5 Crucial Steps to boost your WordPress SEO

Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website. Sadly most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started.

If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices.

We know the idea of optimizing for WordPress SEO can be intimidating for beginners, especially if you’re not a tech geek.

But don’t worry — it doesn’t have to be complicated. Start here to learn the basics, and then you can start applying them to your own website

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a strategy used by website owners to get more traffic by ranking higher in search engines. Search engine optimization isn’t about tricking Google or gaming the system. It’s simply about creating a website that has optimized code and formatting which makes it easy for search engines to find your website.

Five Quick Crucial Steps to boost WordPress rankings

1. Improve your site speed
2. Optimize for mobile
3. Delete thin content
4. Ensure all your images have alt text
5. Review your site structure and internal linking

Improve your site speed

Site speed is important for a lot of reasons. People will tend to leave if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, for one.

But it’s also important to Google.

Contrary to popular belief, Google doesn’t reward fast sites – they penalize slow ones. So if your site is slow, speeding it up can remove the penalty and improve your rankings.

Optimize for mobile

Mobile has long overtaken desktop in the number of users browsing online. And it’s only going to continue increasing as phones get better and voice search improves.

Google knows that. And they reward mobile-friendly sites with better rankings.

It makes sense – Google’s goal is to provide the absolute best experience for the end user. Obviously, viewing a mobile site on a mobile device is going to provide the best experience.

The easiest way is to choose a mobile friendly WordPress theme. But if you don’t want to change themes, you can read this guide to mobile-optimizing your website.

Delete and redirect thin content

Thin content is any page on your site that’s under 300 words long and doesn’t provide clear value to the reader.

The reason we want to delete thin content is that it doesn’t provide any benefit. If you think of your site as a farm, and Google’s “SEO juice” as your farm’s water, you want the water going to the right places.

If you have a lot of dead weight pages, you’re basically watering dead plants. Instead, uproot those plants and keep your water going to the plants already performing well, so they can perform even better

Ensure all your images have alt text

Did you know that Google image search accounts for 10.1% of all Google’s search traffic?

Adding alt text to images is a super easy and simple way to take advantage of some of that traffic.

Plus, Google uses alt text to determine the topic of a page, so it can even help your search rankings on non-image search.

Review your site structure and internal linking

Your site’s navigation is hugely important to SEO. Google gives the highest ranking authority to those pages in your navigation, since they are linked to from essentially every page on your site.

Remember the farming analogy? Adding internal links to important pages is like adding another stream of water to that crop. The more internal links, the more water it gets.

Make sure your navigation is clean, and don’t link to more than 5-15 of your absolute most important pages.

If you aren’t sure which pages are your most important, just look at your analytics to see which pages get the most traffic. (Or you could just do a gut check – you know which pages you put the most effort into.)

Pro Tip: If you want a page to rank faster, add more internal links pointing to that page! For example, if you just published a new blog post that you spent hours creating, go into your old posts and add links to the new post.

Conclusion

While there are quite a few more quick WordPress SEO tips I could give you, I’ll leave it at these for now. It’s more important that you go and implement this stuff right away than get stuck reading more material.

While the tweaks we mentioned here won’t perform magic, don’t be surprised if they boost your pages from the second page of Google to page one within a few weeks. Especially if you have a larger site with lots of pages and decent domain authority.

Biography:

I am Nangoxolo Bodlani from Cape Town, South Africa, and currently a Digital Marketing Analyst at THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DIGITAL MARKETING. My hobbies include playing chess, watching Netflix, playing football and swimming. #Millenial #Sports # Netflix