With the new age of the internet, WordPress websites can now be optimized using SEO. It’s important to improve your WordPress SEO to drive more organic traffic to your website. If you are serious about increasing your traffic, you need to pay serious attention to it. Not sure where to start? Here is a beginner’s guide to SEO for WordPress sites.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy targeted to build organic (non-paid) hits in search engine results. Rankings, traffic, and brand awareness are improved when successfully tapping into SEO. Aspects included in SEO’s reach are the words on your web page and links on your website. It also includes how your website is structured to be understood by search engines. By implementing and following its best practices, you not only create better search engine-friendly websites, but you also make your website better for people as well. Once you understand SEO, you can drive traffic to your websites by just tweaking the way your sites are structured, placing good links, and picking the right keywords.
Read: Key Tips on Writing Blogs for Local Business Websites for Search Optimization
Why do you need SEO for WordPress?
Most of the web traffic you will get is going to be driven by major search engines in the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. For most internet users, search engines are the main navigation tools used. Even if you market through social media, traffic generated from there will always be incomparable to web traffic generated by search engines. Search engines are one-of-a-kind in the way that they offer targeted traffic from people who are specifically looking for your product or anything you are offering. If your website can’t be found on the first page of search engine results, then you’re missing out on website viewers and potential customers. The right SEO can bring a lot of traffic to your website and boost rankings.
Learn SEO: The Ultimate Guide for SEO Beginners.
Can you do it yourself?
Of course, you can definitely do this yourself. Sure, SEO can be very complicated, but just like most things, it can be quickly learned with some effort. Free lessons are vastly available online. Just practice a little, and you can go a long way. Depending on how much you commit and how willing you are to learn, that will determine how well you do. If you’re a WordPress novice and have a lot on your plate, you may also hire a specialist to handle SEO for you. For instance, NO BS Agency can help you with blogger outreach and link building—two essential components of good SEO. Nevertheless, it is nice to have a good grasp of the basic concepts.
Read: Basic steps to get your website ranked in search engines
How do you change default permalink structures on WordPress?
WordPress’ default settings use ‘?p=[id] permalinks for posts. Since this is not very search engine-friendly, you won’t be able to place keywords to optimize your search engine visibility in post permalinks. Because of this, you might want to consider shifting to a text-based permalink structure. For example, you can use the ‘yourdomain.com/year/month/post-name/’ format for your posts. This will help you place keywords that drive traffic to your website and become a more effective SEO.
How to choose the best WordPress SEO Plugin?
When it comes to WordPress, there is a built-in option to hide your website from various search engines. Sometimes, this can go unchecked and make your website hidden. Make sure that this option is ticked off before you launch your page. Some SEO friendly URL structures in WordPress must include words that clearly explain the content of your page. One of the best things about WordPress is that there is a plugin for everything. With SEO, you can also use a plugin. There are only two choices for this. It’s either you go for Yoast SEO or All In One SEO Pack. Both are very effective, so you can choose between the two.
For WordPress websites, you need to try a caching plugin. This plugin can benefit you in two ways. First, your websites perform faster with caching plugins. Second, caching plugins decrease the load on your web server. An example of a caching plugin built for WordPress is W3 Total Cache. It’s has a wide range of features with page caching, browser caching, object caching, database caching and minification options. Another good alternative you can use is the WP Super Cache. It creates static .html pages to help make your website perform faster.
How do you block spam comments on WordPress?
Spam comments do not contribute anything to your topic and confuses users. The updated versions of WordPress already does a good job in blocking no-following links posted by users in the comments section. However, here are some other ways you can prevent getting comments like those posted in the first place. First you can download Akismet, which is an app pre-installed in WordPress to tackle spam comments. You can use this function by signing up for an API key in your WordPress’ plugin page. Once you have an API key, just input the key in the Akismet API key box in the Akismet settings. Voila, you now have a spam comment blocker.
What are WordPress SEO best practices?
Some of the best practices with WordPress SEO is to use categories and tags in your WordPress correctly. This allows you to manage your blog more efficiently and segregate topics. This also makes it way easier for users to locate the content they are looking for. In the beginning, this might get confusing. Categories are the broad grouping of posts comparable to the table of contents in a book. For instance, a blog can have categories such as travel, music, fashion, or food depending on what you want to write. On the other hand, tags are certain keywords that describe your blog post. For example, your blog post may be under the fashion category and contain tags like dresses, shirts, or pants.
Read: 12 Proven Traffic Strategies to Get More Visitors to Your Site More Often
Although this is just a starter guide on tips and tricks to SEO for WordPress, you can still do some research online about this and start practicing it yourself. Hope that this guide was able to help you and give you clarity on the wonders of SEO for WordPress.
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