In the modern digital world, search engine optimization is the way to better brand awareness and recognition, and business growth in general. Now, while launching a WordPress site can be a quick and easy task nowadays, optimizing to rank well certainly takes skill and experience.
After all, it’s the little things that will impress your customers and search engines.
While some of the tried-and-tested practices such as building quality organic links with guest posting and integrating relevant keywords into your content pool will remain important for your long-term position in the SERPs, there are also some refined techniques you’re probably not implementing.
Here are the top seven SEO tips that will boost the ranking of your WordPress website.
1. Choose A Well-Optimized Theme
With over thirty thousand WordPress themes to choose from, you certainly have plenty of viable options at your disposal, but aesthetics shouldn’t be your only criterion.
If you want to rank well, your primary focus should be on the themes ability to be search engine optimized.
A well-optimized theme will emphasize loading speed and responsiveness while boasting the appropriate code to appeal to Google bots. Generally, an optimized WordPress theme should have:
- Adequate meta title tags and heading tags
- Use of canonical URL meta tag
- Enhanced social sharing capabilities with the open graph meta tag
- A proper HTML structure and code
2. Provide Value With In-Depth Content
If there is one SEO tactic everyone knows will reign supreme for years to come, it’s content creation. Google loves in-depth, optimized content, and so do your readers, so there is a need to keep the content machine running smoothly and update your website’s blog page on a regular basis.
Most importantly, your content needs to prove its worth in the eyes of the search engines if you want to rank high in the SERPs.
You can achieve this with smart keyword implementation, excellent readability, proper internal linking, and most importantly, credible and valuable information.
The length of your blog posts is also important, as Google prioritizes in-depth articles that provide a comprehensive solution to every problem. With that in mind, focus on creating content that’s no shorter than 800 words.
3. Choose The Right Hosting Option
Choosing the right hosting provider is one of the most important steps towards stellar website performance and higher rankings.
This is because your hosting solution will greatly determine the loading speed of every single one of your pages – an important consideration for Google’s algorithm.
Optimizing your loading speed and staying in control of your website is therefore essential. This becomes especially important in highly-competitive marketplaces such as Australia.
In the Land Down Under, business leaders operating on the WordPress platform understand the importance of managing their websites on a regular basis and doing it on their own terms.
Through solutions such as user-friendly cpanel hosting in Australia, website owners are managing every aspect of their online presence from a centralized control panel, thus retaining full control at all times.
Use the same mindset when choosing your WordPress hosting, and make sure they offer cpanel as a tool for easy and intuitive website management to help boost website speed and other features and influence SEO.
4. Leverage The Power of Mobile Optimization
It’s a mobile-driven world out there, and Google is increasingly prioritizing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) for website ranking. Simply put, your WordPress site needs to be optimized for all handheld devices and their resolutions.
Google will rank your website based on its mobile-friendliness, or how fast it loads on mobile devices, including the overall look and feel of the theme on a handheld screen.
Keep in mind that people are increasingly using their mobile devices to surf the web and consume online content, which is something Google is taking into account by trying to optimize the user’s experience.
This means that the search engine’s algorithm will penalize your website if it fails to satisfy the new standards of the mobile-driven consumer market.
5. Optimize Every Image
Cumbersome image files can hinder website performance, while poor image descriptions can reduce your chances of snagging a piece of the image search market, which accounts for 10% of all search traffic.
That’s a lot of traffic you could capitalize on if you simply took the time to optimize your image tags, alt text, and descriptions. Simply compress the images to boost loading speed, and give context to every picture with an appropriate description and alt text.
6. Tend To Some Internal Linking
Internal linking remains one of the most successful SEO techniques in the modern digital world, and if you’re not linking your old content in your new posts, you are missing out.
Linking to other internal posts on your site helps feed Google’s crawlers with useful information about your website, and also makes website navigation easier for your readers. In turn, this will boost traffic and your standing in the SERPs.
7. Put The Relevant Keywords At The Top
Finally, tend to some smart keyword integration. Google’s crawlers love to find relevant keywords in the first few paragraphs of your blogs posts, so be sure to integrate your keywords into the first 100 words of every post, sans the stuffing.
Use this opportunity to link to other content pieces on your website as well.
Conclusion
WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world, but popularity alone doesn’t guarantee success in the SEO realm.
Be sure to implement these tips and techniques if you want your WordPress site to rank higher than your competition by appealing to both people and search engines.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of the startup tools blog series Grow Your Business brought to you by the marketing team at UniTel Voice, the virtual phone system priced and designed for startups and small business owners.
