Are you looking for a tutorial to improve the ranking of your WordPress site in Google? Optimize your site using the tactics and best practices described in this article.
Whether your goal is to entertain or inform readers, promote your work, or sell your products and services, you need to improve your WordPress site’s SEO. In reality, you need to optimize your WordPress SEO well to get more traffic to your website.
The problem is that most WordPress SEO guides that we find are often technical and difficult to understand, especially for beginners. In this article, we simplify things. Check out the best WordPress SEO tips to acquire more organic traffic.
First, we will see the optimizations to be made at the level of the structure of the site. Then come the best practices for optimizing the content of the site. Finally we will dissect the link strategy (netlinking) for a better SEO of your WordPress site.
Optimize The Structure Of Your WordPress Site
To build a house that will stand the test of time, you have to make sure you have the foundations right. If the foundations are not solid, it will cause problems sooner or later and you will be forced to carry out major works. It’s the same for a WordPress website.
It is imperative to make the necessary settings when creating the website to prevent this from hampering the good referencing of the latter later. This is where you ask yourself, what does it take to optimize your WordPress site structure ? There are many actions to be taken. For example, you must:
- ensure the quality of the settings in WordPress (configuration of permalinks for example),
- choose a theme optimized for search engines (DIVI for example),
- use a dedicated SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or SEOPress,
- optimize your robot.txt and .htaccesss files ,
- set up excellent internal networking (creation of links within your content that point to other pages or articles on your site),
- create a relevant internal structure (relevant and ergonomic main menu, hierarchy of pages, categorization of blog articles, etc.).
Optimize The Content Of Your WordPress Site
There are many actions to be taken to optimize the content of a website. For starters, make sure you always follow the golden rule of unique content. You must absolutely avoid copying the content of other websites. Even if you change a few words or a few sentences, it is not enough. You need original content.
If we must avoid plagiarism, we must also avoid Duplicate Content. In other words, you must not have duplicate content on your own website. Sometimes this happens without realizing it, because WordPress natively duplicates certain content (for example, the blog page and the archive page). It is important to correct this kind of error as soon as possible.
Apart from plagiarism and Duplicate Content, you must use enriched semantics within your content. Additionally, you need to strategically choose the keywords you use. By optimizing keywords and semantics for a targeted query, you increase the chances that Google will show your content to people who enter that query.
Here are some other criteria to make the content of your WordPress site SEO friendly:
- Write quality content that meets the needs of readers (with rich and relevant content for the reader, you will reduce the bounce rate on your pages, excellent for SEO)
- Structure your content with titles and subtitles that contain relevant keywords (Title tag, meta description, H1, H2, H3… Hn)
- Use bulleted lists, bold and italics for better readability of your content
- Post content to your WordPress site regularly (posting frequency is one of the most important criteria Google’s algorithm uses to rank pages)
In addition, it is important to do the SEO optimization of your images (alternative text, image size, etc.). Added to this are the external links to integrate into your WordPress content. We talk about it in the section below.
Optimize Your Link Strategy (Netlinking)
Over 34% of websites use WordPress as their CMS. Can you imagine the number of websites that this represents? GOOD ! Have you ever wondered how Google manages to rank all these sites? How does it work if two WordPress sites have an optimal basic structure and quality content published regularly? It simply looks at the links (more precisely the backlinks ).
Also called incoming links or external links, backlinks are links located on other websites and pointing to the pages of your WordPress site. The more quality backlinks pointing to your site, the more Google considers your site to be a popular site , an “authority site”. This criterion greatly helps with natural referencing.
You cannot implement a good SEO strategy without defining an optimal netlinking strategy. The netlinking strategy is nothing but the set of means that you put in place to obtain quality backlinks.
It is important not to create links in quantity, it is rather necessary to prioritize the quality of the backlinks. This is mainly the theme of the sites from which your backlinks come, the diversity of backlinks, the SEO optimization of the anchors used.
It must be recognized that setting up a complete netlinking strategy is not a simple task. This is why it is advisable to entrust this task to SEO specialists. Be careful, however, to choose your agency or a good SEO consultant to benefit from tailor-made support.
Also Read: What Are Google Discovery Ads Campaigns And How Do They Work?
