There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to your website. But SEO is one of the best. If your website is optimized for SEO, you can receive literally hundreds of thousands of visitors every single month for FREE.
Optimizing your site for SEO can take dozens of hours. And if you hire someone to do it for you, it will cost you thousands of dollars. But if you are a WordPress user, all you have to do is make a few changes to the settings and install a few plugins.
In this article, I will share with you 6 simple SEO tips that will help you better optimize your WordPress site for Search Engines.
Stop Using The Default Ugly Permalink Structure
The default permalink structure that comes enabled when you install WordPress looks like this:
http://your-site.com/?p=21412
As you can see, this type of URLs not only look bad but are also bad for user experience. This is the URL that people will see in Search Results and on Social Networks like Twitter and Facebook. If your website is using this type of permalinks and someone shares it on Facebook or Twitter, it will be really hard to understand what this URL leads to and what the page is about.
You should instead use URLs like this:
http://your-site.com/cute-kitten-pictures
This URL not only looks good but is also good for user experience. When you look at it, you can just tell what it is about. Using a permalink structure like this one will help improve both your Search Engine result CTR (Click Through Rate) and user experience which are both really important for SEO.
Improve Your Website’s Speed
User experience is an important part of Search Engine Optimization. Google wants to display the best possible results for every search query. Also, Google prefers displaying websites that load up fast and are optimized for speed. So, if you want to be able to get to the first page of Google Search Results and stay there, you need to improve the speed of your website.
If you are a WordPress user, all you have to do is install WP Super Cache. It is a free plugin that will help cut the time it takes your site to load by more than half.
Write Better Title and Meta Description For Your Posts
Most people don’t optimize the title and meta description of their posts. Partly because they don’t know how and partly because they don’t even know they need to.
If you don’t optimize your Title and Meta Description, it’s not your fault. Most people don’t know it is important for SEO.
If you want a page to rank for a specific keyword in Search Engines, you need to optimize your page’s title and meta description. Now, to optimize your title and meta description you don’t have to be an SEO expert. Just follow these simple best practices:
● Include the keyword in the title and meta description.
● Try including the keyword in the beginning of the title.
● Write an enticing meta description that makes people want to choose your site from the search results.
WordPress by default doesn’t offer any functionality to edit meta descriptions. You will need Yoast SEO plugin to be able to edit meta description.
Use a XML Sitemap Generation Plugin
A XML Sitemap helps search engines like Google better navigate your website. A sitemap helps make sure search engines find and index all the pages on your website. Now, this doesn’t mean that a sitemap is necessary.
But we recommend that you create a sitemap for your website. Because sometimes there are deep pages that are not accessible from the homepage. If you want Google to be able to index these deep pages, you need a XML sitemap.
The easiest way to create a sitemap is to use a WordPress plugin. Here are two free plugins that will help you get the job done:
● Yoast SEO – An all-in-one SEO tool. This tool is not just a sitemap generator. It offers all the functionality you will need to completely optimize your site for SEO.
● Google XML Sitemaps – A free plugin to help you generate sitemaps for your website. While the name suggests it’s only for Google, the sitemaps that this plugin generates work with all search engines.
Use a Theme That is Optimized For SEO
It doesn’t matter what SEO plugins you install and use on your site. If the WordPress theme you are using isn’t optimized for SEO, all your efforts to optimize your site for SEO will prove in vain and lost money.
Add Your Target Keyword In The First Paragraph
It is an SEO best practice to add the keyword you are trying to target in the first paragraph. This helps Search Engines know what a page/post is about as soon as they land on it. Now, only try to place your target keyword in the first paragraph when it makes sense.
Display Related Posts at The End of Every Post
Displaying related posts helps improve time on site which is a factor Google considers when ranking websites. Search Engine Optimizations these days is a lot about User Experience. If your site doesn’t offer a great user experience, visitors will leave the site right away and never come back. Not only that, it also reduces your website’s bounce rate which is another ranking factor Google uses. Bounce Rate is simple the amount of visitors that bounce back to search engines after a single visit.
Conclusion
The more optimized your site is for SEO, the better. Implementing all of these SEO tips will help improve the chances of your pages hitting the first page of Google.
If these tips helped you, or if you have your own tips or suggestions, let us know in the comments.
