPress has a plugin for everything, including SEO. The best two are AIOSEO or Yoast SEO. AIOSEO has more powerful features and is innovating faster.
Add XML Sitemaps— a specially formatted file listing every website page, making finding content accessible for search engines. XML Sitemaps help search engines find pages quickly and rank them.
Adding a website to Google Search Console, aka Webmaster Tools, provides a way to see how content will appear on search engines by providing reports and data. It also provides the search terms users type to find your website, each page's appearance in the search results, and how often users click pages.
Optimizing Blog Posts for SEO— Top SEO plugins allow you to add an SEO title, focus keyword, and meta description to every page and blog post. They also show a preview of how it will appear on Google. Optimize the title and description to get maximum clicks.
Keyword Research for Website- a research technique used by SEO experts and content creators. It helps users discover words they enter in the search bar to find content, services, and products in a specific industry.
Proper Use of Categories & Tags—WordPress allows users to sort blog posts into categories and tags. This makes managing content by topic easy for users.
Making Internal Links will help boost pageviews, increase users' time spent on the site, and improve the SEO score of individual blog posts and pages.
Doing WordPress SEO can be a bit technical and thus intimidating, but worry not—many SEO agencies/companies, including RankHigher, will provide SEO optimization WordPress services.
Conclusion
There are many practices to improve WordPress SEO. The long list is intimidating, but adopting a few and consistently working on website SEO will bring outstanding results. The key is to stay consistent and updated. SEO optimization WordPress is a long but advantageous process.