Are you thinking about building or buying a WordPress website? Then, soon you’ll face one important question: How to get more traffic to your website? SEO for WordPress can seem too complicated when you go through most of the online guides. That’s why we’re sharing some of the best practices that will help you develop a successful WordPress SEO strategy and get more organic traffic.
1. Install an SEO‐Friendly Theme
When first installed, WordPress usually ‘chooses’ a not-so-attractive theme by default. Luckily, there is a great number of great-looking themes to choose from. However, many of these themes aren’t SEO-friendly. If you want to boost your SEO rankings, the first step is to make sure your WordPress theme is SEO-friendly. Here’s what you need to pay attention to:
- Choose a theme that isn’t burdened with third‐party plugins and scripts that you don’t need. These will slow down your site.
- Choose a responsive design. Google tends to give better rankings to mobile‐friendly sites.
The descriptions for most WordPress themes claim they’re mobile-friendly and lightweight but, to stay on the safe side, check the selected template using Google’s Mobile‐friendly Test tool. In addition, run the theme through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check how fast it loads.
2. www. vs non-www.
Think whether your site URL will contain www (https://www.wpion.com/) or not (https:// wpion.com/)
From an SEO perspective, it doesn’t matter which one you choose; however, for search engine crawlers these are two different sites. That’s why you need to select one option and stick with it. To set the preferred option, go to Settings → General page and add the selected URL format in the ‘Site Address’ and ‘WordPress Address’ fields.
3. Choose the Best SEO Plugin
WordPress has plugins for everything, including SEO. But a large number of plugins makes it difficult to pick the best one. When choosing the best SEO plugin for your site, pick one that covers all SEO tasks and is free of charge. The 2 most popular SEO plugins at the moment are All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO.
4. Add Your Website to Google Search Console
Previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console is a web service that allows you to optimize visibility of your site and check indexing status. The Console provides data and reports to help you understand how your website pages show up in SERPs, which words and phrases people use to find your site online, and how many times each page is clicked. You can use this data to determine which aspects of your content strategy are working and which aren’t, and make the necessary adjustments.
In addition, the Console notifies you when there’s a problem with your site; for instance when crawlers detect duplicate content or can’t access your site for some reason. Make sure to check your Console once a month to gather the necessary insights and monitor your SEO strategy progress.
5. Optimize the Blog Posts
SEO is much more than simply installing a WordPress SEO plugin. It is a complex process that requires time and patience in order to see results. Yoast SEO enables you to optimize your posts by adding a focus keyword, title, and description to every page and post on your site.
- A focus keyword is the main keyword you are ranking for. To increase the chances of being discovered online, go for long-tail keywords. Bear in mind that your audience is real people, not search bots, so they’ll type longer phrases instead of single words in search engines. Yoast SEO also helps you find similar keywords as you type your focus keyword. Once you’ve chosen a focus keyword, the plugin shows how many times you’ve used that keyword in your post.
- An SEO-friendly title should be readable and legible to human users and contain no more than 70 characters. But if you want to make people click on it, it should also be catchy. Make sure that your title accurately describes what people will get if they click on the link. Finally, make sure it contains the focus keyword.
- Having a proper meta description is important because it is shown in social media like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Your meta description purpose is to explain your article, so make sure it’s helpful. You should also ensure to mention the focus keyword for search purposes. The character limit is 155 characters; everything beyond that will be truncated.
6. Use Tags and Categories Properly
Tags and categories allow you to sort your posts for both the search engines and the users. They help search engines to understand the content and structure of your website better. In addition, they help users to find the blog posts they are looking for easily. Categories group your blog post broadly. For instance, your blog can have the following categories: fashion, music, films, travel, food, etc. Tags, on the other hand, are specific keywords that describe the content of the post. As an example, a post under the category ‘fashion’ can have tags like coats, boots, skirts, and others.
7. Internal Linking
If you want to rank well in search results, your website needs to have high page authority. And the best way to build authority is through internal linking. That’s why it is important to link to your other pages and blog posts. Ask your authors to interlink to at least three other posts in every article they write. This will help you increase the average time visitors spend on your website, boost page views, and increase the SEO score of individual pages and blog posts.
8. Optimize Images
Images are often more appealing than text, but they also take longer to load and can easily slow down your site. That’s why you need to be careful with image quality and size. To ensure your images are optimized to load fast, use alt tags and descriptive titles when you upload an image.
In addition, when saving images, consider two things: compression and image file format (JPEG and PNG). By choosing the right combo, the image size can be decreased by up to five times.
Final Thoughts
Creating a website that attracts traffic is a task that takes time and requires knowledge.
Go ahead and implement the above-listed tips and you should see traffic boots within a couple of months.
really helpful for me thanks for your research.