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As a website owner, you are (no doubt) always looking to increase traffic and revenue to your site. Becoming familiar with WordPress SEO tactics to enhance your website will see improvements in rankings, subscribers, and sales.
WordPress is pretty well-optimized as a content management system, giving a solid foundation to build. Applying a few simple WordPress SEO tactics can boost your website’s visibility and get your content in front of more people.
Before you make any changes to your site, it’s a good idea to understand what’s going on behind the scenes of your website and move forward from there.
WordPress SEO Tactics 101
Hosting
A good web hosting service will help ensure your website loads quickly and is secure without any substantial downtime, among other advantages. Speed is a significant ranking factor for search engines, so you must ensure your site loads fast. According to WordPress’ technical requirements page, the recommended hosting plan to run WordPress efficiently should include a modern version of PHP, MySQL or MariaDB, and HTTPS support.
You may need to upgrade your hosting environment to improve your site’s performance and security. We recommend upgrading to PHP 7.0 or higher to keep your website running efficiently.
SSL and HTTPS
If you still haven’t switched to HTTPS, you must do so immediately. You can check whether you have one by looking for a green padlock in the URL bar. A valid SSL certificate demonstrates that your site is secure and prevents search engines from penalizing you.
Adopting SSL will reward you with a better search engine ranking as part of Google’s mission to make the internet safer.
Permalink structure
WordPress uses permalinks for posts that aren’t typically SEO-friendly. If you alter the permalink structure, you can include important keywords.
If you don’t change your settings from the default, all your pages and posts will have unnatural URLs, impacting how users and search engines perceive the quality and relevance of your content.
Optimize titles and headings
Your subheadings, title, and meta description should reflect the topic of the specific post to make it easier for search engines and humans to grasp the topic quickly.
The meta description and post title often decide whether visitors click on your page in the search results above competitors. Writing compelling, informative descriptions for every page on your site can help you attract more visits.
Likewise, your page title can be one of the most critical factors for ranking well in search results. It is the first line people see in the search results, so it needs to describe your page and encourage people to click.
Search engines are believed to place more weight on the early words to rank well, so try to get your keywords near the start of the title if you can.
Optimize images and media
Images and media should also be optimized to ensure search engines can understand them. Considering what you name your files and using alt tags will help improve your rankings and support readers who rely on assistive technologies, like screen readers.
Content quality
Google rewards well-written content. As Google strives to show its users the most relevant and useful information, you should keep publishing fresh content to demonstrate your authority and provide helpful information to your visitors.
While having lots of content on your site can be beneficial in terms of SEO, you need to be careful to avoid accidental duplicate content. This can easily occur by having two different URLs pointing to the same content. When this happens, search engines don’t know which of these URLs should rank higher, resulting in lower rankings for all of them.
Off-Page SEO
Check out this off-page SEO guide, which covers all the latest tips, techniques, and strategies for ranking #1.
Optimize your site structure
A solid site structure helps users and search engines navigate your site. Your site navigation menu should be straightforward, with categories and subcategories bringing order to chaos. Decluttering your homepage will make your site easier to understand and logically follow through with your content.
Adding links within your content to other pages sets up a network of pages, which points users and search engines to related content. To avoid confusion to humans or bots, ensure the link you use makes sense within the page’s context.
Speed up your website
Speed is an essential WordPress SEO tactic. Waiting for a page to load can be frustrating and make you less likely to engage with or share the content. If your site takes a long time to load, the overall user experience won’t be positive. Therefore, measuring your site speed and working through any bottlenecks is crucial.
Once you’ve identified your bottlenecks and where they are, the next challenge is to make tweaks to speed things up.
Website security
WordPress powers approximately 33% of the web, so it’s unsurprising that it’s a popular target for hackers. You can do several things to make your website more secure, such as two-factor verification, firewalls, and layered security.
We strongly recommend regularly backing up your site in case it gets hacked or something goes wrong when updating it. You don’t want to be left in a position where you jeopardize your date and reputation.
Cater to your mobile visitors
Most people spend time browsing on their phones, so if you optimize your website only for desktop visitors, you are not optimizing for most visitors.
You should ensure that your site is fast, responsive (the design website adapts to the screen size your visitor uses), and mobile-friendly (i.e., links are not too close together and are easily clickable with a consistent font).
Content marketing
Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. You can’t rank well on a topic if you haven’t written about it on your website. People are looking for engaging, authoritative articles and spending more time reading longer-form content online. Writing high-quality content will help attract and retain an audience, particularly if you can become an expert in a niche area.
We’ll write a separate blog post on content marketing next week, so check back for these valuable tips.
SEO and content marketing evolve constantly, so it’s essential to stay current with the best practices to boost your website’s visibility.
Here at WP Tech Support®, we are well-equipped with WordPress SEO tactics to boost traffic and revenue. We will conduct an initial SEO audit on your website and do all the necessary work to improve your search visibility.
Aside from SEO, our highly experienced WordPress developers will quickly fix any WordPress issue and get your site back up and running as it should. We are available 24/7 and will quickly diagnose the problem so that you don’t have to worry about errors, broken code, or display issues preventing you from giving clients the best service and securing a sale.
While most clients sign up for ongoing WordPress maintenance, our emergency fix service is ideal for those without the budget or who need continuous support. It benefits startups who have pieced together a WordPress website but are struggling to make it look as professional as it should.
Please get in touch if you need help with your WordPress website journey – whether on an ongoing basis or a one-time fix.