What can a beautiful, visually stunning and feature-rich website do if it isn’t optimized for search engines?
As a matter of fact, search engine giants like Google, Yahoo, Bing and AOL don’t care about your website’s design and the pretty images found on it.
They care more about quality content, keywords, file names, alt tags and so much more.Understanding what search engines are looking for on your website can bring new success to your online venture.
You probably want as many eyes as possible on your website.Whether your goal is to entertain and inform readers, promote your work, sell your products and services or provide the world’s best web hosting, ranking high on social media is paramount.
Simply put, the more visitors you get, the easier it will be to build an audience you can count on.You don’t need to be an SEO expert or spend years learning the craft to rank your site. You don’t even need to know how to code or understand the complicated processes of web design.
What is SEO and why is it necessary to optimize it?
Well, if you have an up and running WordPress website, you’d know how important it is to optimize your website for search engines. It doesn’t matter how beautifully your website is crafted or how you create a website. Without proper SEO it isn’t going to work in full pace. An SEO-friendly website has higher chances of appearing on the first page of the search results and drive constant traffic to your website. After all, every business wants to have higher rankings and come up on the first Google SERP’s. However, at times, most of us get carried away with search engine optimization.
Therefore, the best way is to keep things simple and use a bit of common sense. Whereas WordPress offers hundreds of useful SEO plugins that often take care of the common things, there are various other tips and tricks that you can follow to make a difference. In this article, I have compiled a list of simple SEO techniques and best practices that you tend to forget. These techniques, if used properly, can make a significant difference as to how your website will be ranked in Google.
Creating WordPress websites are very easy but properly enhancing them for SEO isn’t. If you run a blog or a business site and doesn’t have any traffic, it wouldn’t make any profit. You want to try out a couple of these WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ideas.
Update your posts frequently
Google always likes fresh web content. If your web content is outdated or you aren’t updating it frequently, then search engines wouldn’t push your content to rank higher. It’s not about search engines, it’s about the user’s experience. No one likes outdated content, neither do the internet users.
Consequently, if you want your website to do regularly well in SERPs gradually, you will need to modify or edit your posts frequently. Likewise, do not overlook older articles as well as web pages. Updating your existing articles triggers search engine spiders to re-crawl it as well as increase search engine ranking.
Set your Permalinks
The URLs of your website pages and posts are called Permalinks. In layman’s language, they are what users use in their address bars to reach to your website and view relevant pages. They are also used by other websites and search engines to link to your website. You can also make use of WordPress development service for your website.
WordPress comes with a default permalink setting to allow you to change them as per your convenience and needs. These settings can be found in settings ->permalinks. It is always a best practice to change the default setting to post name – /postname/ since it’s easy to be remembered by the users and simple to index by search engines.
Pick a Theme That’s Optimized for Search Engines
Your theme is one of the most important choices you’ll make for your WordPress site. It determines your site’s appearance and layout. Apart from providing new functionality, it also plays a role in your website’s SEO. For example, your theme can affect your site’s speed, which is vital for the best user experience. The way a theme was developed also matters since clean code gives your site the best chance in SERPs.
When picking a theme you want to opt for one built with SEO in mind. These themes are often referred to as ‘SEO-friendly’. You may also want to look for a theme that offers features specifically designed to improve your SEO such as new heading tag options. Fortunately, there are plenty of themes available that fit the bill.
Make use of dedicated SEO plug-ins
If you’re new to WordPress, you may not yet be familiar with plugins. These are small pieces of add-on software you can install, which add new features and functionality to your site. There’s a plugin to help your site do just about anything including rank higher in search engines. In fact, there are many plugins designed specifically to improve your site’s SEO.
These plugins can provide small targeted features such as creating a sitemap. For even better results, you can also opt for a comprehensive SEO plugin such as WPFixs which will add a whole suite of optimization-focused features to your site.
Target social media users
Social Media has gained huge popularity over the past few years. Today, almost every web user is active on various social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and so much more. Making your content shareable allows your readers to share it across different social networks while driving huge traffic to your site.
Adding social sharing buttons to your website not only drives traffic but also improves your website’s credibility. So, never take the social media power for granted. Target all audiences by taking advantage of social media integration.
Final thoughts
The WordPress platform is your best friend when it comes to making your website to rank higher on search engines. Use it to your advantage and gain lots of traffic to your website.
