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Setting up a WordPress website is the easiest thing you can do. But what good will it do, if it does not get any traffic?If you want visitors to come to your website, the first thing you need to do is make your website search engine friendly.
To help you get started, here are 7 WordPress SEO tips that can double the traffic in just a week. -
Focus on Keyword
Keyword research is the most important part of SEO. Use various tools such as the Google keyword research tool to choose the most relevant keywords for your niche.
- Remember, targeting the most popular keywords (ideally with the highest competition) is not always the best practice. Try focusing on keywords which are low competitive, have a bid value and also has a search intent.
Moz has its own keyword difficulty checker tool which can show whether a particular keyword is suitable to go for optimization or not. So after you choose the keyword here are the followings which you need to do - The focus keyword must appear in the title tag, header tags and sub-header tags (H1, H2) of a web page.
- Your focus keyword must appear within 1st 100 words in the content
- Sprinkle the semantic keyword and long tail keyword in the body content
- Although it is optional use the keyword in the meta description, as meta description acts like an ad copy.
- Do not target more than 2 keywords in page
- Use the focus keyword in the URL of the page
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Choose the Best WordPress SEO Plugin
WordPress provides us with a number of plugins that make our tasks easier. WordPress SEO plugins such as the All-In-One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast are by far the best available in the market. Some factors to be kept in mind when choosing the right plugin are:- Compatibility with the website
- Support
- Future developmental prospects, etc.
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Avoiding Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is the single most harmful element in SEO. Sometimes what happens, the same content can appear in taxonomies like tags and archives page, thus creating onsite duplication.
Hence the best way to deal these kinds of pages is to keep them away from Google Index. To avoid onsite duplication employ these code in the taxonomy pages.- <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex,follow”>
a. NOINDEX tag signals Google not to index that page in its data base
b. FOLLOW tag signals Google bot to crawl the links mentioned in that page
Here are some best plugins which you can choose for your WordPress website: https://theme-fusion.com/choose-best-seo-plugins-wordpress/ -
Making Blog Post and Pages SEO friendly
Image courtesy moz.com/blog/on-page-seo-8-principles-whiteboard-friday If you want your website to rank high on the SERPs, it is a must that the blog posts and pages are SEO friendly. Here are some guidelines to make the page and post SEO friendly, which will improve WordPress SEO:
- Use title tags in the page
- Write h1, h2 tags in a page with keyword inserted
- Use permalinks that hey are easy to remember
- Use breadcrumb navigation
- Install an XML sitemap
- Use relevant keywords within the content
- Use ‘image alt’ tags for images
- Meta descriptions are also useful
- Use rel canonical tag
- Check whether www and non www version exist, if both the version exist then make any one of preffered version. You can do this either implementing rel canonical tag or 301 redirection.
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Internal Linking Between the Posts
Image Courtesy; yoast.com In simple words, interlinking is linking two pages posts or pages within the same blog or website. Interlinking is beneficial since it spreads the link juice and makes navigation easier. It even helps the search engine spiders to index the main pages. However, it does not mean you have to link all the pages or posts on a single page.
Link the most important and relevant links only. If you have WordPress Blog hosted with your site make sure you do internal linking with an old post with new one in order to save a page from going 3 pages away from the home page.
Premium version in Yoast now gives a great SEO internal linking suggestion. You can get to see the full demo here and implement the internal linking successfully. -
Use Search Engine Optimized Themes
Choose the theme carefully. Some themes are too heavy and make the website load slowly; these themes are not search engine friendly. Look for themes that are light and are optimized for the search engines. Search for low-code and responsive themes that can load easily, since the major search engines give great importance to the website loading time while ranking them.
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Install an XML Sitemap
The .xml sitemap plugin is vital for SEO optimization. An XML sitemap includes all the URLs from the website that the search engine bots need to crawl. It helps the content to get indexed faster. Update the XML sitemap frequently.Search engine optimization is an easy way to drive traffic to your website. But in order to reap the benefits, you must know what techniques to apply for getting quick results. The above tips will help you get your website indexed quickly and rank high for the targeted keywords.
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