SEO Strategies to Optimize Your WordPress Website

In order to improve your online brand exposure, you need to garner enhanced organic traffic to your website. Though there are several methods to optimize a website, SEO is the most effective one. To further boost the effectiveness of SEO, most marketers currently use WordPress as their CMS as it is extremely SEO-friendly. WordPress SEO optimization comes with a range of powerful features that offer limitless SEO opportunities, thereby increasing organic traffic and generating better sales and leads.

What Is WordPress SEO?

WordPress is one of the world’s most preferred content management systems (CMS). It runs around 35% of the internet and powers most of the popular websites like BBC America, TechCrunch, and more. WordPress initially started as a blogging platform in the year 2003.

However, owing to its advanced features, it became a powerful solution to run websites and is also used as a potential e-commerce solution. WordPress simplifies many of the basics of ranking factors that help improve website visibility on online platforms, and therefore, simplifies SEO and related driving tactics.

Strategies to Optimize WordPress SEO

Now that you have learned about SEO on WordPress, here are some WordPress SEO tips to improve your WordPress website and optimize it efficiently for a higher SERP ranking.

1. Carefully Select a Reliable Hosting Partner

The hosting provider you use is vital for your website’s SERP ranking. You must make sure the hosting provider is reliable, and to do so, you should check the site speed, security, and uptime.

Site speed directly impacts a WordPress website’s performance in search engine results. Also, the downtime a WordPress site experiences and the distance between the visitors and servers also impacts its ranking. Lastly, secured HTTPS sites also eliminate security vulnerabilities and improve website ranking.

2. Change Your SSL From HTTP To HTTPS

Google uses HTTPS as an important ranking factor and is pushing for 100% encryption across all products and services.

HTTPS is a mechanism that helps the browser to connect with a particular website securely. HTTPS makes browsing extremely safe and secure and ensures no information on a website is accessible by hackers.

In order to serve your WordPress website’s content safely via HTTPS, you will first have to obtain a Secure Sockets Layer or SSL certificate for the domain from a recognized certificate issuing authority like SSLs.com, Media Temple, GoDaddy, Comodo, and Namecheap. Next, you will have to install the SSL on the server and then change your WordPress website’s permanent links from HTTP to HTTPS.

3. Install a WordPress Theme That Is SEO-Friendly

The theme you choose for your WordPress website determines its layout, appearance, functionality and improves the SEO ranking factors. For example, the theme you choose will largely impact the site’s load speed.

Also, how a particular theme was developed is also essential as it impacts SERP ranking. Hence, while choosing a theme for your website, opt for one that is SEO-friendly. You can also run a theme through Google’s web.dev tool before installing it to get insights on its performance and SEO issues.

4. Use a WordPress SEO Plugin

One of the important WordPress SEO guides is to install a WordPress SEO plugin. Plugins are essentially add-on software that helps improve a website’s functionality and boosts the WordPress SEO optimization success. Two of the most recognized SEO plugins are – Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack. These plugins can help create a site map and also add a host of search engine optimized and focused features on improving a website’s visibility.

5. Restructure Your Permalink

Permalinks of a WordPress website are the permanent URLs that point to a website’s individual pages, posts, and contents. Users will use the permalinks to link back to your site, and, therefore, these must be optimized.

By default, WordPress uses permalinks, like: https://esignwebservices.com/?p=123.

This URL structure is not at all search engine friendly and, therefore, can affect ranking. Hence, you will have to customize the URL structure to ensure it is descriptive and clearly explains its contents. Luckily, WordPress offers a number of permalink options to choose from. You can utilize such links and customize them as per your requirements.

6. Create Content with Heading Tags

Another crucial method of WordPress SEO optimization is to use heading tags throughout the content of the website. Adequately optimized headings help in two ways.

It makes the content visually appealing and structured for human readers, thereby improving the readability score.

On the other hand, it also allows the web crawlers to adequately understand the manner in which content is organized in your website, thereby boosting its rank.

You can easily create heading tags for your content with the WordPress heading options.

7. Generate XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is essentially a list of all pages and contents on your WordPress website organized hierarchically. Sitemaps allow web crawlers to understand the contents of a website adequately. In addition, it communicates important information related to your website so that the crawlers can see how each page is related to the other.

This further helps the web bots to index the website faster and offer it a higher rank for related search queries. You can easily generate an XML sitemap by using a targeted plugin such as Google XML Sitemaps.

8. Add the Domain to Google Search Console

One of the most important steps of WordPress SEO optimization is adding it to Google Search Console.

Google Search Console offers some essential webmaster tools that will help you monitor the issues on your website impacting its ranking and will allow you to maintain it adequately.

Some of the popular methods that you can use to add your website to Google Search Console are DNS, HTML file, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, etc.

9. Optimize Site Speed

The site speed of a website is an important ranking factor. As per Google, a site must load within 3 seconds or less to reduce bounce rate and increase its ranking. Hence, to improve your WordPress website’s visibility on the online platform, you must optimize the images, run a site speed diagnosis, omit all unused plugins and themes, reduce the CSS, HTML and JavaScript and reduce the redirects.

10. Effective Link Building Strategies

Last but not least, you must focus on formulating effective link-building strategies. Backlinks from popular websites will increase your website’s domain authority and prove it reliable in the eyes of search engines. Hence, link building is one of the integral parts of improving SERP rank.

Some effective link-building strategies include creating high-quality content, utilizing guest posting opportunities and adding relevant links to your WordPress website on your social media profile, and more.

Some Ideal WordPress Plugins for Better SEO

Here are some popular plugins that will assist you in WordPress SEO optimization.

• Yoast

Yoast SEO is the most popularly used WordPress plugin. Yoast SEO plugin allows you to conveniently add titles and descriptions to the posts on your website. Users can implement it to add Open Graph metadata and also social media images to your website’s articles. Most importantly, the Yoast SEO plugin automatically generates an XML site map for all the pages and content of your site so that bots can easily crawl and index it.

• All in One SEO

All In One SEO, also known as AIOSEO, is one of the highly used WordPress SEO plugins. Almost 3 million users prefer and use AIOSEO owing to its comprehensiveness. AIOSEO comes with the easiest set-up wizard that allows you to select the best SEO setting for your respective business automatically.

AIOSEO also provides TruSEO on-page analysis with actionable checklists, including a smart meta-tag generator that helps optimize your posts. Also, AIOSEO offers other advanced features like – Rich snippet schema markup, XML sitemaps with advanced controls, SEO health check, and more.

• SEMrush

SEMrush is also extremely popular among professional SEO experts. It offers a comprehensive set of features and tools, which help boost traffic. SEMrush is widely used to find high-volume keywords that help boost organic traffic.

Further, it also helps you to conduct competitor analysis to check the keywords for which your competitors rank. Also, the SEMrush SEO writing tool integrates with WordPress and helps to improve your website content for respective keywords so that it can be within the top 10 results.

• Rank Math

Rank Math is one of the fastest-growing WordPress plugins. Rank Math comes with a unique set-up wizard that allows importing of data from other plugins during the set-up. Rank Math will also allow you to generate an XML sitemap and connect to Google Search Console. You can further use it to easily add Meta titles, Meta descriptions, and Open Graph metadata to your website’s blog posts.

• Google Search Console

Google Search Console is also an effective SEO tool that helps to improve website ranking. It is a free tool created by Google. Google Search Console will alert you when the bots are unable to crawl your site or index its contents.

Furthermore, it also shows you the keywords for which your WordPress website is ranking. It also offers relevant data on anchor texts, average position, impressions, and more.

Conclusion

WordPress is undoubtedly one of the best SEO-friendly CMSs and thereby highly preferred by marketers, bloggers, and influencers. Not only does it have advanced SEO features, but it is also extremely easy to implement and thereby allows you to improve your website’s SERP ranking without much hassle.

WordPress SEO optimization also becomes extremely convenient due to its advanced plugins. Therefore, it is wise for you to use WordPress, and by following the strategies enlisted in this rundown, you can easily learn “how to use SEO on WordPress and add a competitive edge to your website”, thereby easily outranking your competitors on the online marketing space.

What’s your take on this? Let us know in the comments below.