WordPress can be considered the most reasonable option for building SEO optimized websites. The platform’s great performance inspired Matt Cutts, former head of the Webspam Team in Google, to name it the ‘Great Option’ for website building.
However, most of us still question ourselves about ‘How can we improve the SEO of our WordPress website, in order to reach the top results on search engines?’ You can find some hints below that may answer your question.
Headlines, titles, and descriptions
The most important keywords are the ones included in headlines, titles, and descriptions on your website.
Your website’s ranking on Google depends almost entirely on these keywords. This is why you have to make sure that these words are the ones that will draw attention to your website.
To adjust titles and descriptions just click on ‘Settings’ > ‘General’, and insert the optimized ones.
Permalinks
Permalinks are the endings of your web pages’ URLs. You can increase their effectiveness by including relevant information about your content. This could guide users towards a particular post or page they want to see. In order to adjust permalinks, you have to log into the Dashboard, and choose ‘Settings’ and then ‘Permalinks’.
The next step is to click on ‘Post Name’
When selecting ‘Post name’, the permalink will appear in the following form: ‘http://www.yourwebsite.com/your-slug’. The SEO structure is very interesting because it allows you to choose a separate slug for every page you have, or even for blog posts or other elements of your website.
In case you don’t really know how to choose the right slug, there are some SEO tips that can help you. For instance:
- The perfect length for a slug is from 3 to 5 words;
- You can make slugs more content-relevant by including some of the SEO keywords;
- Divide words with hyphens.
Yet, an important thing you must remember is that you should change slugs only before a page goes viral, because otherwise you could make it unreachable for the audience.
Meta tags
The primary purpose of Meta tags is to determine what is the main use of your website’s content. But meta tags, like some other website elements, have been abused by overambitious companies, which led to the decrease of their importance in today’s website building process.
Adding them is not necessary. In fact, failing to add them may help you stand out from your competitors because you will know which keywords they are using.
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are in fact Meta tags which are connected with the content. They are supposed to give information to search engines about a page’s main topic. Ranking doesn’t really depend on them, but they can improve your click-through rates within SERPs.
Meta descriptions should be short, but compelling, and they should provide a summary of the overall information displayed on your website. Knowing that Meta descriptions can’t affect ranking, you can do the trick and include keywords to help you tickle readers’ interest and attract them to click on your page. As usual, try to be as concise as possible, and don’t overdo the description.
Content is the most successful optimization tool
Optimization can (and will) be successful only when it’s associated with relevant, high-quality content. That means that your text should contain keywords, and should highlight the post’s topic. Of course, content should also be readable and understandable. For this reason, you have to choose words wisely, and write them in a user-friendly manner, for readers rather than for search engines.
Your headers should be marked as h1, h2, h3, etc., and should refer to separate sections and paragraphs. The most important thing to consider here is to let leading keywords appear in the h1 header.
Formatting headers with a header tag will allow you to underline important heading text sequences, to convert them, and to format them with some of the options displayed in the bar’s drop-down menu.
Leave keyword density aside
Keyword density will come automatically when you have good, naturally-written content. Write for your users, and put keywords only where they are really relevant.
Opt for recent and unique content, because Google will detect even the smallest copy-pasted sentence. It may not discard you at once, but it will certainly not give you the credit of an innovative and responsible content provider.
In fact, Google may even deny indexing your content if it has been artificially generated (especially by using scraping software). Another thing to consider is the number of words you are using: the minimum is 500, without the title.
Research before choosing your keywords
It’s good to be intuitive and to try guessing what people will look for, but there is a Keyword Research Tool that can do this more easily and efficiently.
Google also has a tool that can help you find out which are the most popular keywords. The tool is called Keyword Planner, similar to Google Trends and WordTracker which are also amazing for this purpose.
Adjusting tags and descriptions
The thing that most WordPress themes do is to generate tags by default, usually ones that contain the name of your website. For example, if you have a website titled ‘Premium WordPress themes’, the tag on your brand’s new page will look something like:
New Page | Premium WordPress themes
Tags are critical for Google to relate your website with particular content, and it may happen that Google will perceive two pages with the same tags as duplicated content. This is probably one of the biggest threats for the overall ranking of your website on search engines. So pay attention to the tags and descriptions you choose for your pages.
You can fix this problem by downloading Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin or All in one SEO pack, an extension that gives you the opportunity to rewrite tags and descriptions, and to minimize title tags redundancy.
Optimized images
If you’re already using images on your website, you need to make sure they are optimized. The rule refers especially to unique images. By optimizing their titles, you can make them visible on search engines, and on Google Images in particular.
If your images are not optimized, you can use the ‘alt’ tag to help users understand what a certain image stands for, or, at least, to ‘push’ it a step further in the ranking performed by search engine robots.
To adjust the title and description of your image, go to the publisher screen, click on the image, and select the ‘Edit Image’ button. A small screen will pop up, and you can use it to edit the information you want.
Sharing on social networks
Search engines are becoming more and more responsive to social signaling, which means that few sharing plugins for Facebook, Twitter, or a similar network will help you rank much higher.
The tactic may not be successful at the beginning, but with a bit of patience, it can lead you towards amazing results.
Reciprocal linking
Reciprocal linking is a very good strategy, assuming you’ve carried it out in the proper way. For instance, links will look naturally embodied into your text, which is not something we could say about sidebars. Secondly, the link should be obviously relevant to the content, for instance when one financial site is referring to another.
With your links published on ‘Links’ or ‘Partner’ pages, you’re giving your entire domain a chance to appear in the search list. Buying or exchanging links, however, should be avoided at every price.
Google knows well what you’re doing, and it will spot every link that is not really yours. The mere suspicion of you using exchange sites and software, or referring to excessive backlinks belonging to other domains, will take you to the bottom of their result list or can even ban your website.
By optimizing these simple site elements, you will increase your content’s effectiveness and will deliver useful information for Google’s search engine. If you have some more tips about SEO contribution, please feel free to comment and share them with us.