Introduction:
Looking to improve your SEO on your WordPress website? Well, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we are going to discuss the most crucial tips and settings you need to know to help your website rank up the top of Google, in the most simple and comprehensible way possible.
www vs non-www:
Any website can choose between the domain name showing www (http://www.example.com) and non-www (http://example.com), and WordPress websites are no exception. Luckily for you, there are no SEO benefits for either one, so choose whichever you prefer. However, if your website isn’t brand new, and it’s just being moved to WordPress (or is a redesign), we recommend keeping it the same as your previous website to prevent any future problems.
http vs https
Unlike the previous option, this matters a lot. In fact, most browsers recommend users away from a website if it doesn’t have https. To get this, you need an SSL certificate, which is usually included with your website host. Having “https” at the start of your website simply means your website is secure and safe to visit, and is a ranking factor for every search engine, so don’t skip it! If you have an SSL certificate installed, but your website shows both versions (http and https), try installing the Really Simple SSL plugin.
Check Visibility Settings:
This is probably the single most important setting to check of this entire list. Under Settings > Reading, there is a box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. If this is ticked, your website cannot appear in search results. Make sure it isn’t ticked, or you will get 0 organic traffic to your website. This setting is mostly used for staging websites before they are pushed live. You’d be surprised how often web developers forget about this feature when working on a new site.
Update Permalinks:
Another crucial setting which you can find at Settings > Permalinks. To create SEO-friendly URLs (such as example.com/best-cat-food) instead of ugly URLs that search engines hate (such as example.com/?p=123), we need to change these settings. Find the option that says “Post name”, tick it and click save settings.
Tags & Categories:
Tags & Categories are crucial for helping structure blog content the right way. By using categories and tags correctly, your users will be able to navigate your website with ease, and Google will find your content easier to understand. Happy users and comprehensible content will result in higher positions in Google.
Categories are used to group posts in broad topics, and are often used for a hierarchical navigation system. The category can also be included in your post’s URL, so make sure you pick something relevant!
Tags are less important, which help group more specific keywords and ideas, and will often only appear in a small list on the post itself. Sometimes, the tags won’t actually appear on the page at all.
You can create Tags and Categories through Posts > Tags and Posts > Categories, or on the actual post itself. When writing a post, select which tag and categories to use on the sidebar.
SEO Plugins:
Optimize your site’s SEO capabilities using professional SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack. All these plugins are very helpful in optimizing title and meta description, XML sitemap generation, and completely analyzing your content. This makes optimization easy for non-technical users.
The use of SEO plugins on your WordPress site offers you a host of optimization features and suggestions aimed at improving your site’s search engine performance. These plugins help automate essential SEO chores such as optimizing the title and meta description of every page, creating XML sitemaps that assist search engines in crawling and indexing your site, among others. This leaves you free to focus on creating quality content. From optimizing keyword density to enhancing readability – these plugins give suggestions on how to make your site work better for its SEO.
SEO Plugins help make tedious SEO tasks a lot easier. Some main settings you should focus on include:
Meta Titles: The title of the post in the search results. Be sure to add in your desired keyword, and keep the title under 60 characters long. This is a big ranking factor, so don’t skip it!
Meta Descriptions: The description of the post in the search results. While it technically doesn’t affect your SEO rankings, it does provide context to the user, and will affect whether they actually click on your website or choose one of your competitors.
XML Sitemaps: This is a map of every post and page on your site, which helps Google (and other search engines) find and crawl your website. Make sure you add this to Google Search Console.
Index/Noindex: Index simply means that search engines can add your website to their search results. By changing a page to Noindex, it prevents search engines from adding it to their results and keeps the page hidden.
Some free SEO plugins you can choose from include Yoast, All In One SEO, Rank Math and SEOPress.
Alt tags:
Alt tags are often overlooked by beginners and misunderstood. Alt tag (also known as alt text) is simply short for alternative tag, and is used to optimize images on your website. Alt tags have a few purposes:
- It helps Google understand what the image is.
- It is replacement text when an image cannot load.
- It is read out loud when someone visually impaired uses text to speech.
An alt tag is a small piece of text that appears in the code that search engines read. If you add keywords to your alt tags, these search engines will know that your image is relevant to that keyword, and will help you rank for it. We recommend ensuring that the alt tag is relevant to the image and makes sense, rather than just adding the keyword, in case the image doesn’t loud or the user is visually impaired.
Most page builders will have a feature to add an alt tag. If you cannot find one, try finding the image in the media library (Media > Library) and adding it directly to the image instead.
Internal Links:
Internal links are simply just links on your pages that link to other pages on your website. Internal links are useful for users, and is a ranking factor for Google. The more relevant internal links a page has, the better it ranks (but don’t overdo it). Make sure the internal link makes sense, and if possible includes a keyword. For example, if you have a page about Bird Hats, and you want to rank for the keyword “Bird Hat”, on your page about Bird Shirts, you may add a link on a phrase that says “goes perfectly with a bird hat”.
To add an internal link, you should be able to highlight your preferred text and click the chain icon.
H Tags:
H tags, such as H1 and H2 tags, can seem complicated but are very easy. H stands for heading, and is exactly how it should be used. The H1 tag is the main heading, and you should only have one, preferably as close to the top of the page as possible. This is crucial for SEO rankings, so try and include your keyword in this tag. The H2 tag is a sub-heading, and you can make plenty of these if you want. Try and include your keyword in at least one H2 tag as well, and you can also target other similar keywords in your H2 tag. The higher the number on the H tag, the lower the importance on the page. Most pages use 1x H1 tag as the main heading, a handful of H2 tags as subheadings which represents each section of the page, and a few H3 tags to break apart the sections.
Conclusion:
SEO can be really complicated. Especially if you’re new to building websites and WordPress. But if you follow our tips, you should stand a good shot at ranking your website and improving your organic traffic.
