You want as many visitors as possible on your site, regardless if you aim to inform and entertain readers, promote your skills, sell products or services. Simply put, the more people come to your site, the easier it will be to build an audience in your target market that you can count on.
But where do you start? There are numerous ways of driving traffic to your website, and SEO or search engine optimization is one of the most effective. SEO is a collection of techniques and strategies that help web pages rank higher in the search engines. What more is that there are numerous ways to improve your website’s SEO, even if you are a novice and we are going to explore a number in this read:
Pick Your Hosting Provider Carefully
The web hosting provider you choose is crucial for search engine optimization. Since search engines put speed into consideration when ranking websites, an ideal host can boost your rankings in the SERPs. The host ideally affects the amount of downtime your website experiences and the distance between visitors and servers, both of which are site ranking factors.
If you have not published your WordPress site yet, you will want to pick one that is reliable and has a reputation for an excellent performance. Even for an existing one, you may want to consider switching if the current hosting provider does not meet these criteria.
Choose a Theme That is Optimized for Search Engines
The theme is one of the most crucial choices you will make for your website. It determines the appearance and layout of your site, give new functionality, and even plays a role in its SEO. Your theme, for example, can affect the website’s speed, which, as mentioned earlier, is important. How a theme was developed ideally matters as clean code provides the best chance in search engine results pages.
As such, you will want to go for a theme that is built with SEO in mind. Such themes are referred to as “SEO-friendly”. Ideally, search for a theme that has features specifically designed to enhance SEO like heading tag options. Luckily, numerous WordPress themes match these requirements.
Optimize For Mobile
When it comes to browsing, mobile is king. Most people browse on their smartphones and tablets more than on desktops, and this will only increase as phone and voice search becomes better.
Search engines know this and tend to reward mobile-friendly websites with better rankings. And this makes sense as Google’s primary goal is to give the best experience to end-users. So, it’s imperative to ensure your site is usable on mobile as well.
The easiest way to achieve this is by picking a mobile-friendly WordPress theme. However, if you do not wish to switch themes, you can use a professional web designer to make it happen.
Build Content Around Keywords
There is a good chance you have come across the concept of keywords. These are terms that describe your topic’s content. For instance, you might pick the keyword ‘marketing tips’ for a post that shares several options for marketing online or offline. By doing this, you are simply predicting that people will type this term into Googe, Bing, etc when looking for such information.
Picking a keyword for every post and using it in various sections is a common means of communicating your topic to crawlers and boosts the chances of showing your content in the relevant searches. However, you will want to be smart when implementing this. Avoid keyword stuffing or forcing the phrases in places where they sound unnatural.
Numerous SEO tools can help you get started, SEMrush being an excellent example. This tool helps you do keyword research, backlink analysis, track your rankings over time, and even analyze your site for search engine optimization issues.
Optimize Images
Images are essential for almost every site. They give context, and visual appeal, as well as help, break up text to make it more readable. As you might have already guessed, they can also boost your SEO efforts when optimized properly. For starters, the size and quality of the images can affect the loading speed of the site. Ideally, crawlers will access particular information attached to the images like alt text and filename when indexing the site.
Addressing these aspects can go a long way in boosting your SEO efforts. Ensure you optimize the images and other media to have the least impact on performance. Next, give every image a descriptive alt text and file name.
Conclusion
This is by no means a comprehensive read on WordPress SEO, but the tips mentioned above are some of the most effective. It is important that you implement them today to ensure you have better exposure and a chance of getting more visitors.
