What is SEO? SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of increasing your website’s free, organic traffic by improving your ranking and visibility on search engines such as Google. A Guide to WordPress SEO: 12 Ways to Improve The following guide provides you with 12 ways you can drastically improve your WordPress website’s SEO, boost your organic traffic, and increase your authority on search engines so you can get more visitors and customers. This improves your SEO because it allows search engines to understand your website’s structure and the content your website actually contains. Internally Link Your Site To improve your SEO, you’ll need to increase your website’s authority. One of the main ways search engines determine your site authority is by the amount you internally link to your pages, posts, blogs, and other content. Search engines read Image-Alt-Text, which are descriptions of your images, to rank your site and determine whether or not your images have the information being searched for by users. SSL improves SEO because search engines, such as Google, look for “secure and encrypted” connections when determining a website’s ranking. So you could say externally linking is a good thing for your own SEO, but it also improves the SEO of those pages you are mentioning on your website. These links not only prevent content spam on your WordPress website, but they also prevent search engines from being able to follow those URLs to the sites you are linking to on your website so you are only improving your own site’s ranking and authority.
Imagine you own a delicious gluten-free cafe in Boston. If someone were to search “gluten-free cafe near [insert a neighborhood in Boston]” on Google, it’s safe to assume you’d want your WordPress website to come up at the top of the search results, right? This way, the people who are searching for gluten-free cafes in Boston are more likely to see your site, click on your information, and become customers (whether that’s online or in-store).
Having your website appear at the top of a search engines results page (SERP) is something you can achieve if you spend some time on your search engine optimization.
What is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of increasing your website’s free, organic traffic by improving your ranking and visibility on search engines such as Google. Your content is more likely to appear near the top of the SERP for specific inquiries you’ve optimized.
Now that you understand what SEO is, let’s talk more about why it’s so important.
Why is SEO Important?
When you optimize your WordPress website and content, you’re more likely to reach the people who are actively searching for information about services and products related to yours. This is done organically, meaning you are not paying Google or other search engines to place your content at the top of the results page.
Creating organic, ranking content is also beneficial because your website and information are more likely to seem more reliable and trustworthy for visitors (versus a paid advertisement located at the top of the SERP). Anyone with a business and website should look to improve their SEO as it is a simple and effective way to increase traffic and notability, as well as your number of leads, conversions, and more.
A Guide to WordPress SEO: 12 Ways to Improve
The following guide provides you with 12 ways you can drastically improve your WordPress website’s SEO, boost your organic traffic, and increase your authority on search engines so you can get more visitors and customers.
1. Check Your WordPress Visibility Settings
Check your visibility settings in WordPress. The software actually has a setting that allows you to hide your website from search engines. This can come in handy when building or rebuilding your site and don’t want visitors to see your work in progress.
The feature is found in your WordPress dashboard under “Settings” and “Reading”.
Double check that you haven’t accidentally turned on this feature, or left it on after completing your website. If it’s on, your SEO won’t work.
2. Change Your Permalinks
A permalink is a permanent URL or link to a specific post, page, or blog on your website. Permalinks clearly state what your post, page, or blog actually is (in the URL itself) so visitors know what they are clicking on. You should change your permalinks to not only improve user experience, but to also improve your SEO — search engines read permalinks to determine whether or not your website has answers to certain search queries.
For example, in the case of your gluten-free cafe, if you had a page dedicated to shared gluten free recipes your permalink might look something like this: www.mysite.com/gluten-free-recipes.
To change your permalinks to include an accurate description of your content, head to your WordPress dashboard, click “Settings” and then “Permalinks”.
Click “Save Changes” when you are done.
3. Use Tags and Categories
Tags and categories allow you separate your website’s pages and blog posts into specific and broad groups, respectively. This improves your SEO because it allows search engines to understand your website’s structure and the content your website actually contains.
Added bonus: Tags and categories also improve user experience by allowing visitors to quickly find the content they’re searching for and make it easier for you to manage all of your website content..
Tags are like keywords that you can use to describe what a specific page or post is about. For example, if we think about your gluten-free cafe’s website, the tags on one of your pages may include “muffins”, “tea”, or “cookies”.
To add a new tag or view your current tags, go to your WordPress dashboard and click “Posts” and “Tags”.
You can view current tags or “Add New Tag” here. For more information on tags, check out this list of tips.
Categories are how to you broadly group your posts and pages. In the case of the gluten-free cafe, your categories may include “gluten-free”, “cafe”, and “allergy”.
To create a category, go to your WordPress “Settings” and click “Writing”. Here you’ll see your current categories as well as an “Add New Category” button.
For details on other ways to create categories, check out this page.
4. Choose an SEO Plugin
WordPress plugins enhance the functionality of your website by adding features that don’t come standard with the software. There are tens of thousands of plugins available, many of which can help you improve your SEO. If you are unaware of which plugin you want to implement on your site, you can search the WordPress plugin library for options that fit your needs.
SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO, All In One SEO Pack, and…
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