Importance of Better SEO
We all know the importance of SEO as it determines your website’s marketing around the virtual globe. It defines how well your website content, blog, or product is reached to people related to your site. As a result, the more improved your SEO, the faster your site is ranked top on google. This article describes 9 effective steps of achieving quality SEO on your WordPress site.
1. Check Your WordPress Visibility Settings:
This is a WordPress setting that allows you to hide your website from search engines. This feature is useful when your site is in under construction mode or you deliberately want to hide your site from search engines.
You Can find this on your WordPress Dashboard under “Settings > Search Engine Visibility”.
If this feature is checked, Search engines are unable to find your site, thus SEO falls. You must keep this feature unchecked for your SEO to work.
2. Change Your Permalinks Format:
A permalink is a permanent URL or link to a specific post, page, or blog on your website plays a vital role for your SEO. Permalinks determine whether or not your website fulfills certain search queries for SEO. Also, Search engines use them to learn what your post is about from the URL.
To change your permalinks structure to include a perfect description of your content, you need to head to “Settings > Permalinks”
The structure of your default WordPress permalink will be laid out with the site title, then the date of the post, followed by the post name:
https://yoursite.com/date/blog-post-name
You should select the following permalink structure so that search engines are able to clearly understand the actual meaning of what your blog is about.
https://yoursite.com/blog-post-name/
Most of the successful blogs and renowned sites use this structure.
Don’t forget to click “Save Changes” when you are done.
3. Use Tags and Categories
Tags and Categories are used to keep the related posts together into certain groups or names. This gives your site not only a better structure and UI but also helps search engines to understand your website’s structure and the content of your website.
Tags
Tags are simple keywords that describe the contents of your posts. A post can have many tags to provide a detailed idea about the post. For instance, a post about SEO can have tags like “search engine”, “google”, or “Yoast”.
To add a new tag or view your current tags, go to your WordPress dashboard and click “Posts” > “Tags”.
Categories
Categories are how you broadly group your posts and pages. Categories are broader than tags in terms of describing the content.
To create a category, go to your WordPress “Settings” > “Writing”. Here you’ll see your current categories as well as an “Add New Category” button.
4. Select Your Perfect SEO Plugin
There are tons of available WordPress plugins to enhance your SEO. You can choose Yoast SEO or All In One SEO Pack to get all the desired features for improving your SEO. Some key features of these plugins are :
- Generate XML sitemaps.
- Write title and meta-description for blogs and articles.
- Implement tags and categories.
- Optimize your titles and content with the use of key phrases and keywords.
- Preview of your page on Google.
- Readability check: increase the chances that people actually read your page.
- Full control over your breadcrumbs
- No duplicate content: avoid confusing Google.
You can visit this page to get detailed information about the features of the Yoast SEO plugin.
5. Use XML Sitemaps
A sitemap is a single file of code that contains all the pages of your website to help search engines find, evaluate, and rank the content of your site according to the priority you set on the code and thus improves your SEO.
Unless you are a developer and want to code your own sitemap, you should choose the easier option to install an SEO plugin to generate your XML sitemap. For example, You can use Yoast SEO or Google XML Sitemaps to create your sitemap. This will automatically generate a sitemap providing you options to set priority.
Alternatively, you can use this site for creating your sitemap file free. After that, you should download the file and upload it on your Cpanel “File manager > Public HTML”
6. Internally Link Your Site
For better SEO, your website’s authority must be enhanced. That depends on the number of internal links to your pages or blogs. In order to provide more internal links, you should click in the “insert link” button, then copy & paste your desired URL.
Thus the word will be highlighted and allow the search engine to know that your site is internally linked.
7. Use Image Alt Tags
Alt text of an image provides descriptions of your image. Search engines usually try to fetch the alt-text from the image.
Putting Image-Alt-Text can help to rank your site and determine whether images have the proper information being searched for by users.
You can add Alt-text on “Media > Attachment Details > Alt text”
8. Integrate SSL
SSL, known as the Secure sockets layer is considered as standard technology that runs an encrypted link between server and browser. It stands for the process of sharing information between the website and the security of visitors remains.
The existence of SSL is an important factor for SEO because search engines like Google, look for “secure and encrypted” connections when determining a website’s ranking. Thus, if there were two identical sites with one having SSL and others do not, Google would be more likely to rank the site with SSL.
There are several ways to integrate SSL on your site.
- You can get SSL by purchasing hosting (for example Siteground) that will provide SSL
- You Can use SSL Plugin such as WP Force SSL.
- You Can install free SSL from SSL FOR FREE
9. Use Nofollow External Links
Along with internally linking your site, there is another option of external link meaning you can give authority to other websites and thus helping them with their SEO.
Using No-follow external links will prevent search engines from being able to follow those URLs to the sites you are linking to on your website so you are only improving your own site’s ranking and authority.
There are two ways of inserting No Follow Link
- You can manually insert by putting ‘rel’ attribute set to ‘no-follow’.
- you can simply add “no follow” in the “Link Relationship” form field when you add a hyperlink to your keywords or phrases.
Since you feel the necessity of improving the SEO on your WordPress site, you can start enhancing it by implementing the steps described above. By successfully implementing all of the steps, you can increase your website’s authority and ranking on all search engines, and eventually your visitors, leads, and conversions from the website will flourish.
