SEO Tips For WordPress To Get Content Ranking

Here are some more SEO Tips for WordPress that you may or may not know about, but all these factors will help you to rank better in the Search Engines.

Because WordPress is currently one of the most powerful and used Content Management Systems on the internet today, it is also very suitable for all your SEO needs, thus I decided to write this post on SEO Tips for WordPress to share what I have learned.

Having WordPress installed on your site is simply not enough. You also need to follow a series of guidelines or SEO tips to make sure your website is properly optimized for SEO.

You always want to use SEO techniques, as this will be one of your main sources of traffic. We aim as much as possible to get organic traffic that comes from the search engines, and the best part is that this traffic is free and ongoing.

Let’s start with some simple SEO techniques.

There are four points to consider here when optimizing our WordPress website or blog:

1. Optimization of the Blog

2. Content Optimization

3. Increasing the visits and interaction with the outside

4. Getting links

Once you have your blog installed and set up to go you can begin with these SEO tips for WordPress.

Setting up your blog means finding a hosting company, a domain name that relates to the topic of your blog, and installing the WordPress theme of your choice.

If you need to be walked through this, the easy way to start is to click here. This review will tell you how to have your blog up and running in less than five minutes from now, with no hi-tech stuff to worry about. Also, you will be able to use this platform for free for as long as you like.

SEO Tips For WordPress

Permalinks

The first thing you will need to worry about once you have set up your site as far as SEO tips for WordPress go, is to change the structure of the permanent links.

To do this go to Settings – Permanent> Links in your WordPress dashboard.

It is advisable to make the URL of your site as easy as possible for the search engines to read.

So ideally your permanent link should start with your domain name followed by the title of your post.

You could also put the category in there should you so choose.

So you could have this permalink structure listed within your permalinks tag to make your blog easy to read by the search engines.

/% Category% /% postname% /

If you don’t want the category to show, simply leave it out and just have the post name only.

Metatag Title

The Title Tags are probably the most important tags that the search engines read.

The title of each page determines what is within the page. Yoast Plugin makes this easy for you, as below each post, you can type in the title and the description of the page. You can see a list of recommended plugins at the bottom of this article.

The closer your keywords are to the beginning of your title, the better.

Keyword research is a very important part of the SEO process. Keyword research is one of the best SEO tips for WordPress that I can give you.  If you are not sure how to go about doing keyword research, you can click here and read up further on this subject.

Meta Tag Description

Now that we have the appropriate title and URL, we should start focusing on the meta descriptions.

The search engines usually display a text snippet, which is the text displayed below the URL in the search results.

The general meta description is used only when it contains the keyword that the searcher was looking for.

Some plugins use so-called “automated meta descriptions “. It uses the first sentence of an entry to fill the goal default description. That’s not very smart. That first sentence could be an introductory phrase that has nothing to do with the main theme of the post.

We should, therefore, always write the meta-description by hand, so that you can seduce the visitor who sees your meta-description to click on your website. Again the Yoast plugin will make this process super simple for you.

Make sure that your meta description contains the relevant keyword at least once.

Sitemaps XML and HTML

The XML sitemap is used to send your post updates to Google Webmaster tools and also leave a ping whenever any of the content on your site is updated so that your content can be indexed in all the major search engines.

There are many plugins on WordPress.org available to download for sitemaps. Google XML sitemap generator is one of the best-known ones. You can generate your XML sitemap anytime you want to, and your site map is automatically sent when your posts are updated.

When a new post or page is published, the XML sitemap is automatically sent to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc,  and this allows these search engines to find your website’s new content.

From the SEO point of view for images, the site map has also an interesting feature that it allows you to include images in your sitemap references which will benefit you as you could get some extra traffic through Google Images.

Navigation

Blogs that have many pages devoted to the same subject tend to get better rankings.

If a blog is focused on a specific topic and has, for example, 200 pages dealing with search engine optimization, it would have more authority to the search engines in an SEO niche compared to another blog dedicated to the economy with a bunch of random articles on it. And it’s not just for search engines, humans also will give more weight to pages with a unique theme.

It is therefore very important to be clear about your topic. It is vital to have well-qualified and all related content for your blog. To do this, there are some plugins and functionality you can make use of to make your life easier.

Try to add internal links to other articles within your site that are related to your current post. This will entice visitors to stay longer on your site, as they will click through to other relevant articles.

Interlace your blog entries together by using the following methods:

• Put your blog categories and files on the main menu.
• Make sure you have sitemaps in use.
• Link each article you write to your menu.
• Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to navigate through your website.

Design

The design of your blog is also super important.

A good design will be placed at the top of the searches, but a bad design can make you lose positions to your competition.

Design Tips:

• Keep the design simple, easy to read, and clear.
• Pages should load as quickly as possible.
• Titles should be big and clear.
• Use an easy-to-read font.
• Working a black font on a white background is usually the best.

Images:

Make sure to write alt tags for all your images using your given keyword. Search engines cannot see what pictures are about, so if you use your keywords to describe your pictures, you will get better rankings.

It is always recommended that you insert one or two images within your post, as this makes it more reader-friendly.

When you place an image into your post, click on the image and a pencil should come up. You can then click on the pencil to edit your image. Under the alt tag fill in your keyword and make sure to save.  This enables the search engines to see what your image is about.

Location of Keywords

The keywords must appear at least a few times within each post.

Your Yoast plugin will tell you if you have put your keywords enough times within your post.

It is also important to place keywords within your heading tags, and preferably at the beginning.

Make use of keywords as internal links and it is also a good idea to place your keywords in bold or italics somewhere within the text.

If you are battling with your keyword research, I recommend you give Jaaxy a try. This makes the process of keyword research a breeze, and you can save hours by using this simple platform. To read more about Jaaxy, click here.

Content Writing

Content is another very important part when it comes to SEO tips for WordPress.

Make sure your posts are 350 or more words. In fact the longer the article the better. 1500 word articles have a better chance of being ranked than a 500-word article about the same topic.

Most importantly, write helpful and interesting content that makes sense and that your readers will enjoy reading. Unique content is always best and will get much better ratings with the search engines.

Use videos and slideshows within your content to help the user better understand what you are trying to say.

Make sure your paragraphs are short and to the point.

Make sure to use bullets and headings to highlight certain points.

Write an interesting title that will make people want to read your article. Think of AIDA (Awake: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action).

For more article writing tips, click here.

Must have WordPress Plugins

In WordPress, a lot of the SEO work can be done by using plugins. Many of these will make your SEO tasks so much easier. The main SEO plugin to get your hands on would be Yoast for WordPress, as this will make the whole process of web optimization and SEO a whole lot easier for you.

It is recommended to use as few plugins on your WordPress site as possible. The reason is that too many plugins slow down your site’s loading time and this will also affect your SEO efforts.

Here are some of the best plugins that you will find useful on your site.

To install a plugin on your WordPress site, you just go to plugins, click add new, and then type in the name of the plugin in the search bar.

SEO By Yoast

My first choice is  WordPress SEO by Yoast

The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast is likely the most used and most comprehensive plugin in WordPress.

Once it is activated on your WordPress site, your Admin panel will be changed completely. With this plugin, you can include a Meta Description and Meta title for every post separately.

It also tells you whether or not you are using your keyword in enough places within your post.

It also submits sitemaps to the search engines.

There are also other useful functions that this plugin has to help you optimize every post on your site to the fullest. This is another one of those top SEO tips for WordPress that I can offer you.

All-in-One SEO Pack

It is another one of those most used Plugins. This WP plugin is also one of the best WP SEO Plugins and it is the rival of the WordPress plugin by Yoast. Both of these plugins have almost similar functions, so you don’t need to have both

It also works very well and you could select one or the other which depends on the Compatibility of either plugin with your template. Don’t, however, use both Plugins on one site at the same time, or they will conflict with each other.

SEO Smart Links

This WP plugin assists you in putting internal links to your site automatically.

You could choose the keywords to link to your best articles. By using it, you can decrease the bounce rate on your website and also spend the authority and position of the older posts to the newer posts.

Great SEO tips for WordPress also include having internal links within your content on your website. We can also do internal linking manually, but this plugin just makes it so much easier.

Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker checks all of your pages and automatically informs you if it finds a link that is broken or does not exist anymore.

Using this plugin can be helpful because Google ranking is also based on links within a post, and Google does not like ranking pages or posts with broken links.

In addition to that, it also notifies you if an image does not exist anymore.

The only problem I found with this plugin is that it gives you false visits to Amazon, so don’t get too excited when you see how many times your Amazon links are being clicked, as it is just the plugin doing its work.

404 Redirect

404 Redirect is one of those great SEO tips for WordPress, as it will notify you if you have any 404 errors on your site.

SEO Plugins For Optimizing Images

Having optimized images on your site is also super important when it comes to SEO tips for WordPress because if your images are too big, your site will slow down drastically. I use the Wealthy Affiliate Platform to write all my articles, which automatically reduces the size of my images. If you don’t belong to Wealthy Affiliate then you can consider the following plugins:

Smush It

It is a simple but useful plugin that lets you decrease the weight of your images to upload.

It won’t alter the size of the images on your site, it merely compresses them.

SEO Friendly Image

As mentioned above, Google does not recognize the images so it’s a must to add a description to the alt text box in all your images on your site. By using this plugin, you can automatically fill the image descriptions as per the title of the post. By using this plugin, your website will not have images without any description.

This is a great plugin to add if you have an established site already with loads of images without alt tags, so you won’t need to go back to them all one by one.

Regenerate Thumbnails

This plugin recreates all thumbnails with the new sizes that you assign to them.

You can thus easily tailor your whole library images to new sizes that are used in your template and thus reduce the loading time of your blog or website.

Various Other WordPress SEO Optimization Plugins

Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps helps you to create new sitemaps of your site for each time you post something new.

Authorsure

This plugin allows you to configure the Author of Google and show your face in search results. This plugin works well if your website has many authors and you want to show a different face on Google for each author.

Google XML Sitemap for Video

This creates video positioning for every video file that you set.

This is a great plugin to have an impact on search results for visibility for your videos as it displays an image of your video in the search results as you see for YouTube videos. It’s a way great to get traffic from Google.

Load Speed SEO WordPress Plugins

Google Page Speed Insights

This plugin gives you advice and recommendations on how to lighten your page. Google will give you a score from 0 to 100 and will tell you how to get a better score.

BJ Lazy Load

This plugin makes the content visible when the website is being loaded by the user.

This will improve your website’s load times, especially if you have a page that has a lot of pictures and plugins.

W3 Total Cache

The cache is a copy of elements that are stored in your web browser reader. This means that there are elements that do not have to re-download each time you visit the site.

These plugins are all optional. Use your discretion as to which ones you will find useful on your website, but to me, they are the most important ones.

Please feel free to comment if you have some more SEO tips for WordPress to share with us.