Your website is a valuable asset to gather visitors and raise awareness of your brand. No matter what your website is about, a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will help increase traffic and grow the number of customers.
An WordPress SEO-friendly website will make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website through page titles, meta descriptions, headings, links and keywords – just to name a few.
In this post, we’ll cover how to improve on-page WordPress SEO – all the elements that are in control of the website owner – as opposed to off-page SEO which covers elements that website owners can’t directly control, like inbound links, social shares and domain authority.
Here’s 7 tips to help improve your WordPress website’s on-page SEO and rank highly on search engines.
1. Add a tagline
Firstly, your website’s tagline needs to be completed in the back end. This is a brief description of what you do. For example, HubSpot have added “Inbound Marketing & Sales Software” as their tagline which sums up their key services. It’s a great place to start with an SEO clean up as it allows you to include keywords relevant to your business.
This can be found in the Settings General Screen which controls the basic configuration settings for your site.
2. Update your permalinks structure
Permalinks are the unique addresses of your website’s elements such as pages or blog posts. Typically they’re created with your root domain name followed by words separated by hyphens.
To set your permalink to a more SEO-friendly structure, go into your Settings > Permalinks and pick ‘Post name’. This will allow you to choose the slug for each page or blog post you create and add appropriate keywords.
3. Write SEO-friendly WordPress slugs
A WordPress slug is a few words chosen to describe a post, page, category, or tag. These words will appear as part of the URL (or Permalink) directing visitors to that content
The ideal length of a slug is 3 to 5 words with hyphens to separate each word. The words chosen should be relevant to your content and include your target keywords, where possible.
4. Create XML Sitemaps
Your website’s structure – its code and architecture – will impact your rankings. If it’s full of unnecessary code and has been created with a poor internal architecture, it will be harder for search engines to crawl and index it.
Looking at the code itself can be complicated, but one thing you can do is have an XML sitemap created to let search engines know about new, updated, or removed content on your website. By adding this feature, search engines will be able to crawl your site more intelligently.
5. Write regular blog posts
Blog posts are a powerful way to rank for specific keywords, especially if they are relevant and linkable. The more your blog post satisfies the needs of your target audience, the better rankings you’ll end up with as more people will stay on your site for longer and visit more frequently.
The beauty of a regular blog is that you can target certain keywords that you may not naturally be able to place within any other section of your website. It also gives visitors another link to share, particularly if you proactively link to each post on your social media channels.
Another big plus is that every blog post you create is indexed in search engines as a single page which keeps search engine bots on your site longer and provides fresh content which we know Google gives precedence to.
6. Keywords included in your h1 title and title tag
The title you choose for your blog post (H1 title) is important to let your visitors and crawlers understand the main topic of that page and provide content consistency that will prevent visitors from leaving immediately.
The title of the page, also known as SEO title, appears on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result, and are more important for SEO and social sharing than the H1 title. Including the keyword you want to rank for in both titles will improve the chance of a better ranking.
7. Write compelling meta descriptions
And finally, optimising your meta descriptions is a key way to improve your site’s SEO. The meta description for your site is the 160 character snippet that summarises a page’s content. As search engines show the meta description in search results, writing compelling descriptions is an important aspect of on-page SEO.
Remember, they should be written to entice the reader to click into the post and not just viewed as a further place to include keywords.
These are just a few of the simple ways to improve your WordPress website’s SEO and rank up to the first page of search engines. However, there’s much more to be considered when it comes to improving your search visibility. WP Tech Support can carry out an initial SEO audit on your website and deliver the necessary work to improve your ranking.
Our great value monthly plans are a cost effective way to maintain a well optimised site that meets the ranking factors considered by search engines. Let us take care of your website while you take care of your business.