Search Engine Optimization on WordPress

In the article below you’ll find and review tips through the WordPress SEO targeting instruments and other advantageous tools to improve your website’s visibility to search engines like Google or Bing.

Make use of search tools to maintain the updates

Search engines usually do not note your WordPress website’s SEO changes right away. That’s why well-known search engines such as Google offer you a large variety of search tools to help you perfect your website’s performance in search results. For that reason whenever you make any changes to a WordPress website you’d better request search engines to re-index your website content. It may be done by making use of services like Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. 

Customize your web pages and site titles

Search engines tend to order the WordPress site content we’ve described below in the order given: 

  • Site title
  • SEO title
  • Page title
  • Blog post title
  • Heading

How to find best keywords for SEO

When you fill the site with text, you can insert words and phrases that coincide with the search terms people use to discover sites similar to yours as a constituent of your optimization program. These keywords tend to help search engines rank your website as applicable for users who search by those key phrases. 

Your SEO keyword plan will depend on your website goals and your primary audience. Still it’s particularly significant to employ keywords for optimization in a distinct and plain way so in order could be logical for your visitors. 

Researching keywords for your SEO strategy

Next, we’ll learn more about the process of keyword research so that you could compile a list of relevant words you should focus on. Utilizing the below pieces of advice, you’ll be able to make a comprehensive and continuous SEO plan that will help you enhance the place and achieve the goals of your WordPress site on search. 

Form a list of points that are relevant to what you know about your business sphere

First, think about the topics you want the WordPress website to take in a good position in general. As a result, you’ll acquire a listing of 5-10 term buckets that might be somewhat appropriate to your business field and after that you'll use those lists to choose specific keywords. 

If you already have in searching for more keyphrase or word ideas on the recommendations you’ve generated for your site’s optimization.

Structure your content

Significant part of the consequent SEO plan for any WordPress site is correctly assembling the content. You have to take advantage of heading text formatting to structure pages. Search engines usually give headings a maximum priority, similar to titles. That’s why clear and easy to understand headings defining the page content really facilitate detecting the core themes of your site for search engines. Also, they help your website visitors quickly discover the facts they were looking for and glancing over the page. 

Review the following things while working on your SEO plan: 

  • Be careful and avoid using headings for formatting, such as quotes, for instance. 
  • Do not use exactly the same text in several headings. 
  • Add keywords to your headings. 
  • You can use a single type of heading within a single page since your headings are organized and logical. 
  • Be sure the heading sizes are used progressively across your site as a whole and within your pages. 

Needless to say, structuring the content on your site depends on the type of content you create. 

How to write meta tags for SEO

Meta title tag is a page title that is shown in blue in Google and other search engine results. WordPress recommends adding meta titles to all pages of your site and this is rational enough as this is amongst best SEO practices. According to Google, titles are crucial tags in giving users a rapid understanding of the content that a page offers. More than that, this piece of information is used to decide which result to tap into. That’s why you have to look through the guide below to write a genuinely prominent and an uncommon title that will attract new visitors to your WordPress website: 

  • Create an uncommon meta title for every page of your website. 
  • Try to be concise, but deep. 
  • Try not to produce generic and vague titles. 
  • Try not to clickbait. 
  • Try to correspond to users’ search intent. 
  • Add your target keyphrases and keywords if necessary. 
  • Try to write a meta title less than sixty characters long for it won’t fit into the snippet. 

Meta description, for its part, outlines the page’s content. Search engines demonstrate it in the snippet in the SERP. According to Google, any meta description needs to generally give a brief outline of and inform about a specific page of your website. But you need to know besides this that meta descriptions are not considered as a factor impacting ranking by Google. Below you’ll find best SEO practices you might want to see to write a description that will work: 

  • Offer a precise digest of your content.
  • Include your target keywords if it’s needed. 
  • Attempt to correspond to search intent of users. 
  • You should create an uncommon meta description for every page of your WordPress website. 
  • Don’t apply clickbait. 
  • Try to preserve your meta description below 160 symbols
  • Don’t use general descriptions. 

Bear in mind that meta descriptions help visitors to decide whether your website is relevant for them or not. Because of that, you should pay a lot of attention to them when working on your optimization strategy. 

What is local SEO

You may also want to upgrade your site for some. It’s remarkably relevant for those who have some sort of local business like a shop, restaurant, or bureau. Using local SEO best practices should be a great solution for them. 

Optimizing the local business site is all about making it visible for users that live in the matching area and want to find some new brick-and-mortar places. Applying a local SEO plan you should aim at letting Google know that the business is situated on a specific territory and you want to be found by visitors in that area. 

The grand-rule here is that you should give an accurate address in a region/city. If you fulfill this condition, you’ll get an opportunity to create local landing pages. In addition, your website needs to have an accurate Local Business Schema. It is going to help you in demonstrating to Google that your business is situated on a certain territory. Aside from technical and SEO optimization, creating the content that is aimed at local visitors may be a brilliant idea. 

On your WordPress website, there are many places where a site owner could add his location. For instance: 

  • Business info settings
  • Text blocks on the Contacts page
  • Text blocks in the footer
  • Map blocks

Also, you’ll need to start an account in Google My Business as it’ll help you enhance your local rankings and SEO program. Create and manage online listings in Google My Business as a component of your optimization program. 

Enable SSL on your WordPress site

As soon as you switch on SSL on your site, your custom URL starts with https. It means that each page of your website may be approached with a safe connection. Google regards https as a rating sign and websites still using http may be penalized. If you have no clue if SSL is switched on your site, click on the SSL panel and set it to the Secure setting. 

Inbound links, also known as incoming links or backlinks, are links from one site to another website. Google and other major search engines regard backlinks as some kind of support votes for a page these links lead to. Pages with a huge number of backlinks are granted great organic search engine rankings as the more “votes” you have, the higher your site will rank in Google and other search engines. For this reason backlinks should be in the number of the most important parts of your optimization plan. 

Inbound links configure the foundation of Google algorithm PageRank. Google has implemented thousands of modifications to the original PageRank since it has been launched, but incoming links are constantly at its kernel, remaining a principal ranking signal. 

Look through the checklist on the sorts of incoming links that are appreciated the most: 

  • From the website that is topically related to yours. If one website links to another, Google expects to see that they are thematically related to each other. 
  • From a website that hasn't been linked to you previously. In the context of SEO, it’s better to have less links from diverse domains than tons of links from a single domain. 
  • Comprising target keywords in the link anchor text. Anchor is the visible part of the text link. But remember that these links have to be not overloaded with keywords. 
  • Leading from reliable websites. It is also known as the concept of “Domain authority”. The more authority a website that is linking to you has, the more authority it can pass to you. 

Remember it while starting to develop your backlink plan. 

Reduce your page loading time

Time your page loads is one of the most important factors for your WordPress site’s position in search results. If your pages are slow, it may hurt your SEO, so you’d better think about decreasing your page content for quicker loading. Here are some tactics you might want to consider: 

  1. If the page covers more than one theme, it’s better to break it into separate pages. It will upgrade your SEO by providing more structured content for your visitors. 
  2. Attempt to minimize the number of videos. Content like Vimeo or YouTube videos can impact page load time, particularly on mobile. 
  3. It’s better not to add more than sixty blocks to the page. 
  4. If your blog posts load slowly, try to use blog abstracts in place of displaying the full text of the post.
  5. Use cloud solutions like Google Reviews Wordpress plugin, because they are loaded separately from your page content.

When you guess that page loads lazily, apply special instruments that help you evaluate the loading speed of your site’s pages. 

More SEO help

Keep in mind that your SEO strategy is your duty as search engine algorithms transform day by day. In addition, every WordPress website has special marketing requirements and there is no common solution which can be used by everyone. So if you’re stumbled upon something or have any questions, try to follow popular SEO specialists and look for help in the online community.