Do you want to boost your WordPress website for better SEO practices? Well, there are plenty of different methods to increase your site’s traffic.
And SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the best of all.
SEO is simple, sustainable, highly rewarding, and free to boost your site’s ranking efficiently.
Some of the SEO tips for WordPress are technical. In this post, I will share 17 simple WordPress SEO tips that you can implement right away!
By writing this post, I am assuming you are busy, and a beginner, so all of these SEO tips are going to be a piece of cake.
1. What’s SEO (and why it’s important)?
We use search engines to find information. If you want people to visit your website, you will need to ensure it appears in Google search results (or similar sites).
The best way to do that is SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Which means, optimizing your, website/content and, making it search engine friendly.
SEO includes a wide range of strategies and procedures based off how search engines determine the website rankings. SEO optimized Website has the following benefits.
- Ranking on top of search results means higher chances of massive traffic.
- The website shown in a higher position seems more trustworthy.
- Websites that are properly SEO optimized have sustainable rankings.
If you’re an SEO beginner with a WordPress Website, remember WordPress is already search engine optimized. Now all you need is a few simple SEO practices, which we are covering today.
17 Ways to Boost SEO on your WordPress Website.
Google is by far the most popular, search engine. It releases several features and updates regarding SEO. Techniques mentioned here will also help your site on other search engines, like Bing, Yahoo., etc.
2. Always use Better Hosting
When it’s Hosting, never compromise on it. Always choose a better hosting provider. I know it’s quite overwhelming to choose the right Hosting provider from hundreds of different options.
That’s why, after years of experience with good and bad hosting providers. I have compiled a list of currently best Hosting providers in the market.
For a quick note: Bluehost is currently the best option available.
And CloudWays is better for Managed Hosting.
Hosting is the one, which determines the loading speed, Downtime, User-Experience, and many other factors, of your website. One of the ranking factors of Google includes website loading speed.
You have to be conscious of making your site’s hosting decision.
3. Change your Site’s Permalink Structure:
Permalink is your site’s permanent URL that point’s to your website’s posts, pages.
With these URL’s people are gonna link to your website.
The better your permalink structure is, the better it would be regarding your ranking factors. Make it simple and easy to read and remember.
Change your permalink structure to “post name”. Remember, changing permalink can seriously affect your site’s visibility; it should never be done on a live site. Also, change it only on a newer Website.
To change your site’s permalink structure. Navigate to your WordPress settings> Permalinks (on the left-hand side).
Other permalink structures are not conveying a message about the link.
4. Use a Search Engine Optimized Theme
You should be conscious about Picking a theme for your WordPress website. It determines your site’s layout and feels.
That’s why I recommend using a premium theme.
Some, of the themes, are Monstroid-2, X-Theme, etc., Choose a theme with SEO in mind.
5. Use a Dedicated SEO Plugin
A plugin is a piece of, code that when installed, in a site can increase your website’s functionality and features.
Using a dedicated SEO plugin could make your SEO journey a whole lot easier. For beginners to advanced users, I always recommend using Yoast SEO.
6. Create a Sitemap
A sitemap makes it easier for search engines to index your website. It creates a complete map of your site. That’s why it’s called Sitemap.
It was used to help users navigate through the site. And now it serves as an information communicator to search engine crawlers (bots).
You can use a plugin, Google XML Sitemap, for creating a sitemap.
With a sitemap search engine, bots can better understand which contents are linked and vice-versa. It’s not gonna boost your SEO, It will increase your SEO score to some extent.
7. Create your Content around keywords
You might be familiar with keywords. They are small phrases on which we write our content.
For example, Write content related to “Dirt Bikes”. And by using this keyword in various places like in Title, Headings, and somewhere in the content is a best practice. It will increase the relevancy of that post with the targeted keyword.
And remember don’t stuff the keywords everywhere in the content it will look spammy and unnatural. It will negatively affect your rankings.
Keyword research is crucial for better content optimization. Tools like Long-Tail Pro, Keyword Revealer, can be used for keyword research purposes.
8. Include Internal and External links
Google and other search engines look for, high trustworthy content for users. Content that serves better information.
Including links to spammy and irrelevant sites can negatively affect your rankings. Linking internally and externally, to high authoritative sites that are relevant, will increase your trust score.
It encourages other people to give your site a backlink, which will indicate to the search engines that your website is trustworthy.
9. Optimize Images
Use high-quality images. But images of larger sizes will make a page quite heavy, and Visitors will leave your site before it even loads. Which is bad for your rankings.
Images are essential for almost any website. They form a visually appealing situation plus help break up text in specific ways.
It’s better to compress images. Use a plugin for that, like Smush to automatically compress your images. That way, you don’t have to bother all the time, compressing images manually.
10. Write Comprehensive Content
Writing a whole piece of content indicates search engines that your content is highly relevant. It doesn’t mean a small piece of content can never rank.
The reason why comprehensive content performs so well is that it includes several long-tail keywords. And each long-tail keyword will have its search volume.
Longer content is valuable to the reader. And the reader spends more time on your site. That way, your rankings will go up.
Make a better version of content than out there.
11. Update your Content More Often
Old, quality content will do well. It doesn’t mean you have to create a post and forget it.
That means if you update your content more often/regularly. It will tell search engines, that your content is updated and most likely to be relevant to the searchers.
12. Use Responsive Design
People are now using mobile phones more often to search the web. Designing a responsive website means that your site will adapt and react to each user’s device.
One of the Google ranking factors includes the site’s responsiveness. That means if your website is responsive, the chances are higher that it will do well in SERP’s.
Ensure that by using a responsive WordPress theme. The best way to start with a responsive design is by always checking the theme’s responsiveness. And look at some other SEO factors too.
Here are 50 Top Selling WordPress themes of all time.
13. Use Headings Throughout your Post
Users focus much more on heading to skim the post. Always present your content in a structured frame.
It will have two benefits for your content. First, it will make your content visually appealing second, effortless to read.
Crawlers use headings to see how your content is organized.
You can apply different heading formats in section’s settings listed as Heading-1, Heading-2, Heading-3, to Heading-6.
14. Start Building an Email List
Offer your visitors a high-quality content or something that will help them a lot. That way, you can ask them to surrender their email.
Collect their emails and deliver valuable content notifications in their inboxes. This will help you make your online community.
Collect emails using MailChimp, HelloBar., etc., You can apply different heading formats in section’s settings listed as Heading-1, Heading-2, Heading-3, to Heading-6.
15. Makeup your Routine Uploading Content
Do upload content regularly or make a schedule for it that way you will keep your visitors coming back to your site.
It will help your site by making steady growth in the SERP’s.
16. Focus more on High-Quality Content
Search engines prefer user experience the most. Doing keyword stuffing and maintaining a good position in SERP’s will not retain for the long term.
Focus more on quality. It will increase your SERP’s score.
17. Write Error-Free Content
Writing a clearer and error-free post is one way to tell search engines that, your content is of high quality. No matter how good you are at writing, you will make some mistakes.
To get rid of them and improve, your writing score, edit it again, and again, and back. It’s one way to ensure your writing is error-free. A tool called Grammarly could be a great choice if you want to write error-free.
18. Promote your Content
According to Neil Patel (Digital Marketing Expert) “I spend 20% of my time writing content and 80% promoting it”.
I think you should spend more time writing better content than promoting. Neil’s Blog has enough content to maintain it’s rankings.
But you should spend some time promoting your content. That way, you will get some of your traffic from social networks.
Promote your content on Facebook, make a page of your site there. Make use of Instagram, Pinterest, and Linkedin. Build a community on social networks.
19. Things you Should Know
Instead of trying to rank higher, provide a better user experience. It will communicate with search engines that your content is highly valuable, for searchers.
If your content is comprehensive enough to serve the purpose of the search term, the visitor will not go anywhere else.
