When it comes to SEO, no other content management system can beat WordPress. At least 33.0% of all websites in the world use WordPress because of its powerful SEO features.
To ensure your website operates well and competes with other million sites online, you have to master some WordPress SEO skills that can help you to optimize your site.
In this detailed WordPress SEO guide, I share with you some useful tips and hacks for WordPress SEO that I believe will help you to rank your website on search engines and boost your traffic in the shortest time possible.
Continue reading to find out how you can make your website stand out from the rest of the park.
Below is a table of contents you can click to jump straight to the information you are looking for on this post.
Definition: What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is quite an elaborate concept in digital marketing. SEO is a digital marketing strategy that entails all strategies that help a website to rank at the top or a search engine.
SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic that comes to your website through search engines.
Notably, there are millions of websites on the World Wide Web using WordPress, and all the websites strive to appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
With the best SEO practices, a website can earn a place on the first page of every search engine.
While most site owners will sit back and relax to see Google and other search engines rank and index their site pages, experienced bloggers and companies will invest in SEO because they know its value.
Building Blocks of SEO
The building block of SEO is quite complex. In most cases, people will confuse SEO with other forms of digital marketing. Don’t worry.
I would like you to understand this concept better even before we can delve into WordPress.
Let me break down SEO into a small bit, some pieces you can swallow effortlessly, right?
Okay, here we go!
- Traffic quantity. This is the number of people (visitors) clicking on your website address on various search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The more people click on your site address, the more organic traffic you attract to your site.
- Traffic quality. The quality of traffic is the number of users visiting your site to access your products, services, or read the content. You can attract millions of visitors to your website, but if they are coming there for the wrong reason or because the search engine feeds them wrong information about your site, that is not quality traffic.
- Organic traffic. This is the traffic that searches engines directly to your site, and you don’t have to pay for it. For instance, if your site appears at the top of a search engine, then many users are likely to visit it whenever they type a keyword that relates to your site.
Benefits of SEO For Your WordPress Website
Search Engine Optimization has many benefits if only you can do it the right way.
Indeed, most sites that have employed the best SEO practices have climbed at the top of search engines in just a month.
Although if you have a newly launched website, it is not likely to appear on a search engine unless you invest some reasonable bucks on making it popular.
Below are some benefits of SEO you should be aware of:
- It is a major source of traffic to a website.
- It helps Google and other search engines to understand your website better and rank it appropriately. The advanced algorithms that search engines use may not be well-equipped to rank your website well.
- You can miss out on potential traffic if you do not optimize your website. In most cases, when people search the internet for information, they won’t find your site on the first SERP.
- With SEO, you can help Google and other search tools to rank your website better and double your traffic in just a month.
- Making your website search engine friendly maximizes the amount of traffic to your site. I believe that good SEO practice can help you grow your site from ten visitors a day to even a million frequent loyal visitors within a year.
- It results in a higher conversion rate for your website. Your target audience or customers will easily notice your site whenever they go online.
- With proper SEO, you can increase your user close rate by up to 14.60%.
- It enhances user experience making your website more preferable by visitors.
Basics of WordPress SEO
Sometimes WordPress SEO can look complex and tedious if you are going to do it yourself. Trust me. I have been here before.
If you have a website that you want to push up the search engine ranking, then maybe understanding a couple of SEO techniques can help you big time.
Sure, you don’t have to be a tech pro to understand how to apply some simple SEO techniques that can help your WordPress site to appear at the top of a search engine.
In case you already have a WordPress account, then you are ready to keep going and optimize your site.
So, let’s move it. Here are some hacks to start optimizing your WordPress website right away.
1 – Find Out if Your Website is Visible
Not all sites are visible. Some may be temporarily down while the site owner is making some modifications to the site.
WordPress has a feature that enables you to hide your site and make it invisible while you optimize it in the background.
You can make all the changes you want on your website before you can launch it with WordPress.
In rare cases, you can set the hide website feature accidentally stopping internet users from accessing it on various search engines.
If you cannot trace your website on a search engine, then you should check your WordPress settings and find out if you are not hiding it by mistake.
Follow these steps to make your site visible in search engine:
- Login to your WordPress account
- Go to the Admin area.
- Click on settings
- Scroll to ‘Search Engine Visibility” section
- Confirm that you have unchecked the box close to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site.’
- Save all your changes.
2 – Choose Your URLs Wisely
The URL that you use for your site should be easy to read and understand by both humans and the search engines.
That means it should explain the content of the website before users can click on them and visit them.
Here are some examples of URLs to explain this;
https://www.goodsites.com/how-to-make-people-like-your-site-in-2020/
https://www.goodsites.com/tips-to-rank-your-site-at-the-top-of-Google-page/
If you look keenly, you can tell the nature of the information that the above URLs carry. An SEO-friendly URL should be easy to read right away on the search engine address box.
You want to avoid these types of URLs as much as you can when you are creating your website:
https:/www.goodsites.com/?r=oop115
http:/foodstuff.com/melons/0012
If you intend to improve your website ranking on search results, you must change your WordPress website permalink. Let me show you how you can do that effortlessly:
- Login to your WordPress account
- Go to settings
- Click on Permalinks
- Select post name option
- Save the changes
Another tip here; you should not change your permalinks setting on WordPress in case your site has been active online for the last six months.
You can only change it if you were using the numeric option. If your options were day, names, and month, then continue sticking to that.
The reason you should not make these changes is simple. You will lose your rankings on Google and search engines where your site already might already be ranking.
You can hire a website developer to create a 301 redirect for your site pages if you must change the permalinks settings.
3 – Choose Between WWW and Non-WWW
WWW and non-WWW may seem unimportant when designing a website at first only to realize that you’ve made some great mistake choosing either of the two.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is not the only sub-domain on the internet. There are others such as FTP, POP, SMTP, and others that you can opt for your site.
At the initial stages of establishing your site, you have to decide between using the WWW address or non-www address.
If your website has both address formats, search engines will consider them two different sites and rank them separately.
So, you must decide on one of them and ensure you are consistent in all the URLs you create for the site pages.
Ideally, most people often forget to enter WWW whenever they enter a site address on search engines.
There is a possibility that the search engine can direct them to another affiliate site, and this reduces the amount of traffic to your website.
To change or set your preferences, you can follow these steps:
- Login to your WordPress account.
- Go to settings.
- Click on General.
- Enter the URLs that you want on both ‘Site Address’ and ‘WordPress Address’ fields.
Note that there is no significant drawback in using either WWW or non-WWW addresses. All you have to do is pick one that you think your visitors can understand easily.
Best WordPress SEO Plugins
Ideally, the most fantastic thing about WordPress that will attract anyone to using it is the variety of features and plugins that it offers.
With the right plugins on your WordPress CMS, you can easily design your website and create the most out of it by making it search engine friendly.
Well, in this part of the tutorial, I would like to take you through some of the best plugins that can improve your WordPress SEO. You use choose SEO friendly plugins if:
- Appearing at the top of a search engine is one of your objectives this year.
- You intend to escape the mess brought by nonsensical codes.
- You don’t want faulty themes appearing on your site.
- You mind the high cost of managing your site every time.
Here some of the best WordPress plugins to install now and optimize your site effortlessly:
1- ContactForm 7
Sure, this will be one of the best WordPress plugins that you ever lay your hands. The tool allows you to use Askimet to filter out all spammy submissions on your site.
It also helps you to create and manage contact forms, and use reCaptcha to verify that those accessing your site mean no harm.
ContactForm 7 has the most outstanding feature that enables you to create the best content for your site. Your visitors will like the amazing pages you create, and you can see an increase in traffic in the shortest time.
The statistics behind Contact Form 7 is absolutely amazing, and I would recommend anyone to go for it.
It has over a thousand positive reviews, and over five million site owners are using it today. You can install ContactForm 7 directly to your WordPress and begin using it now to improve your site.
2 – Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is undoubtedly one of the most popular on-page WordPress SEO plugins in the market at the moment.
The plugin comes with all the features that you need to make your site more visible on search engines and attract more organic traffic.
Once you have conducted keyword research and came up with some quality content to publish on your site, Yoast SEO can help you in site optimization.
Yoast SEO is the best tool for:
- Creating metadata
- Enhancing site readability
- Optimizing subheadings and titles
There is a free and premium Yoast SEO tool. I would advise you to go for the paid version because it comes with more features than the latter. If you are just straining up, you shouldn’t mind going for the free Yoast SEO version.
3 – Akismet Anti-Spam
Managing your site is never going to be a walk in the park. Hackers are always ready to collect information from your site. They use the stolen information to infringe on your visitor’s internet privacy.
With the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin, you can keep spammers away from your WordPress blog.
It helps make your site secure round-the-clock. You will gain trust from visitors once they discover that their confidential information such as email addresses and payment records are in safe hands.
Here is what this amazing plugin can do:
- It uses the Akismet moderator to analyze and filter all the spammy comments and shares on your site.
- It allows you to remove useless links that you may have on the site.
- Enables you to view and approve comments on your site.
Regardless of your budget, you don’t have a reason to lack this plugin on your WordPress site. It comes in both premium and free version.
The premium version will only cost you a dollar or less, and you can be sure to keep all spammers at bay.
4 – WooCommerce
If you have an online store, then you have probably heard about this unique plugin. WooCommerce is the best option for all WordPress webmasters that long for a less tedious or traditional route of using Shopify and other tools.
The WooCommerce plugin is built to improve your online experience and make it easier to sell products on your online store more efficiently.
It comes with lots of features, in-built platforms, extensions, and customizations that target improving your site.
Forget about its price, with the WooCommerce plugin. You can get countless optimization tools and themes. With this tool, you always have a reason supporting the increasing number of visitors to your site.
5 – WordFence Security
If you use the internet, or you have a WordPress site, then you understand the value of having the best anti-malware. A malware protects your site from internet privacy issues.
In 2020, cybercrime is taking a new dimension, and every business or individual is looking for the most efficient and reliable way to keep their digital footprints safe. WordFence Security offers you all these under one roof.
Here is what WordFence Security does for your website:
- It provides reliable virus and malware scanning.
- Comes with a tool for blocking IP address, blocking illegal Google crawler, and preventing IP whistling.
- It provides regular email alert for critical issues that you need to address.
- It protects your site from hackers.
With WordFence Security plugin, you can rest assured that your site is definitely on safe hands. It comes with all the essential features that will improve the security and integrity of your website.
6 – Google XML Sitemap
Every website must have a sitemap if it wants to appear on a search engine page. Google crawlers use sitemaps to find out new content on your site that it can include on the database and index your site accordingly.
Google XML Sitemaps also comes handy to help Google and other search engines to index your site by providing a special XML sitemap,
Now, here is the good part of this plugin. Once you install it to your WordPress, it will automatically create an XML sitemap.
Search engines like Google can crawl and index your site to appear at the top of most search engines.
Google XML Sitemap plugin helps your website to remain visible on major search engines for the longest time.
It has a clear and straightforward user interface, which makes it user friendly for a newbie user.
7 – WP Super Cache
Your website downloading speed is vital in ensuring that your visitors don’t spend more bandwidth to open the site pages. Ideally, in 2020, speed is of much essence as everyone is looking forward to having everything they do unfold faster.
You can increase your site downloading speed with WP Super Cache without spending much time and money.
The plugin creates or generates lighter HTML files from WordPress, which take less time to open than conventional PHP scripts.
If you are looking for a way to increase your website speed, then this should be the best tool that you should have for your WordPress SEO.
It also comes with other benefits that make it an essential tool for any website.
8 – Elementor
Elementor plays in the same league as BoldGrid and Divi Builder in terms of quality and efficiency. The WordPress plugin is useful in building lighter pages for your website. It has a simple user interface, which makes it easy to use.
Also, it is cost-effective, and for only $50.0 per year, you can create quality pages for your sites and watch your traffic grow to millions of visitors in just a year
Ways To Boost Your WordPress SEO
1 – Optimize Your Site Content
I think this should go without saying – your site must exhibit the best content in the subject that you have specialized in.
For instance, if you are educating people on Nutrition and Dietetics, then you must ensure you give an expert opinion on all the views and opinions you publish on the site.
To create unique content for your site, you must research extensively and share your ideas flawlessly in the content you publish.
Remember, you are always looking forward to educating your target audience and giving them another reason to visit your website always.
Presenting your ideas in a structured format will make your website more appealing to the visitors.
Here is what you should do when you look forward to optimizing your website and increasing traffic:
Research widely
Most internet users browse the internet when they are looking for some information online. Therefore, your site attracts organic traffic if it has the information most internet users are looking for online.
In most cases, visitors will stay on a website for longer if they believe that the information they are getting there is helpful to them.
The best way to creating quality content for your website is researching widely before you can create any content. This is a concept I have been applying for a while.
To be precise, you must do some keyword research and establish a key phrase that you believe can help people to locate your website easily in most of the search engines.
I always ask myself how Google and other search engines rank my website before I can create any content for the site. I also research all the relevant keywords that would link a user to my website.
There are several keyword research tools online like Ubersuggest that you can use to find out the phrases you should use in your content.
Find some key phrases that your competitors are not using and ensure you include them in your content.
Remember, there are millions of sites offering content for internet users, and only the best quality sites rank on the first page of a search engine.
If you are lucky to find your niche, then do not hesitate to create some content around it. Create quality content after researching and give your site visitors a concrete reason to visit your site every day.
Write and publish quality content
After keyword research, what follows is the actual writing. SEO content writing is not similar to our usual way of writing.
You have to use the keywords that you have selected the right way in the content. Writing is an elaborate process.
Since you are the one with the ideas and tips that you would like your target audience to grasp, you are, therefore, the best person to write.
That sounds simple, right? Well, it is never that easy to write search engine friendly content for your website. You have to create a draft, write, edit, and rewrite the content once more before it can meet the quality threshold that most search engines want.
When writing the draft, you should not strain yourself with making the piece of the article look great. Logically write the draft- let your points flow and be clear.
The article you come up with should have a simple structure of title, introduction, body/main point, and a conclusion. In the conclusion section, ensure you are brief.
Give the reader a verdict on the most important points that they should take from the article. You can also summarize the article in this section as a way of wrapping up your thoughts.
In the editing section, you want to focus on the readability or clarity of your content. You can make use of proper copywriting skills to make your content user friendly. Remove all wordy sentences and ensure the vocabulary used in the article is easy to understand.
Note that you may have complete knowledge of the topic you are writing, but your target audience may have no information at all of what you are discussing in the article.
To educate them, you must make the article more engaging and clear enough for everyone to read. Use short sentences and be straightforward in your writing.
Once you finish writing, you can ask your friend to read the article and give you some feedback, Make any possible corrections on the writing before you go ahead and publish it on your site.
Apart from asking your friends to read the article, you can do this on yourself. Read it aloud and get the tone in the article.
When you read loudly, you can easily find out if the article is flowing. Another trick is setting the computer to read the article loudly. Listen, and find out if the content in the article is logical.
2 – Optimize The Structure of Your Site
It is much easier for search engines and users to navigate through your site if you optimize it.
Once you optimize your website, it will be clear to the users what the site is all about, and they can easily relate to the products and services you are offering.
When it comes to effective site optimization, there are two factors that you must consider;
- Site organization
- Contextual internal linking
Site organization
An organized site has a smooth navigation path. It is easier for the user to trace all the information that you publish here.
The reason is that you have arranged the site in order from the posts, pages, and comments. There is a common hierarchy that most webmasters implement when they organize their sites.
Here is what the path entails:
- Having a clear menu on the site homepage
- Setting clear categories
- Having subcategories or subtitles in case of written content
- Designating a section for posts and comments from users
The rule of the thumb here is that you must set an easy to navigate site path.
Do not clutter the content on the homepage or flood the home menu with many options, which can make it hard for the user to trace the information they need on your website.
If you want to make your site easy to navigate, then use a clear menu.
Contextual internal linking
Well, organizing your site is essential to help the user stay on your site pages for long. Apart from that, you must ensure that the content you are publishing on the site has some connected internal links.
These are links that appear in the form of a text, and the users cannot see them until they click on them.
If you have a page that you consider more prominent ore useful on the site, then ensure it has links that supplement the information you are providing there.
The links that you include on the page must be relevant to the context page. You can use anchor texts to provide users with more information on the links you are offering.
3 – Speed Up The Website
Ideally, most users, especially those using their mobile phones to access online information, get frustrated if your website is very slow. In most cases, users will not visit a slow website. This reduces your site conversion rate significantly.
Since your main focus is on increasing traffic to your site, you must ensure that you speed the site downloading speed to enhance user experience. Here is how you can achieve this:
- Measure site speed. There are many tools that you can use to gauge how fast your site opens. Although most of them are conflicting in the tips they give, you must ensure you get the best one that works for your website. Get some tips on how to boost your site speed. You can also adopt the best metrics that will make your site lighter and easy to access by mobile users.
- Improve the site speed. To achieve this, you can either utilize a CDN or change your site hosting. Some webmasters will opt to change the type of WordPress they have been using and even alter their JavaScript and SCC loading.
- There are many ways of improving your site speed, and you can learn all of them and get your site on the first search engine pages.
4 – Secure Your Website
Your website is susceptible to frequent attacks by malware and virus if you do not enforce some security measures to protect it.
There are many Internet privacy issues like spamming and trolling that you should always protect your site users from. Hackers target WordPress sites most because it is the most used platform for websites in the world today.
To make your site more secure, you can start by changing your default username to make it impossible for hackers to predict your username and gain entry to your site.
Also, the password that you set for your site login should be hard to crack. To set a strong password for your site management, you can use password management software like Last Pass.
The password should have at least 20 characters. Miss letters with numbers and other punctuation marks like a question mark or apostrophe to improve the strength of your passwords.
Also, you can do the following to make your website setup more secure:
- Make hardening your site security your responsibility. Choose the best hosting company that assures your maximum site security from hackers.
- Use tools like Cloudflare to backup your site information
- Restrict users from too many attempts when they login to your site. For example, you can specify that a user is not allowed to have more than three login attempts to access the site.
- Always update all your WordPress plugins to ensure you are using the latest versions. By doing this, you will be fixing all the security issues that your website may have. Keep all your WordPress installs up to date to avoid exposing your site to any threats.
- Monitor your website from security threats using some of the WordPress tools Sitecheck. Also, some companies provide site security services. In case your site is hacked, they can rescue it and ensure it works optimally.
- Keep track of all your website activities. For instance, you must be aware of the number of users that login to the website and the kind of information they access. WP Security Audit Log is a tool that can help you to monitor how the files on your site changes and all user activities.
5 – Make The Site Mobile-friendly For The Visitors
Millions of people access the internet using their mobile devices. It means if you should think of a better way to make your website friendlier for them. The site should be easy to read and navigate on a mobile phone.
Once you optimize your website for desktop visitors and forget about the millions of people using mobile devices, you are on the hook to reducing the number of visitors to the site.
Use Google Analytics to find out the number of people visiting your website on their mobile phones and take some measures to optimize your website for them.
Focus on optimizing your website to make it friendly for the majority of visitors.
Here are some of the tips to help you make your website mobile-friendly:
- Ensure your site has a responsive design. The website should adapt quickly to different screen sizes that the user may be using.
- Be selective on the type of images and font size on the content, which may make the site pages a bit slow to download. Some mobile users may be using a 2G network, and that may take them a lot of time to access the ‘heavy’ images that you post on your website.
- Focus more on improving the content you publish on your site. You want to find out what most users will do whenever they log in to your site and focus more on improving their experience.
- Create a list of tasks that most users perform when they visit your website and try to make it easier for them to access those services.
- Use Google Analytics to find out the most visited pages on your website. With that data, you can now work on improving the pages and making them more useful to your target audience.
- Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to make your site pages fast to open on mobile devices. AMP is a bit complex, and you must ensure you are using it the right way to get the intended results. Also, ensure you download the original AMP plugin for your WordPress website.
Final Thoughts
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is elaborate and takes time to implement. However, it doesn’t have to be complicated if you have this tutorial by your side.
The tips I have shared here are useful if you are looking forward to increasing traffic to your site or making your website appear on the first page of most search engines.
