Four Essential WordPress SEO Tips and Tricks
You have chosen to develop your website with the WordPress content management system (CMS) and you want it to gain visibility on the internet. Although today’s WordPress CMS is quite improved and is developed to be SEO friendly, you can still improve on it with a few well-chosen tips and tricks.
#1 Make Sure Your Website is Visible in Search Engines
The first step that you should take to improve SEO on your website: make sure that nothing prevents your site from being visible. If you don’t do this, none of your SEO actions will be effective as the site is basically a complete black box to search engines
You can make sure your website is searchable and indexable by going into the Settings page in the admin panel and making sure that the box “Ask search engines not to index this site” is unchecked.
#2 Choose a Good Theme for Your Website
When building a website in WordPress, you inevitably have to choose a theme or create one from the ground up. The theme is not only what will control the appearance of your site, but also some of its functionality.
If you are starting to look for a WordPress theme, you will soon realize that you have a vast number of choices. However, not all of them are equal. Of course, the appearance of a site is important, but its functionality also counts. Preferably, even if you have to spend a little money, either choose a theme from recognized publishers to have guaranteed stability and security, or you can use a PSD to WordPress service to help turn a design you have into a functional theme.
Ideally, you should limit the features you initially implement to those you consider essential and keep in mind that your theme will have to be updated over time as the web evolves and new technologies rise up. The maintainability and security of your site are at stake here.
A well-built theme has a “clean” codebase, that is to say, it is correctly written, guarantees the functioning of the site, and provides a good user experience. Making sure you don’t bloat the theme with unnecessary features will help avoid the risk of conflicts (javascript), improve the loading time of the pages and thus improve your ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Lastly, make sure that the theme of your site is ‘responsive, which means your content is displayed correctly on all screen sizes: desktop, tablet as well as the various models of cell phones out there each with different screen sizes and resolutions.
#3 Create a Site Map
The sitemap is an XML file that maps all the pages of your site and their location within a logical structure. The Sitemap allows search engines to find and index each relevant page on your site and then later display them to Internet users during their searches.
With a Sitemap, you improve your chances of having your site’s structure and content correctly interpreted by Google and other search engines. This leads to a higher ranking in SERPs. This is why maintaining an up-to-date and correct site map is one of the first things every SEO specialist recommends.
Thankfully, creating a sitemap isn’t difficult in WordPress. You can directly create and update it from the admin panel. What’s more, plug-ins like Yoast SEO also do the job of maintaining the sitemap automatically, further making this step extremely easy to implement.
#4 Make Sure the Size of the Images You Use are Appropriate
Page speed is one of the key criteria taken into account by Google to decide the ranking and placement of web pages in its SERPs. The size and the format of the images you include in your web pages are key factors that can substantially contribute to their size, which makes loading them far slower.
To optimize your images and ensure your web pages load quicker, you have a few very simple solutions:
- Use formats that store data efficiently: jpeg for photos, png for text images and logos, gif for animations, etc.
- Optimize the way your web pages load images. The pages of your site should only load the images at the sizes at which they are displayed. For example, if an image takes a quarter of the screen and is displayed on a 1080p monitor, there’s no reason to load it at 4K. It won’t improve the quality of the image, and it will substantially increase loading times. There are plugins that allow you to maintain and store your images at different resolution sizes automatically and load the correct one for each device.
- Use tools and plugins to compress your images. Competent tools can substantially lower the size of an image while maintaining its quality for most observers. This way your image files will be lighter, which will contribute to a fast page loading speed.
Remember Google and other search engines love fast loading speeds. Don’t forget that your site must also be displayed on mobile phones quickly and correctly, and mobile devices have less computing and bandwidth resources, which makes this step even more important. To evaluate the speed of your site’s pages, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.
About the Author
Ali Dino I am a professional blogger share guide about the Technology, Internet, WordPress, Blogging tutorial, SEO techniques, and getting traffic to the Site. I love to learn new things related to the latest technology, if you have anything in your mind please do share with me at [email protected]
