How to Optimize SEO in WordPress: A Practical Guide
You may have optimized your website and content with SEO, but did you optimize your SEO for WordPress? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is also referred to as natural referencing, and […]
Read moreWordPress SEO: Everything You Need to Know to Rank Well
Your website and its content could be top-notch, but no one other than your friends and your mom will see it if you don’t make WordPress SEO adjustments.
According to Moz, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is “the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as “organic”) search engine results.”
The WordPress core is built with SEO in mind, but it can’t automagically enhance your pages, posts, and content. It sets the foundation, but you need to work on improving SEO from there.
Fortunately, there are so many ways you can improve Google search results for your WordPress site.
Here are the details and links to all the resources and SEO tips you need to make your WordPress site an SEO powerhouse including properly structuring your content, improving your site’s performance, and using SEO plugins.
Structuring Your Content for SEO
When it comes to optimizing your website and its content to help with improving SEO, there are many areas to cover. It’s crucial to make sure your blog posts are structured properly, that your site is easy to use, and that you do keyword research, and include keywords in your blog posts.
It also helps tremendously to have a marketing strategy that includes gaining backlinks. These are other websites that link to a page on your site because it contains relevant and valuable content for their readers.
But before planning a marketing strategy, you need to cover your bases. It all starts with your WordPress site.
Be sure it’s easy to use so visitors can effortlessly peruse your site.
If your site’s difficult or confusing to navigate, visitors may click away quickly. It sends a signal to search engines that your content must not be relevant, which causes your ranking to drop.
To improve Google search results and your ranking in them, it’s also necessary to make sure your content structure is up to snuff. This entails ensuring your blog posts and pages include metadata and headings.
For WordPress SEO, it’s also imperative to do keyword research, then add the great keywords you find into your blog posts and pages.
For full details on all these areas and SEO tips, check out How to Optimize SEO in WordPress: A Practical Guide.
Bolstering Your WordPress Site’s Performance
One way to improve Google search results and your rank that’s often overlooked is to make sure your WordPress site performs well. This entails making improvements under the hood so your site loads quickly every time it’s visited.
If your website doesn’t load quickly enough, users can grow impatient and click away from your site. This automatically signals to Google that your site isn’t worth ranking.
Improving SEO through the performance of your site looks like:
- Fixing errors on your site
- Choosing a good hosting provider
- Using an SSL certificate
- Updating your site regularly
- Minifying and combining files
- Reducing DNS lookups
- Implementing multiple caching solutions
- Not using too many plugins, and
- Using high-quality plugins and themes when you do
To get all these SEO tips in full detail to boost your WordPress SEO skills, check out SEO Optimization for WordPress through Improving Site Performance.
Take a Rocket to the Top
As mentioned in the list above, improving SEO on your site also includes enabling many types of caching solutions. This can get complicated and daunting.
Fortunately, there’s a plugin that can take care of caching on your site as well as take care of optimizing your site’s performance in several ways.
WP Rocket can not only implement page caching on your WordPress site without having to touch any settings, but it can also minify and combine files in one click. It also includes add-ons so you can quickly and effortlessly enable other kinds of caching as well.
Check out WP Rocket: Cache Plugin for WordPress SEO for details.
Go the Distance with WordPress SEO Plugins
One of the best SEO tips and the best way to improve Google search results and ranking for your site is to install a WordPress SEO plugin.
It can help you manage your site’s SEO in many ways including helping you track your keywords, by giving you feedback on your content so you can make changes, improving SEO, and many other options.
Below are the top WordPress SEO plugins. They’re all updated on a regular basis, they’re secure, reliable, and can help you improve Google search results and rankings for your site.
No matter which one you end up choosing for your site, you can rest easy knowing you have everything you need for improving SEO.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is a popular choice for improving SEO for over five million WordPress sites. It’s a free plugin that analyzes your blog posts and pages for key components. It then provides SEO tips to help you improve Google search results and rankings for your site.
Beyond that, it can help you optimize metadata and automatically provide a lot of SEO housekeeping that would otherwise be a time-consuming hassle to implement manually.
For example, it can automatically redirect media URLs, insert breadcrumbs, and delete archive pages which don’t offer anything as far as improving SEO.
There’s also a premium upgrade option which offers a lot more features to help you further improve Google search results and rankings for your WordPress site.
For details, check out Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin: The Toolkit Your Site Needs.
The All in One SEO Pack Plugin
Another popular option is the All in One SEO Pack plugin. It’s user-friendly with everything you need automagically set up right out of the box. There’s no need to configure any options, but you can to help improve Google search results and rankings for your site all the more.
It’s also the only free seo plugin that includes Google Analytics tracking options as well as integration for e-Commerce sites. This also means the All in One SEO plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce.
Additionally, this plugin can also automatically generate meta tags, and optimizes your page and blog post titles to help you rank well.
While this plugin is free, there is a premium option if you would like more features as well as training materials to help you up your SEO game.
Check out The All in One SEO WordPress Plugin: Help Your Site Rank Well for details.
The Best SEO Plugin for WooCommerce
When it comes to SEO, WooCommerce sites have different needs than the average WordPress site. There are so many more pages of products, for example, that require special SEO attention.
Fortunately, there are suitable plugins that are not only compatible with WooCommerce, but that can also help you with improving SEO altogether.
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin, and All in One SEO WordPress plugin are both great options. No matter which one you choose, you really can’t go wrong. Although, they do have their differences.
For example, the All in One SEO WordPress plugin works right out of the box while Yoast requires at least some configuring. Yoast also offers a robust set of SEO tips that dynamically guides you as you write content for your WordPress site.
For details, check out WooCommerce SEO: The Best Plugin for Your Online Store.
Go Further with these SEO Resources
With these SEO tips, you’re well on your way to mastering SEO on your WordPress site. With the list of resources available above, you can go that much deeper to help with constantly improving SEO on your site.
For more SEO tips and resources check these out:
- How to Optimize SEO in WordPress: A Practical Guide
- SEO Optimization for WordPress through Improving Site Performance
- Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin: The Toolkit Your Site Needs
- The All in One SEO WordPress Plugin: Help Your Site Rank Well
- WooCommerce SEO: The Best Plugin for Your Online Store
- WP Rocket: Cache Plugin for WordPress SEO