Optimizing SEO on WordPress

Using good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics is an essential part of creating a successful website. SEO refers to all the things you can do to help your site rank higher in search results, which is the absolute best way to increase the traffic your website receives. In this post we’ll review some great tips for performing effective SEO on a WordPress website.

SEO tactics work by helping your site appear more relevant to the topics you address. This in turn makes it easier for search engine crawling software to find, identify, and index your site for relevant searches. If you’d like to learn more about SEO, feel free to watch our video.

Now there are a lot of web building platforms out there, but if you want a tool designed with SEO in mind, you

certainly should consider using WordPress. Right out of the box, WordPress sites and blogs come pre-packed with great search engine optimization. Nevertheless, this does not mean there aren’t things you can do to improve SEO on a WordPress website. In fact, truly good SEO requires continual adjustment to be as effective as possible!

Improving SEO on a WordPress website is similar to performing SEO on any website, but there are few tips and tricks that make it a little easier to perform on WordPress.

Plugins: As we’ve discussed in previous blog posts, WordPress developers have created plugins for pretty much everything. So it’s no surprise that there are several great plugins for SEO.

Generally these plugins provide you with ability to add meta data to your posts and pages, separately from the main site itself. Some of the plugins can also help you write better content, giving you keywords to include when producing your content.

Some plugins we recommend are: Yoast, All-In-One SEO, and SEO Title Tags.

Finding keywords: Keywords help search engine software identify your site as relevant to certain content categories or topics. So incorporating relevant key words into your content helps your website appear in relevant search results. However, for the most effective use of SEO keywords, you’ll need to do some research to find out which words are the most relevant and most frequently searched for your topic. There are free tools that can you help you find these words such as Adwords Keyword Tool, KeywordDiscovery, or Wordtracker.

Word of Caution! Utilizing keywords more than 2-4 times in a single post is not recommended. Simply repeating a word many times often causes search engines to flag your post as spam. So make sure you are judicious in how often you employ key words in your content. Instead, try to choose several unique keywords and use them sparingly as they naturally fit in the context of your writing.

Adding “alt” tags to images. Many photo plugins come pre-built with the ability to easily add “alt” tags, which make your images indexable by search engines.  But in the case that you don’t have a plugin, you can use this html tag: <img src=”url” alt=”some_text”/> in your image link to manually improve your SEO and help your search result ranking.

Optimization. Site optimization is one of the most effective tools for improving a website’s SEO, but sadly it is also one of the most overlooked tactics. Optimization refers to how to make your website faster, leaner, and more efficient.

Consider two websites that are exactly the same, but one is better optimized so that it requires less resources from the server on which it resides, loads faster on the computer browser to which it is being sent, doesn’t suffer from bloated or out-dated software, and is certified to be malware & virus free. Which of these two websites is more likely to rank higher in search results? Hopefully the answer is obvious. Search engines favor websites that are regularly optimized.

To learn more about WordPress site optimization, click here.

These are just some of the great ways in which you can continually improve your SEO on WordPress. Make sure to maintain and keep up-to-date with these practices to ensure your website is optimized for search engines to receive as many visitors as possible! And explore our Pro hosting for the best WordPress hosting for your site!

Tiffany Bluehost