SEO Advice
WordPress SEO is a very important thing for those who are new in website development. Usually, it’s hard for them to understand all nuances. The majority of small business representatives are enthusiasts; they generate creative ideas and succeed offline. However, entrepreneurs are not SEO experts. They simply don’t have time to create an effective promotion strategy. In this article, we’ll teach you basics and give you SEO advice. This information will be useful for:
- small business representatives who administrate corporative websites;
- novices in SEO;
- aspiring marketers.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a marketing subject oriented on the organic improvement of website’s positions in search results. SEO depends on many things, including technical aspects and creative approach (interesting content, relevant links, etc.). Following SEO advice can lead to traffic growth.
Rule #1: Find a good WordPress hosting
Perhaps, you wonder: What hosting have to do with SEO? Obviously, Google doesn’t care what company you choose to get a website hosted. However, many things depend on hosting:
- Performance. The faster your website loads, the better. Hosting should offer you at least PHP 7+, HTTP / 2 and several types of caching.
- Security. If your website got hacked, your ranking positions decrease rapidly. Find a hosting with regular security checks, firewall, and in-built security.
Here’s our SEO advice: make sure to install SSL-certificate. It affects performance, security and your rating in search engines. You hosting should provide a free SSL-certificate and assist in uploading the whole website through https.
Rule #2. Install SEO Plugins
WordPress now seems to be the most SEO-friendly content management system (CMS). However, plain WordPress websites can’t reach the top of Google search results. That’s why you need optimization plugins. At the very least – Yoast SEO and Clearfy.
Yoast SEO
The Yoast SEO plugin shows how optimized certain posts are and suggests corrections. The results are formed based on the keywords volume and other aspects. In addition, this plugin can:
- create custom SEO titles and meta descriptions;
- enable Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Card;
- generate the XML sitemap automatically;
- get content analysis and reviews.
Clearfy
Few thousands of people worldwide use Clearfy daily. It helps to speed up the page load, disable unwanted scripts and page duplications, and save website resources. High performance increases the loyalty of users – they don’t have to wait for a post to open. This aspect ceases the bounce rate. The search engine summarizes positive user reviews, and the page skyrockets in search results.
Rule #3: Set Up Custom Permalinks
Permalink is another name for the URL. By default, WordPress permalinks are no good for SEO. Luckily, there’s a way to change it. Go to the admin part => Settings => Permalinks, select Post name, and save the changes.
Rule #4: Optimize Your Website Content
Content optimization is the most important part of the effective SEO strategy. Writing interesting content is a tough job to do. Consider hiring a freelance author to write high-quality posts. This way you can focus on your business promotion and spend time doing other important work.
Here is SEO advice for high-quality and well-optimized content:
- Publish new posts on the regular basis. Search engines love new content.
- Provide links to useful resources. It can be your content or other websites you use.
- Add multimedia content. Videos, audios, infographics make your website stand out.
- Launch polls. Learn more about your users: ask what they like, what questions they have, start a discussion.
Rule #5: Add Keywords To Titles And Meta Descriptions
Titles and meta descriptions are shown in the search engine results page (SERP). Use the most popular keywords. Keywords are a set of words users usually type in the search bar. A search engine uses these words and phrases to compare your page with the search query. The more relevant your title and meta are, the higher the chances that your resource will be shown on the first page of search results.
Rule #6: Optimize And Compress Images
Research conducted by Backlinko showed that content with at least one image has a higher rating, compared to the content with zero images. So you should add images to your posts. However, there are other ways to improve SEO efficiency.
- Rename image files before uploading them. Better if their names relate to the subject of the article.
- Add image captions and fill in Alt attributes. Describe what happens in the image. We’ve already discussed why it is so important.
Moreover, image compression improves performance. Storing image thumbnails speeds up the page load, and search engines love fast websites. Robin image optimizer is your best friend in image optimization. You can find more information about its useful features in here.
Rule #7: Install A Caching Plugin
In Rule #1, we’ve already mentioned that your hosting provider should offer you a caching type. In some cases, your hosting caching is all you need for speed optimization. However, consider trying a caching plugin to use additional tools for performance improvement. You can find caching plugins in the WordPress repository.
Rule #8: Install High-Quality Plugins Only
Poorly developed plugins can harm your website. Usually, they become the source of performance issues and slow down your website. The worst part about bad plugins – security breaches they create in the system. Hackers could find and use these vulnerabilities to access your website.
Search and install plugins that:
- earned at least 4-stars rating;
- have many installations;
- compatible with your WordPress version.
Rule #9: Send The Sitemap To Google Search Console
The sitemap is a file that tells Google what pages of your website should be added to the search results. As we’ve mentioned above, Yoast SEO creates a sitemap automatically. Your next step is to use Google Search Console to tell Google that your sitemap is ready.
Rule #10: Share Content In Social Media
No one has yet been able to 100% confirm or reject the theory that links posted on social media improve the website rating for search engines. Nevertheless, sharing posts in social media definitely increases the clickthrough rate.
The more actively you interact in social media, the more traffic your website gains. Social media helps to turn even the least interesting material into the viral video or mem in no time.
Conclusion
When you start asking questions about SEO and performance improvements, you may hear that it’ better to start practicing and learn things in the process. However, we recommend studying these basics in SEO-optimization first. The article covered TOP-10 SEO advice to improve the website. This information can help you to launch an SEO-campaign.