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You can build an amazing website, with beautiful design and fully functional, however in order to be visible for the people you want to reach you might think about the SEO of the website. In order to attract organic traffic to the website you will have to consider ways to have a good SEO. The ranking of the website on the search engine machines such as Google is reflected by the SEO of the website.
WordPress is build to work friendly with bots drawing your website and although it provides its customers with a rich choice of plugins and features on how to increase the SEO of the websites there are some steps which the plugins of WordPress are missing and in this tutorial we will provide you with steps on how to improve the SEO of your website.
Site Title and Tagline
The first thing you should consider is the name of the site and the tagline. You will have to define the site name(the domain name) and the tagline which is a short and clear explanation of what the website or your business is about. You can access this fields of your website from the admin area of your website. Onc you access the admin area go to Settings → General:
Optimize permalinks
Permalinks are one of the main pieces of your WordPress website. With the help of permalinks your website is divided into different pieces which help the visitors to identify the content on the website. The permalinks are also important for Google bots which are indexing the pages with the help of permalinks. Also, the content of your website can be shared by using the permalinks which you have created.
Knowing the above, let’s review how permalinks are created and which are the most commonly used. In order to access the permalinks page go to the admin area of your website → Settings → Permalinks
The permalinks are built by the domain name followed by a string. The string is determined by you in this tab. It is very important for the permalink to be readable for the search engines. From our experience what we would recommend you is using one of the following types: Day and name and post name. The day and name permalink will provide you customer with information if the website is keeping the posts up to date, however this permalink will make the URL of the website longer which can affect the SEO of the website. The post name option is easy to remember for the visitors of your account and readable for the search engines.
Below we will provide you with examples how are the two kind of permalinks works:
Default permalink by WordPress: www.yoursite.com/?p=2567
Post name permalink: www.yoursite.com/this-is-a-post-name-permalink
Date and name: www.yoursite.com/2015/02/this-is-day-and-name-permalink
Keep your website organized
One of the most important things is to keep your website organized. In order for the SEO for your website to increase we would highly recommend you to review your posts if they are organized into categories and easy to find. If they are not you can review our article How to create post categories and posts in WordPress and reorganize your website.
Optimize your images
As we mentioned before the SEO of the website depends on the search engines such as Google which have bots crawling your website. However machines and bots cannot read images, they read the text which comes with the image or said in other word the tag of the image. It is highly important to upload images with good quality to your website for the visitors but it is also important for the images to have a proper name(tag) so bots can read them and rank the website. An image with the name “boys-green-tshirt” will have a better rank than an image with a default tag “IMG8874.jpeg”
Original content
One very important piece of the SEO of your website is the content which you have written. In order for the website to be ranked higher we would recommend you to make sure that there are no duplicated contents and URLs in your website. Also, check every content which you upload that it is unique and avoid copying content from another website because such actions can heavily impact the SEO of your website.
Create a sitemap.xml
Once you build your website with all the pages in it you will have to make it readable for Google you will have to make a structure of the website. The structure of the website is the file sitemap.xml. Gladly, WordPress provides you with plugins which can generate the sitemap for you when you install them.
Add Meta descriptions and keywords
The meta description and keywords are very important for the SEO of your website because their job is to tell more about your website/business to the search engines. The keywords are the phrases which customers may search in order to find your website on the content which you are writing about and meta description is the part which explains what your pages contain. The best way to add the meta description and keyword to a post or page is with a SEO plugin.
WordPress plugins for optimization
Last but not least, WordPress provides the option to install plugins which can assist you in optimizing your website. Such plugins are the minify plugins, caching plugins and others that will tweak the loading speed on your website. From the list below you can review the most popular plugins that are used:
- WP Rocket – WP Rocket is a caching plugin which is most used because of its user-friendly interface which makes the plugin easy to use. The plugin helps your website by caching your pages, minifies CSS, JavaScript and HTML as well.
- WP Fastest Cache- this is another caching plugin provided by WordPress which is getting more famous with every day. The plugin also caches the pages and posts and can minify CSS.
- W3 Total Cache – is the third plugin in our list which is a speed enhancing cache plugin. The plugin is on the top list with its many functions of caching, however, it is recommended to be used by experienced users. Also, it can be configured to work with memcache and it has a database caching, object caching and page caching.
- WP Optimize – This plugin is everything in one plugin: it provides cache, optimization on the images and clearing of the database file.
- RankMath plugin – The plugin can help you rank your website and help you with the SEO optimizations. It is user-friendly and can improve the SEO of your website.
- Yoast SEO plugin – This plugin can help everyone rank their websites higher in the search engines as Google. The plugin can also provide you with the necessary tools to optimize the content on your website
- SEMRush plugin – This plugin is recommended for users with more experience and technical knowledge. The plugin itself provides you with tools to optimize the website and increase the traffic on it.
- All in one SEO pack – This plugin helps you with the SEO of your website by providing you with an easy way to create sitemaps, meta tags, image sitemaps and more.
