by ROC May 2022
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, in essence, a technique of making sure your site’s pages rank well in search engines like Google and Bing. It’s a trending subject, over and above it is also a rabbit hole and one could easily get lost down if you’re not alert. However, there are a few basic strategies you can use to make sure your content ranks well without struggle. Like, selecting strong keywords, optimizing your permalinks, and speeding up the time your site takes to load are all factors that can make a noteworthy transformation.
In this post, we will look at SEO, explicitly as it relates to WordPress. We’ll converse on whether the podium is good for SEO. When you sit down to find something on the internet, there’s one place you turn: a search engine. This means if you want to get your website perceived, you’ll need to guarantee that it appears in searches on Google. Most prominently, your site must appear at the topmost position or nearest to the topmost position
The best way to do this is through SEO, which works on a wide range of strategies and activities based on algorithms and then decides the rank of a particular website. There are many benefits to optimizing your site for search engines, primarily speaking:
By creating a WordPress website, you’ve already made the most compatible platform for search engines. Additionally, there are adequate ways to give your WordPress site a get-up-and-go towards the top of the rankings. Not surprisingly, this is the reason why WordPress is so ahead of the competition. When you decide on your website which platform is the best option, you need to think about traffic. To have visitors rushing to your site, you need to think about ranking and visibility, and which content management system (CMS) would support this the best. We recommend WordPress.
WordPress is the most popular CMS at present times. At present, users from all over the world build WordPress sites, to develop their businesses online in different niches. According to facts, 42.2% of the websites at present time are powered by WordPress.
The URLs on your site are known as Permalinks. You can easily manage your permalinks when you work on your WordPress control panel. You can handle this by visiting the settings and giving it the format, that suits you the best. Ideally, it should be informative. When you tailor-make the URL, a format like the above is well for the search engines, and your users also should be able to read the meaningful topic of your article from the link easily.
The permalinks can improve the ranking of your website in the following ways:
Keywords in the link are counted as a crucial ranking factor.
Nice-looking and informative permalinks can surge the CTR (click-through rate) of your posts on the search engines. The click-through rate for a link is also a strong Google ranking influencer. When you get fewer clicks, Google will drop lower your positions and at the same time will improve the rank of websites with a high CTR.
Lastly, a non-SEO reason but in your favor. If your link is not making sense with haphazard characters, you will get fewer visitors from Google as well as social media channels; particularly, when you use ugly permalinks. So, customizing the permalinks with informative text is a better style than leaving them with the default option.
Many website owners, who have hired fresh, or experienced developers supervise to see the images being used most perfectly. You need to make sure the images are configured correctly, which means they must include alt tags, captions, and descriptions in an informative way. WordPress’s integral editor enables users to manage all of these efficiently and much more with ease.
Including images in your blog posts is an excellent method to break up large bodies of text and make your website more aesthetically alluring. However, images aren’t just there for an aesthetic reason; they also serve an important role for SEO purposes. For example, WordPress gives users the ability to produce alternative text for their images. You can use this alternative text for promotion by including important keywords in the text.
WordPress comes with a lot of additional features that can further improve the search engine optimization of your website. One of them is themes. It’s a great thing that you can use WordPress practically to build pretty much any website. Whatever your objective is — a business website, portfolio website, e-commerce website, website for consultation, or renting your products, you will likely get a theme for your business, industry, or purpose.
Themes help you build your dream website in diverse ways. For one, a high-quality theme will make sure your site has the suitable HTML markup consequently covering your technical SEO. To understand HTML markup, though written mostly in PHP, WordPress creates HTML pages that are easily comprehensible by search engines. The up-to-the-minute generation of themes (like Genesis) has even started to take benefit of HTML5 and the improvements it brings.
Good themes also make your site look professional and alluring. This impact matters like time spent by visitors on your site (or click the back button). This is a sign of quality as your website is counted as user-friendly and informative so user spends more time. For Google that will influence your search rankings.
The SEO title and the meta description are two major ranking factors in SEO. You are required to define them for every post and page of your website. Also, the targeted keywords need to be included in the metadata so that they can improve your rank significantly. Also, this process helps you to raise your CTR since they are on display on search engines. All you need to do is to connect one of the many free SEO plugins that are available for WordPress and then, add them.
This process does not take more than a few minutes. Then, you can use the same plugin for all your future posts. If you forget to add the metadata yourself, a plugin like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO will get the desired information from the title and the first sentences of your content making things easy for you.
Search engine crawlers make use of metadata to better comprehend the layout of your website and the content it has. The easier it is to handle your metadata, the more advantage you can expect from the potential it offers. Luckily, WordPress makes managing your metadata as simple as it could be.
WordPress allows users to connect a range of themes and plugins both of which can help customize the look of your website and increase its functionality. Google’s SEO algorithms have become quite complicated; as they use a variety of systems of measurement to ascertain the user experience. This makes us consider a range of aspects, like the load time of a website and its URL preparation.
Pointers for a bad user experience are:
Page speed is one of the utmost significant metrics that Google uses to establish an SEO score and it has a prominent role in deciding the rank of a website. WordPress’s integral tools for optimizing page load speed, with numerous other plugins, can further enhance your website’s efficiency.
No CMS can offer the same competencies as WordPress when it comes to enhancing user experience. By taking advantage of all the various tools that WordPress offers you can give your SEO a significant organic boost.
Already all themes in the WordPress directory can be mobile optimized. For good reason. In a world where mobile devices obscure desktop computers, Google is very vocal about using mobile-friendliness as a ranking principle, no website can escape. Mobile optimization websites do not even bring forth the Google results in mobile search requests anymore.
The mainstream of internet traffic is from mobile devices at present time. Websites can no longer manage to overlook their mobile users; they need their website to be mobile compliant at any cost. There used to be cases where websites had to create devoted mobile versions for users who browse on mobile. But the typical method now is to have dynamic webpages that inevitably adjust to suit the display that the user is viewing them on. WordPress does much of this work automatically and the widely held WordPress themes are already optimized for mobile.
Search rankings are always under the threat of spamming, contaminating others with viruses, or being harmful in some other way. Unfortunately, that’s not always up to you. Your site can silently land itself on spam lists in case it gets hacked. A lot of shady people out there are just looking for such an opportunity and later can use it for their good. In such a case, you end up receiving a Google penalty.
Gratefully, WordPress is itself is very secure and its safety regularly is monitored and enhanced. The WordPress security team does its darndest to stay abreast of things. In case any issue is noticed, WordPress sends out a safety update. In addition to that, you have the option of various security plugins to choose from. Still, if worst happens, they also have guidelines that explain to you how to get back as before if your site is hacked.
Social media is massive today, and it provides the best platforms for marketing your brand. Achievement in your social media platforms campaigns will help in advancing your SEO ranking. What this means for you to market your brand you must leverage social media for your online marketing campaign. And WordPress assists you to do that. On WordPress, you can create specific social media buttons for your blog so it’s easier for readers to share your content with their family or friends.
You can show a social media feed on your site. WordPress can help you to automate your social media campaigns! Organic traffic is not the only option and Google is not the only foundation of traffic. You can use other substitutes including social media platforms with millions of users. So, include social sharing buttons on your website in the initial stage. WordPress offers plenty of answers for this like Jetpack sharing, SumoMe, and more. How does that help your SEO? Well, search engines take social signals into account while ranking. That means the more people share your content on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, the higher it will appear on Google as well.
Choosing a keyword for each post or page and using it in various places like the title, the headings, and the content itself is a communal way to express your topic to search engine crawlers and surge the chances that it shows up for relevant searches. Undeniably, you need to be smart about the way you use this tool. The best way of boosting your SEO in the long standing will always be to have sincerely relevant content that your users are looking for. If you are little by little producing content that pulls a large audience, you will find it easy to maintain a high SEO score.
There are tons of great SEO tools out there to help you get started, they are trusted solutions. It consists of controlling gears like great keyword research tools, to enable you to track your rankings, and influential backlink analysis, and you can even check your website for SEO issues and get the useful suggestion.
All the stuff above is good, but, if you need a developer to put it all into practice, it won’t do much good. WordPress is so user-friendly, that pretty much anyone can manage to do many things listed above. We already know about the easiness of WordPress editor; nevertheless, it spreads to the rest of WordPress as well. Most things are domineering for SEO and it can be created with a few mouse clicks and need absolutely no coding skill.
Google’s algorithms consider the regularity of content while deciding the rank of your pages. Older, content will perform well, but a boost is given to newer, ‘fresh’ content that’s corresponding to the search of users. So, updating fresh content in your CMS is beneficial.
If you want your site to consistently perform well in the SERPs, you will need to add new content frequently. You can do it with help of posting a calendar to keep track and varying the types of content you generate and keep visitors interested. Also, don’t abandon older posts and pages. Updating your existing content prompts crawlers to re-evaluate your content and to give it a higher distinction than pages that are never updated with new info.
Google is pretty keen on speed and as such, it treats site and page speed as a ranking indication. Google considers page/site speed explicitly because the faster a page can load and allows the search engine crawler to index your website suitably. Additionally, page/site speed is really important for a good user experience. Pages that load fast will have a lower bounce rate and higher average time spent by users.
For people using WordPress, site speed should not be a problem. WordPress has abundantly fast-loading themes to meet your need. Also, it has various plugins that actually improve site speed. To ensure everything works and loads smoothly, you can check your site speed on Google’s Page Speed Insights. The Page Speed score includes data from reports on two essential speed metrics DCL and FCP, as well as data from Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). This help evaluates page routine on both desktop and mobile devices and provides recommendations about how to improve it.
Some common reasons for a slow loading site include:
As speed is really significant, it’s crucial to be aware of these potential roadblocks that can appear, when and under what circumstances, so you can learn how to approach and deal with them.
WordPress has improved continuously on the go over the years to become one of the best search engines friendly. By now, it is a mature podium with wide-ranging SEO capabilities. WordPress plays nice with Google and other search engines have loads of other features for advanced SEO optimization. It is fast and mobile-friendly, loaded with features, secure, and easy to learn. In a nutshell, WordPress is the perfect CMS for SEO and building websites that rank well. If your goal is to hit Google’s front page, the WordPress platform is your best bet.