One of the purposes of a website is to offer information about your business to your clients. Another purpose is to obtain new clients and some of them may find your site after performing a search on DuckDuckGo, Google , Yahoo, Bing or other search engine. However, if you take into account the fact that there are around 1.5 billion websites out there, appearing in the search results may be tricky. Sure, not all websites are in your niche and in your region, but you get the point. Simply creating a website does not guarantee getting new clients.
Nonetheless, there are things you can do, that will help you rank better in the search results. Here are 7 SEO recommendations to improve the rankings for your WordPress website:
1. Adjust the permalinks of your website
The permalinks are the strings of text that appear in the adress bar, after the domain of your websites (example: www.yourdomain.com/this-is-a-permalink). By default, WordPress ads the id of the page or post as the permalink, which is not that great (example: yourdomain.com/?p=123). But don’t worry, it is very easy to change it into a better structure. You just need to go to settings -> permalinks and choose a better option. We usually go with “Post name”.
Using this structure makes your links easier to read/remember and SEO friendly. You can use relevant keywords in the permalink and this will have a positive effect on your rankings.
2. Install and use a SEO plugin
Installing a SEO plugin will allow you to add meta titles and descriptions to all posts and pages and this is very helpful. We usually use Yoast and one of the reasons is that it automatically generates a sitemap. More than that, it analyzes the readability of the page and gives a SEO score, plus recommendations. When creating a page or post, it would be a good idea to do the following:
2.1. Optimize the title
The title should be short (if it’s too long, it will be trimmed in the search results), accurate (perfectly describing the content on the page) and attractive. Many people read only the title, so getting their attention is very important. It should also include the keyword you are interested in as early as possible. If you can, start with the keyword itself.
2.2. Add a meta description
The meta description is the text appearing under the title in the search results. Having the meta description short and to the point can help people understand what they will find on the page, before they click. Including the targeted keyword in this section is helpful for SEO. Like with the title, if the meta description is too long, it will be trimmed by the search engine.
2.3. Add links to internal pages
Internal linking is very important for the search engines to understand the structure of your website and how the pages are related. It also helps users discover related content on your website. If a page has many links to it, the search engines will assume it has a bigger importance and it will rank it higher (tha page will have a higher link value). The algorithm is much more complex, but this is the main idea. The link value of a page is also distributed to the pages to wich it links. If your homepage, for example, has the highest value, adding a link to a blog post will help it rank a bit higher. Here is an article on internal linking, to understand it better.
3. Submit a sitemap of your site to Google Search Console
A sitemap is a list with all the pages in your website. It can help search engine bots better understand the structure of your website and how to crawl it in a more intelligent way. If you are using Yoast, it automatically generates a xml sitemap and it is generally under the form of “your-site.com/sitemap-index.xml”. Using your google account, log in to Search Console and add your website. You will need to verify that you are the owner of the site and there are several ways to do it.
After the site has been added, you can submit the sitemap and this will help in the indexing process. It will also help Google better understand the structure of your website.
4. Add good quality content to your WordPress website
If people find what they were looking for, they will stay on the page longer. If they don’t, they will close it right away and go to the next search result. Google has a very complex algorithm behind the search engine and it will notice if people tend to stay longer on your pages, or if they leave right away. If you have good quality content, chances are that people will stay longer on your site and you will rank higher in the search results. More than that, it will be more likely that people will share your content.
4.1. Structure it properly – use headings, links, bold text and images
Having the content nicely structured, with headings, lists and images, will make it easier to read and more pleasurable. This may have a positive effect on the time spent on your site. Having a good structure will also help people go directly to a subject they are interested in and they will be more likely to come back to your website.
5. SEO your images
Images are an important part of any website. They help deliver the message and you know that saying: “a picture is worth a thousand words”. They can also help you get more traffic to your website, but they need to be optimized. So, let’s see how you can SEO your images.
First of all, the images need to be optimized for the web. This means reducing their size, without loosing any quality. Google takes loading speed very seriously, so you don’t want to have big images (in size), that load slowly. You can do this in multiple ways: use a program, like Photoshop, an online service, like TinyPNG, or a plugin, like Imagify or Smush.
Then, what you want to do is name the pictures in a descriptive way. Even though, google is very good at identifying what an image contains, it is better to name your pictures right. By doing so, you can also add some keywords, relevant to the image and page.
When uploading an image to your WordPress website, some new fields will appear on each image. The most important field is “Alternative Text”, which will be used in case the image does not load. Here you will want to enter a text that best describes what the image contains, in such a way that, if the image does not load, the user can understand what you wanted to highlight. You also have title, caption and description. The caption is also important, since it adds some context to the image. It is important that the text surrounding the image to be related to the content of the image.
6. Improve the loading speed of your website
You probably know by know that google wants fast websites. Well, he wants what’s best for the users, and the users want fast websites :) So, if you want your pages to rank higher, you will need to optimize the loading speed of your WordPress website. Depending on the set-up of your site, there are various things you can do, but the most important are:
- choose a good host;
- optimize images;
- enable cache and gzip compression;
- use lazy loading.
7. Make sure your website is responsive
I probably should have listed this one the first, since it’s crucial, but I can’t imagine having a website that’s not responsive these days. If you are not sure about this, go to Google’s mobile website compatibility test and give it a run. If your website is not responsive, you need to re-design it. Why? Because if you your website does not meet this criteria, Google might not even show your site in the search results.
