- February 14, 2024
- Posted by: Akshay Sharma
- Category: Wordpress
What if someone looks for some specific services on Google, and your WordPress website appears on the top? Well, this is possible now! All you need to do is improve your site’s performance using the top-notch WordPress SEO strategies and tactics.
At present, millions of audiences use search engines to explore the information and services that they want to know or avail. This makes it a top-priority for website owners to improve their website’s ranking on search engine results pages.
Are you a WordPress website owner and prefer to gain organic traffic to your site? If yes then optimizing your site using the best SEO tips is probably the best option you can opt for.
Check this guide till the end to get a detailed idea of dominating SERPs through WordPress SEO optimization.
Top 13 WordPress Search Engine Optimization Practices to Get Higher Rankings in Search Results
Want to increase your site’s authority on Google search results? Follow this WordPress SEO guide till the end.
Here you will get to know some best WordPress SEO practices that will help your website gain higher search engine rankings.
1. Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider
In WordPress SEO, choosing the right hosting provider really matters. This is because if your website hosting is good, it has a huge impact on your website’s performance and speed.
You can give it a thought before starting your website. If already started, you can plan to migrate your website from your current hosting provider to a more quality hosting provider.
In case you are unsure about which hosting platform to choose, you can choose any of our recommended ones. This includes- Hostinger, Bluehost, SiteGround, and Dreamhost.
2. Ensure to Have a Valid SSL Certificate for your Website
Protecting your WordPress site from harmful malware is no longer optional. Nowadays, it has become imperative to have a valid SSL certificate installed on your website. WordPress websites without valid SSL certificates might get penalized or warned by search engines.
In fact, using a secure HTTPS connection is a confirmed ranking factor as of now. This ensures that data moving through your site is encrypted as well as secured. So, you need to encrypt your website with an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate.
You can simply install the SSL certificate from the admin panel of the hosting provider. Then activate it by following the plugin instructions that you get on the screen. Once it’s done, your site is encrypted!
3. Select an SEO-friendly WordPress Theme for your Website
The official WordPress theme library consists of thousands of free and premium themes. With the availability of so many WordPress themes, you can personalize your site by choosing a theme that not just loads faster but is also lightweight.
However, ensure that the theme you are choosing is SEO-friendly and serves a perfect combination of design and speed options.
While selecting the perfect SEO themes, look for the ones that have clean codes, are responsive and work seamlessly with the popular SEO plugins. This will assist in taking care of your website’s technical SEO needs.
4. Check the Visibility Settings of Your WordPress Website
Once your website is live, this is one of the most undeniable steps that you should follow. You need to check the visibility settings of your website and ensure that it’s indexable.
For checking the site settings, navigate to Settings > Reading. At the bottom of the page, just right next to the “Search Engine Visibility” option, you will get to see a check box that reads “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.”
You must ensure that this box is unchecked. Most of the time when your website is under development, developers commonly check this option to restrict Google and other search engines from indexing the website.
So, you must uncheck this box to ensure that your website is indexable.
5. Choose the Address Format of your Preferred Site
While going through the setup process of your WordPress website, you need to pick your preferred web address format. It depends upon you whether you will include “www” in the URL https:// or not.
As Google considers www and non-www versions as separate URLs, it is significant for you to choose any one of these. Maintaining consistency with any of these formats throughout the site will help you avoid any SEO complications and hinder issues related to duplicate content.
For choosing the Address menu, go to the Settings option from the left menu of the WordPress dashboard. Choose the “General” option and type in your preferred address format both in the “WordPress Address” and “Site Address” fields.
6. Set SEO-Friendly Permalinks and Slugs
Permalinks of your website should be more descriptive as they help users and search engines understand your pages in a better way.
In WordPress SEO, one of the best permalink structure that one can choose is the “Post name”. Most of the time, it provides users with the title of the post which helps them in knowing what they can expect from the content.
In case it becomes longer, you can always edit the URL from the Post editor to make it easier to read. While editing the content of your page, you can always include your keywords in the permalinks for which they want the post to rank for. Doing this will be exceptionally better for on-page SEO.
Note: If your WordPress site is already live, you should never attempt to change its permalink settings. This might result in broken links and it might negatively hurt your site’s SEO.
7. Install WordPress SEO Plugin
By following some best SEO practices, if you want to take your WordPress website’s SEO to the next level, then install and configure a WordPress SEO plugin. This is one of the most effective ways to optimize your entire website and rank it on the top of the SERPs.
You can select any of the popular WordPress plugins like All-in-One SEO, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, etc. Moreover, you can always go for the one that has seamless integration with popular WordPress themes and has popular SEO features.
One of the safest and most popular options is to install Yoast SEO plugin. This WordPress plugin includes all the popular SEO functionalities and flexibility that your WordPress website needs. You can use either Yoast SEO premium or free version to optimize your site’s post or page.
8. Submit an XML Sitemap to Google Search Console
An XML sitemap is a file on your website that offers a structured map of all the pages on your website. These XML sitemaps contain all pages in a format that makes it easier for search engines to read.
Not only do these sitemaps provide some crucial information regarding the page but it also helps search engines in discovering some new pages. WordPress automatically creates a sitemap for the website.
You need to simply submit these XML sitemaps to your Google Search Console account. This will speed up the process of getting your site discovered by Google and help in better understanding your site.
9. Use Keyword Research for Content Planning
In WordPress SEO, doing relevant keyword research is one of the most effective tasks. You need to find out the keywords that your target audiences are typing into Google and for which your competitors are ranking for.
You can use various free and paid tools to choose the keywords that address your user’s intent. Ensure to filter and choose the target keywords depending on the following metrics: keyword difficulty, search volume and search intent.
Based on this keyword research, you can further create an effective content plan. However, if you are targeting local audiences, ensure to choose keywords that local audiences are searching for. These keywords will help you in creating a content strategy for local SEO.
Not feeling confident enough in doing keyword research for your website? Well, you can’t take risks as keywords play a major role in your website optimization. Just look for a professional agency that offers quality WordPress SEO services and ensure to get results that match your expectations.
10. Write High-Quality SEO Content
Quality content is undeniably an essential aspect of SEO strategy, so you cannot risk it. Before writing your content, you need to analyze your competitor’s site to evaluate their content strategy. Additionally, you need to select the right type of content for more effective targeting and find opportunities to add more value to the content so that it levels up.
Also, ensure that your content matches Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. To do so, you need to follow some on-page SEO best practices like:
- Backing up your blog posts with data from reliable sources and statistics
- Provide only factually correct information and try to gain expertise in that niche.
- Offer transparent information about your website, its authors, and their expertise.
Not just that, ensure to create and format the content as suggested by the WordPress block editor for WordPress SEO optimization.
11. Optimize your Page Content for SEO
Creating high-quality content is just a halfway for WordPress SEO. You should also focus on optimizing your content for readers as well as for search engines.
While optimizing your content, you need to ensure that its readability is good and it does not possess any tonal inconsistencies. Also, it should be 100% original and plagiarism-free.
Apart from this, there are several on-page tasks to perform for optimizing your page content. This includes optimizing HTML structure, keywords, structured data, syntax, etc.
You should also focus on optimizing the title tags and meta description of your content. It can be done by limiting their length structure and including primary keywords in it.
12. Optimize All Links for WordPress SEO
The two types of links that are essential for WordPress SEO are – internal links and external links. You need to focus on creating contextual internal links to some relevant pages on your website. Doing internal linking helps in passing link juice between different pages of your WordPress sites.
You can also add some dofollow and nofollow external links to your site. This will help search engines crawl the web pages and help them in ranking higher on search results. Adding nofollow links also prevents your site from negative SEO results.
13. Optimize Performance and Speed for WordPress SEO
In order to enhance your WordPress site’s SEO, it is essential to optimize the speed and performance of your website. Page speed matters a lot as it significantly impacts your page rankings.
For accessing how well your website performs, search engines like Google conduct some assessments like Core web vitals. You can easily check the speed and performance of your website using some free SEO tools like PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrics.
Once you have optimized your site following these tips, you can always measure its traffic and engagement using the Google Analytics tool.
Final Thoughts
Whether you own ecommerce sites or any other websites, you can seamlessly optimize them for search engines following these WordPress SEO tips and techniques. You can start with choosing a good hosting provider, a reliable WordPress theme and some excellent SEO plugins. This will make your website optimization process much easier than you have ever thought of.
Hope that if you follow the SEO best practices mentioned in this post, it might help your website in gaining higher search rankings and more traffic. However, if you are a beginner, it is better not to invest much time in learning and implementing these tactics. Rather choose a professional SEO agency for optimizing your WordPress website and get higher rankings on search engine results pages.