SEO has changed drastically over the last decade. But don’t be fooled – SEO is by no means dead as many people would have you believe. If you’ve just secured a managed cloud hosting account and set up your spanking new WordPress site, then you might be wondering what to do to get some organic traffic to your website. Below are some WordPress search engine optimization tips to help you along.
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Install Yoast
WordPress comes SEO-ready right out of the box, but you can always make it better by installing an SEO plugin such as Yoast. Yoast gives you full control over what search engines see from your WordPress website. The plugin will guide you on how to write better content and help with keyword analysis. It will also enable breadcrumbs, social and schema markup, and generate XML sitemaps. The plugin is available for free install via your WordPress dashboard. This is one of the most important WordPress search engine optimization tips.
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Use Friendly Permalinks
As you may have noticed, WordPress has a very awkward URL structure. While it may work perfectly fine, it is not clean and can impact negatively on your rankings. The default structure uses the day and name in the URL e.g. “http://yoursite.com/2016/11/03/hello-world/”. Using shorter URLs is usually better e.g. “http:// yoursite.com /hello-world/”. Make sure to use the title or keyword in the URL.
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Use Focus Keywords
Keywords are still important in 2018. After all, Google is still a computer algorithm and needs keywords to determine what the content is all about. This doesn’t mean stuffing your content with keywords. However, you should try to incorporate a focus keyword. The keyword density should be about 0.5% or thereabouts.
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Use Meta Descriptions to Increase CTR
While meta-descriptions have hardly any impact on your SEO ranking, they do affect CTR. CTR is one of the ranking factors Google uses in its algorithm. The higher your CTR, the more relevant Google will deem your content. You can use your Yoast plugin to set up your meta description. The character limits for a meta description should be between 150 and 170.
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Header Tags
HTML tags (H1, H2, H3) are used by the Google crawler to determine the relevance of your website content. Have a single H1 tag per page and several H2s and H3s below it. The H1 tag should contain the focus keyword while the rest of the tags should have the longtail variations of the keyword. Tags also help to make your content easier to read.
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Keyword in First Paragraph
Always include the focus keyword in the first paragraph of your posts and pages. This is because Google crawls content starting from the top going down. If your keyword appears in the first paragraph, then Google will deem the content more relevant to the keyword topic.
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Do Keyword Research
WordPress search engine optimization is hinged on proper keyword research. Targeting the right keywords could mean the difference between a page 1 and a page 2 rank. The difference here is staggering. 91.5% of search engine users never venture past the first page. Use tools such as KWFinder, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, and SEMrush. As a rule, you should avoid targeting keywords that are too competitive or where you’re competing with sites that have huge domain authority.
