8 Basic SEO Recommendations for WordPress Sites
It’s no secret that WordPress is one of the best platforms to host a website for business. In fact, the popular platform has over an estimated 1.3 billion active users. Even so, improving SEO is something that many businesses struggle with. In today’s digital world, search engine optimization needs to be at the root of your digital marketing strategy.
Businesses that learn to navigate SEO improve their visibility, are able to connect with their target audience, experience improved engagement, and grow their business. Today, we’re going to discuss the best SEO recommendations for your WordPress site. But before we get started, let’s discuss why SEO is crucial.
Why SEO is Important for Your WordPress Site
WordPress has some amazing benefits all on its own. But your digital marketing efforts don’t stop with your website. Businesses need to combine SEO best practices that not only strengthen their marketing strategy but ensure their website is seen by the search engine and their audience. Ultimately, if you’re not invested in your SEO efforts, you will lose your competitive advantage, and you will miss out on a great opportunity to grow your business.
In today’s digital market, SEO has become a central focus for businesses that need to increase their awareness and expand their market. SEO is essentially a sustainable and affordable way for businesses to develop a regular audience and generate consistent leads.
Even more, SEO is important because it is the fastest, most efficient, way for businesses to drive traffic to their website. In fact, 81% of people search online for a product or service. This means that by following SEO best practices, businesses can maximize their market reach, attract more visitors to their website, and increase the likelihood of converting these visitors into customers.
Here are 8 SEO recommendations for your WordPress Site.
1. SEO-friendly Template
One of the first, and easiest, things you can do to optimize your site for the search engine is to ensure you are using an SEO-friendly template. If you’ve just signed up for WordPress, you’ll start with the “twenty-twenty” default theme. However, there are plenty of free themes to explore that will help you improve your SEO efforts.
If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, don’t assume that your template is giving you the best SEO results. In fact, it could be negatively impacting your SEO. Unfortunately, many themes claim to be SEO-friendly but actually come with a bunch of features you won’t use and slow down your site’s performance.
Recommendation: Run a demo site into Google’s web.dev tool to check out potential SEO issues.
2. Keyword Research
Many businesses have heard of keyword research but don’t actually put it into practice. Keyword research is a process that involves researching popular search terms that users search in the search engines.
The better your keyword research is, the better your content will be able to climb up the search rank. Essentially, keyword research should be implemented at the start of your SEO strategy and be used to plan your site content and on-page optimization.
Recommendation: Avoid broad, single-word, terms that will make it difficult for your content to get in front of your target audience. In reality, a single-word will hardly ever give searchers accurate results. A searcher is more likely to insert a few words in the search engine. This means businesses should create a keyword phrase to match their target audience’s search intent.
3. Optimize Page Headings
H1 headings are often overlooked but can really increase your SEO efforts when done effectively. H1 headings give context into what your page is about, which is great for both users and the search engine. Businesses that don’t take the time to optimize their H1 headings are missing out on a great opportunity to improve their search ranking with their WordPress site.
If you want to take it a step further, don’t forget to optimize your H2 through H6 headings as well. These subheadings are a great way to organize your content to improve readability and a great opportunity to include your main keyword phrase to boost your ranking in the search engine.
Recommendation: Be sure to naturally place keywords throughout your content. Keyword stuffing is something that is dinged by Google, which will have a negative impact on your search rank.
4. Install a WordPress SEO Plugin
Most business owners aren’t marketing gurus, which is why tools like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack exist. Before you even begin optimizing your WordPress site, it’s highly recommended that you install an SEO plugin. What’s even better is that you don’t have to spend any money to install either of these two.
Let’s take a further look at Yoast. While Yoast won’t optimize your site for you, it is designed to make it easy for your website to meet the highest technical SEO standards. For instance, the plugin will ensure that your site has canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content.
Recommendation: Have a clear understanding of the keyword phrase(s) you want to rank for to get the most out of your SEO plugin. This will be used to analyze your website and ensure you are meeting your goals.
5. Set Custom URLs for Pages and Posts
URLs are often looked over when it comes to improving SEO. But spending some additional time on setting custom URLs for pages and posts can go a long way in your SEO optimization.
WordPress will use your page’s title to create the URL. The problem is that the page title is often too long and will shorten on the search engine results page (SERP). Custom URLs allow you to remove unnecessary words and tailor your URLs closer to your keyword phrase for better SEO optimization.
Recommendation: URLs often contain many subfolders, but it’s best to avoid these when possible. The best way to do this is by keeping your URLs straightforward and as short as possible.
6. Create Unique Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Another great way to improve your site’s SEO is by creating unique title tags and meta descriptions. Your title tag tells visitors and the search engine what your page is about. Your meta description functions in the same sense but is regarded as an advertising copy. Essentially, meta descriptions help draw readers to a website from the SERPs.
With that said, spending additional time on your title tags and meta descriptions can boost your search rank. If you have Yoast, it will automatically set your page’s title tag with the help of your page heading, but you can overwrite this to create something unique that leverages variations of your main keyword. You can apply this same process to your site’s meta description. Spend time creating an enticing description that utilizes your keyword phrases.
Recommendation: Be sure to write a unique title tag for every page. Additionally, try to keep your meta description between 150 and 160 characters for the best results.
7. Utilize Internal Linking
Internal linking is any link from one page on your website to another. This is important to help you establish relevancy between different pages on your site. Additionally, internal linking helps you establish authority earned from external links, and helps users navigate your content better.
Even more, internal linking connects your content and gives Google an idea of your site’s structure. Some businesses even leverage internal linking to establish a hierarchy on their site, giving the most important pages and posts more link value.
Recommendation: Focus on using links that are natural for the reader. This means that your links need to be relevant to add value. If a reader clicks on a link, they are expecting it to not only be useful to them but be related to the source content.
8. Optimize File Names and Add Alt Text to Images
Images are another powerful, yet forgotten, aspect of your site’s search engine optimization. Images especially need to be optimized if you use quite a bit of them throughout your site.
One of the first ways to optimize your images is through the file name. Before you begin uploading images in your WordPress media library, it’s important that your file names are optimized to give further context to a page. For instance, your image file name shouldn’t say “/untitled1.jpg”. Instead, it should read something like, “/MacBook-pro.jpg”.
Alt text is designed to improve accessibility by describing what the image is showing to visitors who can’t see the image and helps the search engine crawlers, which improves SEO. Changing the alt text on your images is simple through WordPress. Once you drop the image in the image block, you can change the alt text on the right side of the page.
Recommendations: When optimizing image files, be sure that the file name is relevant with descriptive keywords. When describing your alt text, don’t start with “picture of”, get right into the description of the image.
SEO continues to be at the forefront of digital marketing. For businesses using WordPress, it’s important that you spend time optimizing your site to increase your visibility, get in front of your target audience, and ultimately improve your digital marketing efforts. At Applied Innovations, we solve technology problems to help businesses thrive, contact us today to learn how we can help you.
