An SEO Boosting Guide For WordPress Website Owners

by Brandon Graves web developer

Creating a website with WordPress is easy but taking it to your audience is not so simple. There are billions of websites in the world and chances are there will be thousands if not millions in your category itself. Effective search engine optimization holds the key to improve the online presence of your interface among relevant users. WordPress is an inherently SEO-friendly platform but you need to enhance the feature even more to beat the competition. Here is an SEO boosting guide for WordPress users that touches on all the different aspects of the topic. You will find tips to improve all the optimization factors that can lift your interface’s position in relevant SERP rankings.

1. Select A Dependable WordPress Hosting Service

You need to ensure that your website is easily and quickly available to all interested users. A vital factor that affects website accessibility is hosting. Choose an efficient and dependable company that provides WordPress hosting services. Compare the features and the price plans offered by various agencies. Look for a plan that contains all the essential features that you require and fits into your budget.

2. Define An Efficient Permalink Structure

Are you aware that the URLs of your posts/ pages affect the online visibility of your interface? Go to Settings > Permalinks in your dashboard.

If you have not modified these settings, you will find that your installation will be using the default format i.e Plain that looks like the following URL: http://www.yourwebsite.com/?p=123

Here “?p=123” means that the content can be found in the 50th row of the wp_posts table. This is not a search engine-friendly URL structure and you must choose a text-based format that describes the nature of your post or page.

3. Add An XML Sitemap To Your Website

Search engines need to be aware of the existence of a page in order to crawl and index it. An XML Sitemap is a file that contains a list of every page of your website. Search engines refer to this file to know about the various pages of your interface. It, therefore, becomes essential to add an XML Sitemap to your website. Don’t worry, you do not need to be a WordPress website development expert to conduct the process. This can be done easily through a sitemap plugin or an SEO plugin. You only have to configure the tool’s settings and it will automatically generate the file for your website.

4. Avoid Duplicate Content Issues By Using Canonical Tags

The existence of duplicate content is one of the most common issues that a large number of new owners are unaware of. Duplicate content here does not refer to the same text published in two different locations of your interface. Take a look at the following URLs:

http://yourwebsite.com

https://yourwebsite.com

https://yourwebsite.com/index.php

You are thinking all the links are the same, right? You are correct but for a search engine, each URL represents a different location. This can cause the engine’s crawlers to identify the wrong URL for indexing. Using canonical tags helps in pointing the crawlers towards the link that you want them to crawl. The following canonical tag can be added to the header of the other locations and it will inform search engines about the target URL.

5. Do Extensive Research To Discover The Most Suitable Keywords

The next tip in our SEO boosting guide for WordPress users is about keywords. Content forms the bedrock of your SEO strategy. You need to provide informative and interesting material that offers some value to the visitors. At the same time, the matter needs to be optimized with relevant keywords so that search engines can include it in relevant results. Use keyword research tools to identify terms that attract high traffic but have low competition. Put your competitor’s websites under the scanner and find out which phrases are bringing them more traffic. Then build a list of the most suitable terms for your website and include then in relevant content. Make sure that

6. Interlink Content To Boost Engagement

Interlinking is another helpful tactic that can be used to improve the SEO of WordPress websites. Whenever you create a post that is related in some way to an earlier one, make sure to link them. It can be easily done by adding a hyperlink to a bit of text that refers to the other material. This will help search engines in understanding the context of the page in a better manner. Search bots will be able to dive deeper into the website and crawl more pages. This strategy is also helpful in boosting visitors' engagement with the interface and encouraging them to spend a longer time.

7. Create A Fast And Responsive Website

User experience has become an important factor not only for satisfying the audiences but also because search engines use it to finalize their rankings. It is essential that your website is responsive in nature so that it is easily accessible by visitors irrespective of the device they are using. Another important aspect is the page loading speed. People hate to wait too long for an interface to load. Enable caching on your website and use content delivery networks to ensure pages are delivered quickly to users. Moreover, employ best practices like code minification and image optimization to create a lightweight interface that loads easily.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website for search engines is a constant process and you need to assess your strategies’ effectiveness from time to time. The suggestions discussed here can be easily implemented but if you face any problems you can hire a WordPress developer to make the necessary modifications.