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WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet’s websites today. The free and easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS) has helped people create professional websites with limited technical skills.
The CMS offers unlimited themes and plugins for users to experiment with their site. No wonder it has been one of the most sought-after CMS since early 2000, with a whopping market share of more than 60%.
A WordPress site cannot automatically bring you success unless you get your SEO strategy right. Even a tiny mistake can disrupt your potential to rank on the web. In the post, we’ll discuss some helpful WordPress SEO tips for maximizing online visibility and ranking better on SERPs.
1. Not Setting Permalinks to Post Names
A permalink is a unique URL structure pointing to a blog post, web page, or other content on a site. It has two parts: the domain name and the slug. The slug appears after the domain name. A website’s domain name remains constant, but the slug is dynamic.
Google recommends using a simple and short permalink structure to make it easy for people to follow and share. Depending on your website’s requirements, you can choose a simple permalink structure or a hierarchical URL.
Complex URL structures can be complicated for search engine crawlers to understand. Therefore, you should always edit the permalink for all your posts on WordPress by going to Settings > Permalink and adding a custom URL structure.
To make a permalink SEO-friendly, you should try to include the target keyword within it. This will help your content to rank in SERPs. It would help if you also eliminated stop words within the URL structure to trim it further.
2. Not Creating and Submitting XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is a list of all the URLs present on a website. An XML sitemap helps search engines crawl your website more efficiently and index your content faster. Besides, the XML sitemap also signals search engines on how frequently your site is updated and which web pages should be prioritized over others.
XML sitemaps are crucial in boosting the SEO rankings of WordPress sites by improving their online visibility. It is particularly beneficial for new websites that don’t have any backlinks. Sitemaps help search engines discover pages from the deep web and index them.
You can install the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress to create an XML sitemap. Once installed, go to SEO > General and reach the “Features” tab. From there, you need to go to the XML Sitemap option and enable it. Once the sitemap is created, please submit it to Google Search Console.
3. Not Updating Content Regularly
Updating old content on your WordPress site is as essential as creating fresh content. As time passes, your content loses value and becomes less relevant to users. Consequently, the traffic to those blog posts decreases after some time.
To ensure no traffic loss from older posts, refresh them by updating information and adding more content. Content refresh has tremendous SEO benefits. Firstly, it will boost your traffic and increase the click-through rate. Secondly, when you update your content, it signals Google that your content is fresh. This will speed up the crawling process and index your site faster.
Thirdly, as you update outdated content, you can enrich the user experience by fixing issues such as broken links, spelling, or grammar errors, linking better resources, and improving your content’s overall accuracy.
4. Not Implementing Schema Markup
Schema can spike your site’s click-through rate by offering rich information (additional data) to users in the Google SERP. It is an advanced SEO technique that all WordPress sites should implement. To add schema markup to your WordPress site, use the Yoast SEO plugin.
Schema markup is a type of microdata that tells search engines more about your site. On WordPress, it is added to the HTML code within your web pages. By adding schema markup, you can increase your probability of ranking in SERPs for relevant search queries. It might also help you appear on Google’s Knowledge Graph and Featured Snippets.
5. Not Checking For Broken Links
The links on your WordPress site should pass the link juice from one web page to another. This helps in spreading value from one high authority web page to another. The link juice doesn’t spread within your website in the presence of broken links.
Broken links are harmful to a site as they hamper the user experience. Moreover, Google hates broken links and has pulled down the ranking of such websites. You can use the Broken Link Checker tool on WordPress to discover such links on your site and replace them with active links.
6. Not Setting Up Your Time Zone
One of the most overlooked features of a WordPress site is the time zone setting. Most WordPress users realize this when they schedule a post to be published at a particular time, but instead, it goes live at a completely different time. This happens due to the difference in the time zone between their location and the default time zone set on WordPress.
Therefore, you need to go to WordPress’s time zone settings and select your city’s time zone or a city with a similar time zone.
7. Neglecting Suggestions From Your SEO Plugin
The final WordPress SEO tip that most users tend to ignore is the suggestions their SEO plugins offer. Every professional WordPress website has an SEO plugin installed to create and publish SEO-optimized content. Users need to follow the suggested edits and implement changes accordingly.
When you have finished writing a blog post, you can scroll down the dashboard to find the suggestions made by the SEO plugin. If you consider them and make changes within your content accordingly, it will help you rank on the web. But, if you ignore those suggestions, your content might lack proper SEO optimization.
SEO is an ever-evolving domain that is continuously experiencing new changes. SEO optimization is combined with a good user experience to boost organic rankings. Therefore, whatever SEO changes you plan to implement on your site should cater to satisfy the masses along with the search engines.