WordPress is among the best content management systems for website development, management & SEO. While you can pull a lot right “out of the box”, there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to improving performance.
Website optimisation using the best practices and tactics boost its ranking on the search engine, draw more sales and subscriptions while delivering the best online user experience. All of these aspects are ingrained in good SEO which better up your online marketing and PR strategies. The details here would help you get acquainted with the best SEO practices using WordPress and its Yoast SEO plugin that add more features and search engine optimisation tools. Read on to find out more.
- Begin with the Right WordPress SEO
Basic setup; without extensive custom settings, unnecessary plugins and theme optimization, provides a stronger foundation for a better ranking, refined workflow and a fully optimized website. With the appropriate settings and basic grasp on SEO functions, you can ensure an exceptional website promising the best user experience.
- Content & Site Structure Optimisation
Engaging and authoritative content is the key to digital greatness and website with the highest domain authority. High-quality content for a WordPress site is possible only through distinct, diverse, creative and unique ideas, centered on a particular topic however, each must be well-organised, structured and accessible to users. All of these features are sure to pull a wider audience and keep them engaged.
When website structure is concerned, it has to be extremely user-friendly and navigable while ensuring clarity, existence as well as significance of a page. This particular aspect can be achieved with contextual interlinking and appropriate website organisation.
- Speeding Up a WordPress Website
Website speed is one of the most important elements of WordPress SEO which factors in overall user experience. It’s obvious that a slow and dull website frustrates users while increasing the bounce rate. Such visitors are unlikely to recommend, engage, browse, convert or even visit the website ever again. As a result, you’ll lack share-worthy content, page links and brand recognition on the digital front. Make sure your website performs above the mark for both desktop and mobile users. Seek professional web design agency support and services on this particular aspect to gain a competitive edge!
- Security
With website development and management, WordPress is one of the widest and most used platforms. A statistical revelation from March 2019 tells us that WordPress websites acquire approximately 40% share of the internet. As awesome as it sounds, it also makes WordPress most vulnerable to hackers which is why internet security is another crucial factor to look into.
Make your website more secure, starting from login credentials like the default username ‘admin’ that must be changed whereas the same rule’s applicable for passwords that must be more than the typical ‘12345’ or ‘welcome’.
Just in-case you’re unable to think of any password, use an automatic generation tool that puts on the table more than 20 passwords for you to choose from! While password management tools such as 1Password or LastPass give more than 20 password variants, WordPress comes with a number of two-factor verification plugins that works exceptionally well.
- Don’t Ever Ignore Mobile Users
Digitalisation introduced us with yet another innovative way of conducting business activities, that is ‘on the move’. A lot happens when users are moving from one place to another, wait in lines, at the bakery, at cinemas, checking social media and much more. All of it makes our mobile devices a de facto way to browse the internet which is why a mobile-optimised website is a winning key.
In 2018, Statcounter revealed that the mobile market share surpassed that of desktop in many different ways. Using WordPress, you can develop a super powerful, engaging and amazing website as well as enable you for mobile SEO.
- Analyse & Improve
Implementation and impact measurement of the changes can result in a good performing SEO campaign since it tells what works and what doesn’t. Google presented two amazing tools that analyses website performance results as well as identify future opportunities to focus on.
Google Analytics is to analyse results and adding it to a website stores all user data in your personal account. You can monitor the number of page visits, conversions, bounce/abandon rate once a visitor lands on a certain page and much more. Google Analytics also helps you track overall user’s website crawling behaviour.
Google Search Console is another tool, meant to analyse website’s performance and the way it appears before users on the search engine. Export and sorting with impressions and search query data can easily help in identifying opportunities allowing you to improve the clickthrough rates, content as well as ranking.
Optimising the Blog – Quick SEO Tips
Begin by targeting the right keywords to familiarize Google with the content for it increases the likelihood of your blog to pop up against a specific search query. Focus only on a single keyword against a topic. Yoast SEO plugin needs a particular keyword when publishing the content while ensuring it’s being used appropriately. Understanding user intent is important which simply refers to the search query entered into the search bar
- Low Difficulty & Long-Tailed Keyword
Keyword difficulty is another important metric to make your article more relevant and visible. The higher the difficulty level, fiercer would be the competition which reduces performance against other competitive search terms. Always choose keywords having a decent traffic volume with low competition. Keyword difficulty can be gauged using free tools such as AdWords Keyword Tool or, a premium more advanced SEO tool like Ahrefs. You can even take expert advice from a creative digital marketing agency in dubai for instance.
Keywords based on three to four phrases are referred to as longtail that are highly product specific and easier to rank because of low competition. When a blog reader searches using a highly specific phrase, content which matches the intent is likely to rank high. Placement is another important factor so make sure the content is sensibly utilized in the title, description, subheadings and so on.
- Persuasive Titles & Meta Descriptions
Click-Through Rate (CTR), for a page is yet another ranking factor on Google which means that a specific blog content receiving higher number of clicks to that of previous would eventually lift it up on the page. This is possible only if the best practices are ongoing to ensure you stay on the top position. Write compelling titles and attention-grabbing descriptions that are persuasive enough for visitors to click and convert. Keep the tone natural without over and unnecessary use of keywords.
- Responsive Blog
Google prefers mobile-first indexing which means a mobile website is to be determined for ranking higher against the search queries even when the query is launched from desktop. This is possible if you’ve selected a responsive WordPress theme and there’re many to choose from depending on your blog type and target demographics.
- Featured Snippets
You can get the most from your blog content by optimizing it against the featured snippets that appear on the search page right above the first result, in a box, as an image, video or in a tabular format. Their distinct appearance makes them stand out in the search results which boost the chances of getting more clicks. Featured snippets you’ll come across are:
- Paragraph
- Numeric and bullet-point list
- Table format
- Video
Drive more traffic to your blog by featured snippet content optimisation.
- Image Optimization
Even the most pro blogger is sometimes unfamiliar of the fact that Google Image Search drives a lot of traffic only if you’ve properly optimized the images. Give it a further boost by adding appropriate description in the Alternative Text area thus making it recognizable by Google in terms of user intent and product discovery.
- Website’s Load Speed
A website’s loading speed is crucial to win or repel visitors based on total time it takes for a page to load. As an important ranking factor, you’ll need to optimise a website against faster loading as compared to that of your competitors. To analyse the page speed and boost it up, simply go to Google PageSpeed Insights, enter the URL in the respective area and proceed accordingly.
Now that we know all about optimizing websites using WordPress, are you ready to make your search engine and user friendly?
