Many people, especially the ones new to blogging, choose WordPress as their content management site. However, using it as-is will not help your SEO. For that to happen, you’ll have to take on some SEO tips and practices to make sure that your website shines through.
Luckily, WordPress makes it super easy for its users to implement the best SEO practices. However, it is still recommended to take the assistance of an SEO consultant specialist. Having one on board will help improve your website’s ranking.
In this guide, we’ll talk about the top 5 SEO practices, share tips and explain how you can use them to rank higher.
Focus On The Content
I’m sure a lot of people have heard the saying “content is king”, but often they fail to understand the importance of it. A website with stale content is not only dead to its visitors but also search engines. It needs to be interesting, unique, and most importantly, not plagiarised. It should always bring something new to the table.
Now obviously, you can always copy-paste a quote or two or insert research studies but copying an entire page is simply poison to your website rankings. Moreover, it is crucial to be regular with posting content on your website and staying relevant while doing so.
Set Up SEO Friendly URLs
Setting up permalinks in WordPress is a key component of SEO best practices. If you don’t know what that is, well, in simple words, it’s the URL that is the easiest to remember. You can tell that by just looking at one. For instance, which one of these URLs do you think is the easiest to remember?
Yes, that’s right! It’s the third one. Luckily, WordPress is a content management site that makes it way easier for its users to insert friendly links. All you need to do is go to Settings > Permalinks and select Post Name or Month and Name. However, bear in mind that you’ll need to do this before you post content on your site. This is done mainly to avoid any broken links.
Maintain a Strong Link Profile
Links have proved to be one of the most important factors in ranking your web pages. Now, this includes every single thing. The quality of your backlinks, the number, optimization of the link, every single thing is strongly correlated, especially to your local ranking. For example, inserting backlinks is important, but stuffing in dozens of low-quality backlinks in there won’t help you.
Instead, one quality backlink from an industry leader in your niche would make more impact on your SEO. Fixing broken links is equally as important. Moreover, use competitive analysis tools to fetch more link-building opportunities which include more relevant sites in your niche, except your competitors.
Mobile-Friendly Website
The importance of being mobile-friendly is pretty clear in this day and age. Even Google has understood the assignment well and has introduced mobile-friendly tags in the search results. Basically, this means that if your website isn’t mobile-friendly it will be somewhere deep down, enjoying the worst rankings ever. The tags will let the users know if your website is mobile-friendly or not, even before they get into it. In case it isn’t, it will impact your click-through rate negatively.
You can always use an RWD – responsive web design, which is a technique that allows developers to build a website around a mobile-first approach. If that doesn’t work for your website, you can always use a mobile hybrid solution. Just make sure that there are no conflicting URLs or content that can mess up your WordPress SEO.
Speed Up Your Website
If you think that your website is slow, especially when compared to that of your competitors, you might want to use some techniques to speed it up. Remember, the tortoise beats the rabbit only in children’s tales, not in the SEO world. One of the ways to do that is compressing and optimizing large images by using plugin tools. Also, get rid of those outdated page elements such as old themes, unnecessary data, functions, etc. This is to make sure that the old themes are not holding you back.
WordPress surely is a flexible CMS that is easy to use, beginner-friendly, and a better base for SEO than most of them out there. But remember, at the end of the day, it’s still a CMS and can only get you so far. If you want to rank higher, there’s some effort you have to put in. If you’re not well-versed with SEO, start by hiring Mapit Marketing Group, reliable web development and SEO agency. They will take care of every aspect of improving the rankings of your company.