WordPress SEO is the best CMS for search engine optimization, but it won’t get you results without a strategy. SEO is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and updates.
To optimize your site for search engines, you need to generate an XML sitemap and submit it to the major search engines. To make the job easier, there are several SEO plugins that help you do this automatically.
On-page optimization
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing pages within your website in order to increase your search engine rankings and earn organic traffic. This includes publishing relevant, high-quality content and optimizing your headlines, HTML tags (title, meta, and header), and images.
Keyword research is a crucial part of on-page SEO. It helps you discover words users enter into search engines to find content, products, and services in your industry.
Another important aspect of on-page SEO is the structure of your site. You want to ensure that your site hierarchy is as short and logical as possible, as this makes it easier for search engine crawlers to reach and index your sub-pages.
A clean permalink structure is also essential for on-page SEO, as this helps users and search engines navigate your WordPress site. It also prevents duplicate content, as Google considers non-www and www URLs as separate.
Keyword research
Keyword research is a crucial aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) that uncovers the keywords people use when searching online for information, products and services. It can also help a website understand search intent so that it delivers content relevant to the search query.
SEO keyword research helps web owners create content that can be optimized to attract more high-quality traffic. To do so, they need to compile a large list of potential keywords that they want their website to rank for.
Once they have this list, they can start incorporating those keywords into their content. This can include pages, blog posts, tags, categories and more. The more that the keywords are scattered throughout your website, the more likely that Google will pick them up and rank them in search results.
Link building
Link building is a crucial component of any SEO strategy. It can significantly impact your website’s visibility, search engine ranking, and traffic.
It’s essential to build high-quality backlinks that are relevant to your site. This is called contextual linking.
To find good sites to link to, use a tool like Ahrefs or SEOmoz. These tools will help you identify pages with good backlinks and high authority.
You can then create supporting content that links back to these hub pages. You’ll need to be careful with your anchor text, which should describe the page’s topic.
Alternatively, you can use a WordPress SEO plugin to help you find good external sites to link to. This will help you avoid spam and improve your ranking.
It’s important to have a healthy mix of both dofollow and nofollow links on your site. This will give Google the impression that you have a good link profile and keep you from getting penalized.
Site speed
Site speed is a critical part of WordPress SEO as it can impact your conversion rates, bounce rates and page views. It also plays a significant role in Google’s Page Experience algorithm.
To build a page, WordPress runs a complicated process that involves retrieving information from a database and PHP files, putting it together and then serving it to your users. This process can take a long time, especially for pages with multiple elements.
To avoid slow loading times, consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to host static images off of your server. This can significantly decrease the load time of your site.