5 Best SEO Practices for WordPress

5 Best SEO Practices for WordPress

At the end of the day, it’s all about getting your message across. With an incredible dedication to every content created, every useful information communicated, every unique UX design made, you want your website to show up and get noticed.

Be it Google, Yahoo, Bing or AOL, all search engines prioritize one thing only: the Search Engine Optimization or SEO score for the particular content. You could publish a scientific experiment to prove a theory for all we know, but if it’s not properly optimized, you would have rather done it in a newspaper for more success.

SEO, therefore, is a complete evaluation of how accessible, readable and relevant your article is to the users who will have searched for it online.

SEO factors in everything from the correct use of the focus keywords or the search terms that users will have input in the search bar to additional material including images and hyperlinks for references to stay as true to the search query as possible.

Thus if you really want to maximise click-through rates, the number of users and ultimately have your platform or web rank higher up in the search engine results, follow some useful guidelines which we have highlighted below.

Improving your SEO score with these useful tips

Thanks to the built-in plugins for SEO monitoring that many websites have been using, the content can be tailored and altered to provide the most effective results. However, there’s always room for improvement and even analytical software won’t always hold your hand through to maintain high spots on the results page of search engines. For that purpose, we’ve gathered some essential tips you can make use of when creating content in the boundaries and regulations set out by SEO.

Using Google Analytics

A free and essential digital analytic software, you’ll want to set it up for your website as soon as you even think about the idea of how you’re going to manage the user’s traffic and how to bring in more of that. The applications and functions of this tool are countless. With a convenient dashboard, you can compare and observe multiple metrics like the amount of traffic, which section do users spend the most time on and most importantly the average speed for a page on your website to load.

Speed is an important factor in deciding how long would a user browse through your platform. Google also wouldn’t recommend your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load a single page. For this purpose, it’s vital to use compressed files for images as these help a lot in easing up the load of the website. Secondly, you can also try using caching plugins to speed up your platform as well.

Permalinks, alt-texts and internal links

Sometimes you’ve got to pay attention to the elements which don’t directly concern your article or written content. This first starts with having a URL which is neat and somewhat represents what the users can expect from the article. So think of it as a heading before the actual heading. Though WordPress will create this URL or slug by default, but it’s best to check if the URL contains the focus keyword or the title of your article since search engines use your permalink in guiding the user as well.

Since a lot of users will redirect to your website via Google images instead of search words as well, you need to include relevant keywords as alt-text just below an image. Finally, internal links which are relevant to your content and may provide users with additional useful information is highly recommended. Thus, use YouTube links or even links of other sections of your website to add some more weight to your article.

Neatness and quality of content

Users aren’t just looking for the information they require, they want it in a manner that’s convenient, precise and comfortable to say the least. That’s why it’s more than recommended to divide sections into several subheadings each with new information to add. WordPress has six different font sizes for the headings and you need to use each one accordingly.

For example, title should belong to the H1 tag and any additional ones should range from H2 to H6 depending on how many other headings or subheadings you choose to incorporate. This is rather a good SEO practice that reflects quite nicely on the score.

Organization is key, thus add quotes from experts on the subject matter if you can. Illustrations, gifs and other forms of media will allow readers a little breather after going some five lines of text or so. Keep sentences short and avoid using complex terms unless when you absolutely need to.

Optimization for different platforms

Your users need to have the content accessible no matter where they are or what device they choose to operate it on. This is where a real challenge comes in because most e-commerce sites will work quite hard to make the desktop accessible yet completing ignoring the handheld counterpart. In fact, most users now prefer to access web content as they’re travelling, eating in a restaurant or while on short breaks from a job. This is where carrying a laptop would be hectic.

Search engines value it as well since they have their own set number of points allotted to how mobile-friendly the site might be. Hence, particular attention should be paid to the code of the website to ensure that the dimensions, format and spacing alter accordingly when the content’s viewed from a handheld device.

Sharing is caring

Finally, you’ll want to make sure that users just don’t stop when they’ve got all the information they need. You want them to further that info and share it with others across the social media. For this purpose, the inclusion of buttons for sharing the content on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, to name a few, is essential for popularity and traffic.

Conclusion

Keeping the above mentioned guidelines in mind will let you climb those long steps to higher traffic and viewer base much quicker. At the end of the day, you need to stop thinking of SEO as just search engine rankings; understand that it is much more than that, and user experience must be prioritized when you devise your SEO strategy. This way, not only will you be able to increase the prospects of your online business but you will also have delivered relevance and quality to your consumers.

Author Bio

Sohail Rupani is a Senior SEO Strategist for an agency known for best SEO Services in Florida ‘PNC Digital‘. He specializes in SEO and SEM techniques. He is passionate about technology and loves to analyze the tech industry in his spare time and stay in touch with the latest happenings. He also writes technical articles about SEO and digital marketing. Follow @sohailrupani for more updates.

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