WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO Agency

If you’ve built a site on WordPress, you must’ve encountered the term ‘WordPress SEO.’

WordPress SEO is a given if you want your website to fulfil the search engine parameters to rank high and generate traffic. It involves multiple steps and methods that optimise your contentand improve the technical SEO to bring more positive results.

Let’s check out the whats and hows of WordPress SEO, best practices, and why you should opt for WordPress SEO services.

WordPress SEO Best Practices

1. Ensure Website Visibility

Checking your site visibility is the first step towards enhancing your WordPress SEO. There is a checkbox on WordPress that, if checked, doesn’t allow search engines to index your website. WordPress offers this feature so that you can hide your website from search engines when you’re building and rebuilding your website and don’t want the search engines to show your site when it’s a work in progress.

But forgetting to check off the box after your site is functional can be a death sentence to your website SEO efforts. Indexing your site is one of the first rules of site visibility and checking the box can make your site invisible to your search engines, pulling down the rest of the WordPress SEO efforts as well. Ensure that this setting under Settings > Reading > Search engine visibility is disabled by default and keep checking for it to remain that way when the site is functional.

2. Use Tags and Categories for Keywords

WordPress has categories and tags that help website visitors navigate WordPress sites. These are especially important for websites with multiple product and service categories. Adding tags and categories allows you to differentiate pages based on the type of content they’re offering.

Tags are similar to keywords that tell the search engines what your website is about. For example, if you have an eye care clinic in Sydney, the tags on your pages may include eye care, optometrist, eye doctor, etc. To add a new tag to your current tags, you can go to your WordPress dashboard and click “Posts” and “Tags.”

Categories include a broader spectrum of your keywords. Continuing the example of an eye care facility, the categories in that case can include eye clinic, healthcare, etc. Blogs, product pages, location, and pricing pages are allocated into different categories, making it easier for search engines to understand your website’s structure and content. Agencies that provide WordPress SEO services ensure that these tags and categories amplify user experience on websites by allowing users to quickly find the content they’re looking for.

3. Use XML Sitemaps

Search engines automatically index websites but a sitemap can help search engines update accurate information on the search engines’ result pages. For WordPress SEO, you have two ways to upload a sitemap – XML and HTML. The process of generating a sitemap may differ from platform to platform but the XML format is a standard one.

An XML sitemap is the one you need to submit as it helps search engines find, evaluate, and rank the content on your site. It is a file of code that lists each page of your website. Understand that search engines rank pages and not websites. An XML sitemap helps Google and other search engines inspect all the web pages on your WordPress site. You can generate a sitemap on WordPress by adding wp-sitemap.xml to the end of the URL but the best bet would be to use an SEO plugin to do that.

4. Choose an SEO Plugin

WordPress SEO becomes a lot easier if you install the right plugins. These plugins help you optimise your WordPress sites for SEO and enhance different aspects of your website such as on-page analysis, a sitemap generator, and a schema markup.

There are ample SEO tools that you can pick from the market. A WordPress SEO agencyknows how to implement these plugins and get the most out of them for your WordPress SEO. Some of the parameters you need to check before picking a plugin include

Cost: Check if the plugin plans suit your budget and even if they have free features available. Freemium options work best for a small business that doesn’t have the budget to opt for an enterprise plan.

Features: Does the tool have the necessary features to enhance your site’s SEO? What are some of the unique features the plugin offers that align with your SEO goals? Ask yourself these questions and see if the features fit your budget and SEO activities.

User-friendliness: As someone who owns a WordPress website know how much ease of use is important. Check the WordPress SEO plugin’s interface and determine its level of difficulty. Pick one that doesn’t require technical knowledge to operate.

5. Prioritise Internal Linking

Internal links are one of the major ways you can add context to your website and boost your WordPress site’s SEO. It helps you build an information hierarchy and signals Google that you have high-value content that is vouched by other similar pieces.

It overall builds the authority of your site as search engines use internal links to discover related URLs and understand the relationship between your pages. To link to other content on your website on WordPress, just highlight the words on the anchor text, click on the link button in the WordPress toolbar and copy and paste the URL you wish to link to.

Remember, context is very important while you link internally. To create an internal linking strategy, you can create topic clusters, where you create a hub page for a broad keyword with high search volume and supporting pages that each link back to the main topic page. You can also check the website’s authority pages to find quality backlinking opportunities.

6. Optimising Images

Images are essential to creating a visually appealing site but they also take up a lot of space that can slow down your site. There are ways you can optimise the images which can improve your WordPress site’s loading time.

• Compress your images: Compressing images and videos drastically reduces the file size and leads to faster load times. JPEG files require lossy compression whereas PNG files require lossless compression.
• Add Alt text: Image Alt text Improves WordPress SEO because it allows Google to add context to images and feature them on image searches. You can assign alt texts in WordPress via the media library and the block editor.
• Readable file names for images: Since Google uses text to understand images, have readable image file names that are short and descriptive and preferably have a keyword.

7. Set up an SSL Certificate

Secure Sockets Layer is a standard security technology and a confirmedSEO ranking factor. HTTPS ensures that the information that is transmitted between the website and the visitors remains secure. SSL enables end-to-end encryption so that sensitive data that users enter is not intercepted by a hacker. When a WordPress site is SSL certified, the URL starts with https:// instead of http://, and also shows a padlock icon next to the web address.

This allows Google to know that the site is secure and prioritises that instead of sites without SSL. To enhance WordPress SEO, you don’t have to manually set up an SSL certificate since it automatically adds SSL to your site. If you have a different type of account on WordPress such as a WordPress.org.site, you’d need to take care of your website’s security individually using an SSL plugin.

8. Speed up your Website

There are various elements on a website that can slow down your loading speed. A slow loading speed can be dangerous to your SEO and lead to a frustrating experience for a user. To check if you have a low speed, you can check it on a page speed tool like Google PageSpeed Insights and find ways to optimise your page speed. Some of the ways you can do that are by

• Installing a caching plugin: It stores parts of your website data after the first load so that future requests load faster.
• Using a Content Delivery Network:  It distributes your content to servers across the world to speed up loading times in other locations, taking the load off your original server
• Minifying your Code: Remove unnecessary characters from your code to help it load faster.

9. Update your Permalinks

A permalink means a permanent URL, or link to a post, page or blog on your WordPress site. The permanent URL needs to be clean and help users and search engines navigate your WordPress site to improve its search engine optimisation.

Search engines include URLs on SERP and they’ll get more clicks if they’re easy to read and clean rather than them having random letters and numbers. You can change the default permalink structure by heading to Dashboard → Settings → Permalinks on your WordPress account.

Enhance WordPress SEO with Supple

With WordPress SEO, your site can reach its fullest potential. Hiring the right WordPress SEO agency is the avenue to improve your SEO efforts. Supple provides all these services and more, where each activity is specially tailored to your business goals and objectives. Contact us to learn more about how we can collaborate to work towards the common goal of enhancing your WordPress SEO.