Whether you are a novice on WordPress or have been into blogging for quite some time, making your WordPress blog posts SEO friendly has become crucial to drive more and more traffic to your website. If you are really serious about increasing your website traffic, then it is a must to pay attention to WordPress SEO best practices.
The most important aspect of your website is its content but it makes no sense if doesn’t attract visitors. Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is a tool every website owner should use in order to ensure their content is enhanced for search engine consumption. It will bring more and more visitors to your site.
Although the code generated by WordPress follows the SEO best practices, there is a lot more you need to do if you want to maximize your SEO efforts. Well, the idea of making WordPress blog posts SEO-friendly can be intimidating for beginners but don’t worry we have come up with detailed information on how you can create SEO-optimized blog posts.
What is SEO?
According to Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as “natural” or “organics” results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
SEO is a tool that is used by most website owners to bring maximum traffic as possible by ranking better on search engines. SEO means to set up a website that has optimized code with proper formatting so that search engines can easily find your website. When people search for the topics you write on the web, your content will appear on the top of search results if it is written with SEO in mind. And, you’ll get more audiences clicking through to your site.
It is the most important factor that will help your websites rank better on search engines.
Why is SEO important?
In the present market, SEO marketing has become more important than ever as search engines are often the biggest source of traffic for most websites. Search engines serve billions of users every day who are looking for solutions to their problems or answers to their questions. You can trigger targeted groups to click through to your website with the help of search engine optimization if you have a blog site or an eCommerce site.
SEO is important because the majority of search engine users are more likely to click on the suggestions appearing on the first page of the search engine results. To take advantage of this, it is necessary for your website to appear on the first page of search engine results pages(SERPS). SEO also aids in enhancing the usability of a website and improve user experiences.
The most reliable place to get answers to your questions nowadays is a search engine and having the presence of your website in the top positions for keywords the user is searching, increases the website’s trust. Another importance of SEO is it is good for the social promotion of your website. The users who find your website by searching on Google or Bing are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or some other social networking sites.
The beauty of SEO is that it can keep you ahead of the game. For example, if there are two websites selling the same items, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales than the other website.
So, search engine optimization is of utmost importance to maximize traffic to your websites.
Now, let’s dive into the tips and strategies you need to make your WordPress blog posts SEO friendly.
Tips to enhance your WordPress blog posts for SEO
1. Make sure to get noticed by search engines
WordPress comes with a built-in setting option to hide your website from being tracked by search engines. The main objective of this option is to give you time to work on your website before it’s ready to publish. Also, it can be useful for development or private websites.
However, if this option is turned on, it prevents search engines from looking at your website. So this option should be switched off if you do not have any developmental work.
If you feel something is wrong and that’s why your website is not appearing in search results, then it’s probably due to this option being checked. So, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that this option is unchecked.
You can simply log in to the admin area of your WordPress website and then head over to Settings > Reading and look for the “Search Engine Visibility” setting.
This is possibly the most important of all essential SEO settings you need to check for. In any case, do not check this option.
2. Set up proper permalinks
The underlined part is the permalink for this post. You are not allowed to set permalinks in a custom way by default. However, you can set a custom structure for permalinks by changing the permalink settings to the post name. To do this, all you have to do is go to WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks > Select the structured label as “Post Name”.
Post name is one of the most SEO-friendly options for most websites because it gives people the idea of what the page is really about from the URL itself. It may help you increase your click-through rate in the SERPs which leads to more organic traffic. It also maximizes the likeliness of getting keyword-rich backlinks. For this to happen, you need to use your keywords in the URL.
Let us see consider two links that lead to a blog post.
https://amplethemes.com/blog/wordpress-seo/
https://amplethemes.com/blog/?p=13080
Both links take you to the same post page but the first one is more readable and looks finely tuned. It is the permanent URL we want our visitors to see. The main idea here is to put the focus keyword for the post in the permalink. And, one thing you need to be careful about is, you need to think twice before changing the structure of the permalink if you already have content in a different permalink structure. Well, it may cause broken pages and it adversely affects SEO rankings.
3. Write quality content and write often
First of all, make sure to edit and proofread your blog posts as content plays a vital role in increasing or decreasing the search engine ranking of your website. Well-written content alone is not enough to fling your website to the top of Google or Bing but goes a long-long way. Google is smart enough to determine what actually good content constitutes. So you need to write relevant content in order to rank better in search engines and attract more visitors.
It is a good idea to repeat keywords or keyword phrases in your content but don’t overdo it. Just because you have your keywords written several times in a paragraph won’t do anything to increase your ranking, instead, it may send you down. So take care of the number of keywords that you use in your content.
Along with writing good content, you also should write often as it will help you in your SEO efforts. You need to do so not just because Google will see that your site is active, but because there will be more content to base your rank on. Additionally, this helps with user engagement and retention. So you will be benefitted doubly.
You can use the Grammarly Chrome extension to check your grammar and spellings right inside the WordPress editor. Lastly, make sure to update your site regularly.
4. Use WordPress SEO Plugins
One of the best ways to optimize your WordPress blog posts for SEO is to use SEO plugins. There are many SEO plugins such as Rank Math SEO, Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, and so on in WordPress. These are the most widely used SEO plugins in WordPress. These plugins are updated frequently to keep up with search engine changes and consists of everything that you will require to make your website SEO friendly, functionally taking care of all your basic and essential SEO features.
There are several advantages of using SEO plugins in your blog posts. The loading speed of web pages is one of the most important factors for usability, and it influences rankings in search engines quite strongly. With WordPress, you won’t have any issues as long as you install a fast-loading WordPress theme. By this what it justifies is the speed of your website will be optimized using an SEO plugin. Moreover, it makes the content easy to publish, revise, and update.
One of the most powerful ways to extend the functionality of the WordPress sites is to add the Plugins. The WordPress database has millions of powerful (and free) plugins that can add multiple functionalities to your site. Also, the plugin shows how your blog will look like in search results. Not only that, but it also creates an XML Sitemap file that lists all the pages on your site. An XML Sitemap lets search engines find the content of your website. The existence of XML Sitemap is not a ranking factor, but it helps search engines quickly discover pages on a website.
5. Use optimized images
When we talk about image optimization, it is a bifold process. The first thing that you want to ensure if the image size is suitable and compressed to maintain the speed and performance of your website. This can be done manually or you can use an image optimization plugin such as Imsanity. And the next thing you will do is make sure they include alt text.
Adding text in the alt section of the image helps search engines know what the images are about, which results in a better ranking of those images in image results pages. It will also obviously help your ranking on SERPs since Google now delivers image results above text-based results for certain keywords. So, it is proven to be very useful.
Managing your media properly is a great way to get an SEO edge, thus making it one of the essential SEO settings. Many website owners are found neglecting alt text, image captions, and file names as well but these are important factors of SEO and can be added with ease. So better not to skip these steps. Providing information to Google about what the images are about by filling out the name, making sure the file name itself is readable, typing up a caption and an alt text will add that much more information about your content.
People are so impatient that they don’t even wait for more than a couple of seconds for your website to load and Google also penalizes your site if it takes more time to load. Above everything, you will lose rankings and that’s not a thing good thing. So, the best way to fix this issue is to use image optimization methods. Also, you can use an image optimization plugin that will take care of your image files all by itself. Another image optimization plugin is Optimole.
6. Make internal linkings
Page authority is assigned on each page on your website by the search engines. Page authority is also known as a score and the details of this score are kept hidden so that people cannot game the results. Nonetheless, the most usual signals of authority are links. Hence, it is very important to link to your own content from your other blog posts and pages.
Make a habit to interlink your own posts wherever suitable. It will ultimately improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages. In case your blog posts are created by multiple authors then create a pre-publishing blog post checklist that requires them to interlink at least 3 other blog posts.
There are innumerable advantages of interlinks. It helps to increases the average session duration by the visitor. It helps in reducing the bounce rate of websites. It helps to increase the ranking for a particular keyword. Moreover, interlinks aid Google to crawl your site better way and understand your niche. Above everything, internal linking is very important to make WordPress blog posts SEO friendly.
7. Optimize the speed and performance of your site
The speed and performance of a website is a crucial factor. Google also takes it into account. In addition, the speed of the website has a number of other effects that will add together to grind all your efforts to a halt. According to web experts, the users decide whether they want to stay or leave within a few seconds of visiting a website. It means you only have a few seconds to showcase your content and engage viewers as a website owner.
The speed of a website is a crucial factor in page view times, bounce rates, early exits as it directly affects user experience. You will retain fewer visitors and then your SEO rank will drop which will lead to even fewer visitors and many of those who stay will become increasingly frustrated.
Search engines like Google now rank faster websites higher than slow loading websites. Therefore, you need to focus on making the speed of your website fast and performance good.
8. Test your website for mobile-friendliness
As most of the Internet users, these days are also cell phone users. With the increased use of smartphones, people prefer to surf the internet on their phones rather than on desktops or other devices. The reason for the increased craze and popularity of mobile phones is its easy usability, portability, and availability of all features. So, it is a must to make your website mobile-friendly. If you do not do so then you are risking to lose many viewers.
What Google seeks for in websites when it comes to essential SEO settings is an optimized design that looks good on mobile devices. Why? Because there are more people accessing the web via mobiles these days than by desktops, laptops, or tablets. If your site fails to load on mobile, you’ll lose your rank. That’s for sure.
How to know whether your website is mobile-friendly or not? As Google is the solution to every problem, in this case also it helps. Google provides us with a tool where we can test our sites and make sure everything is okay. It’s simply called the Mobile-Friendly Test. Test your website with this tool thoroughly and ensure that there are no issues with your homepage, your blog posts, and pages.
Well, you need to put in all your efforts to get your sites ranked on the top of search engine result pages. The things you need to consider are:
These are some of the techniques that you need to adapt to make your WordPress blog posts SEO friendly. Hope this article was helpful for you in keeping up with the SEO enhancement.
You may also like WordPress Security Plugins, WordPress Websites Hacked.
