WordPress powers almost 35% of the total sites on the internet. It is basically a content management system (CMS) that is not only easy to use, but also offers quite a wide range of other essential features. WordPress sites also incorporate a wide range of plugins to facilitate you in serving many varied purposes of your sites such as image optimization, ON page WordPress SEO, and others to maximize the overall user experience.
Be it a blogging site or an ecommerce platform; everything can be built on WordPress. In addition to this, optimizing a WordPress site as per the algorithms of Google is also relatively easy and straightforward. If you play your cards smartly, then you will be in a position to enjoy the benefits like increased brand visibility and awareness, enhanced conversions, and ultimate ROI in a hassle-free manner.
If you are a newbie and are seeking help in optimizing your WordPress site, then you are at the right place. This article talks about several essential ways you must follow in order to help your WordPress site reach its target pool of audience and rank high on the SERPs.
Let’s start.
1- Install the Yoast SEO Plugin
As far as SEO on a WordPress site is concerned, Yoast is an undeniable option. It is a wholesome WordPress SEO plugin that helps you in maintaining an optimum score of your on-page SEO.
It provides many valuable features like relevant keyword research, keyword optimization, faster indexing, a preview of your posts, readability check, complete control over your breadcrumbs, internal linking suggestions, content insights, and permalink editor.
It provides you with information related to the scope of improvement of the posts on your WordPress sites. In addition to that, it recommends remedial actions to enhance the overall on-page SEO score of your posts & pages.
The plugin also allows you to edit your meta-tag, title, and description. It further tells you about the density of your focused keywords in the articles on your WordPress site.
One of the best parts about the Yoast SEO plugin is that it helps you by identifying the condition of all the essential elements of SEO with the help of colours. For instance, green coloured dots show that your work is optimum. The orange one offers the scope of improvement, and the red one indicates the urgent need for serious improvements.
Moreover, it does not require any prior technical knowledge to operate the Yoast SEO plugin.
2- Create Quality Content
The need and importance of quality content in enhancing your overall SEO score is not a secret to anyone. Quality content helps you establish a brand authority amongst your target customers. It also helps in providing an excellent user experience to your visitors. Excellent quality content increases engagement, conversion rates and dramatically reduces the bounce rates.
Here are a few benefits of quality content in terms of optimizing your WordPress site.
- Facilitates higher CTR
- Helps you earn backlinks from high authority websites
- Allows you to include keywords in a natural and humane manner
- Provides great user experience.
In order to write engaging, impactful, and excellent quality content, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind.
- Write by keeping your target audience at the focal point.
- Curate your content in simple language.
- Include relevant keywords.
- Try to address questions that are frequently asked by your target audience.
- Seek help with a few tools to find keywords, generate titles, and check the overall SEO score.
- Stuff keywords naturally.
- Include a table of contents in your articles.
- Take help from the visually appealing content types like GIFs, videos, images, screenshots, and infographics.
- Strategically plan the position of the CTA’s in your content.
3- Earn Quality Backlinks
Optimizing your site is further divided into two parts. The first one is on-page SEO, and the second one is the off-page SEO. On-page SEO will be taken care of by the Yoast SEO plugin. But, off-page SEO would require you to earn quite a lot of backlinks from high-authority websites.
Backlinks are nothing but the links from one site to another website or a landing page. These are further divided into two parts – do-follow and no-follow backlinks.
Do-follow links allow the search engine bots to follow your links. However, no-follow links don’t allow the bots to follow your links. In order to rank higher on the SERPs, you have to build a wide backlink portfolio with a mix of both do-follow and no-follow backlinks.
However, it is important for you to note that it is not always the backlink’s quantity that matters. The quality (authority of the site from where you are getting a backlink) of backlinks has a significant role in determining your backlink portfolio’s efficiency.
4- Integrate Analytics
With the help of Google Analytics, you will be able to identify the high-converting pages and work towards enhancing the SEO score of it. Moreover, the analytics will give you a gist about where the majority of traffic is coming from, allowing you to optimize your SEO campaigns.
It also helps in identifying the problems and provides ways to troubleshoot those issues. For instance, if most traffic on your site is coming from mobile devices, but the bounce rate is relatively high, then the chances are your site is not entirely mobile responsive. Hence, you must work towards optimizing the WordPress website to be mobile friendly and also check for other elements like site load speed, and simple navigation structure.
Moreover, Google Analytics also helps you identify the broken URLs or pages with 404 errors, allowing you to manage it accordingly.
5- Include Interlinking Structure
Internal links are basically the links that redirect the user to another page/post from the same domain. The interlinking structure is usually adopted because of three primary reasons.
- It facilitates the user in navigating through the website.
- Helps in establishing information hierarchy for the given sites.
- Aids in spreading the link ranking power (equity) around the websites.
Conclusion
The scope of SEO is unlimited, but the process can be a bit challenging. But, if you are just starting over, then getting deep into the technicalities is not advisable. You will get to know about the intricate details eventually. To begin your WordPress SEO journey, following the ways suggested above in this article, will help you through in the journey of ranking high on the SERPs.
Thank you for creating such valuable content. Your hard work and dedication are appreciated by so many.