All website owners eye for No. 1 position in Google and other rapidly emerging websites. To achieve this, they optimize websites with different SEO tactics and monitor its performance at all the times. SEO is a highly unpredictable technique which keeps changing from time-to-time because of sudden updates in Google’s algorithm, changing behaviour of visitors, etc.
There are several individuals who fail to promote their site in Google search results despite applying several SEO practices. Are you also troubled with the low-ranking of your website? Read on our comprehensive guide that covers seventeen best WordPress SEO tips for beginners.
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Best WordPress SEO Tips for Beginners
WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging websites, allowing people and businesses to share their thoughts with the internet world. Every blog needs exposure and readers for success, though, and the best way to achieve those goals is to use SEO to improve your rankings in search engine results. We are covering here Best WordPress SEO Tips for Beginners in 2020 that will help you rule SERPs.
1. Writing Style and Topics
When you plan your article, choose a keyword to focus on. The keyword you choose should be related to your business or topic, and you should do some keyword research beforehand in order to select a keyword that doesn’t have as much competition as other ones.
Your primary goal should be high-quality content, as this is the preference of readers and search engines, as well. Make sure your content is well-written, original, and relevant to your audience.
The ideal length of an article is a relative notion but something between 700 and 1,500 words is considered the norm. While the keywords are important, don’t just stuff your article with keywords, as that can actually work against you in search engine rankings.
If you’re going to post content, you should do so on a regular basis, so that your readers know to expect updated information from you. If you only post sporadically, your readers can’t trust that you’ll post new content, and they will likely stop reading your website completely.
2. Structure of URLs
Create URLs that are both SEO- and user-friendly. Remember to check your Permalinks page in WordPress, to make sure that you’ve selected the text-based permalink structure for URLs. This will allow you to create readable links that essentially tell the reader what the page is about.
For example, www.example.com/name is more user-friendly and easily deciphered than www.example.com/index.php?page=name.
Also, in WordPress, you can choose the www or non-www option for URLs. For example, you can set it so that a URL is www.example.com or just example.com.
For SEO purposes, it doesn’t matter which structure you choose, but make sure that you’re consistent throughout your website with the chosen structure. Don’t have some of your URLs structured one way, and some structured the other way.
3. Optimize Posts and Comments
There are some specific ways to optimize your posts for SEO. Use a SEO-friendly title that includes a keyword, if possible.
This is a way to get your posts to show up in search results. Strategically place a keyword or two within your content, but be careful not to overstuff an article with keywords, as this will damage your rankings in search results.
Use a meta description. This is a snippet in HTML that summarizes the content of a page. These snippets are displayed under the website link in display results, and internet users are more likely to click through to a website when these snippets are displayed. (WordPress SEO Best Practices)
Keep control of the comments on your posts. Engaging readers in conversation will result in more traffic to your website and more links back to your website, but only if those comments are real and meaningful.
Make sure that the comments posted are genuine comments and not spam. This is sometimes difficult to do, but make sure you check each comment that’s posted.
If you use images in your content, optimize those for SEO, too. Compress the images as much as you can, without sacrificing the quality. The goal is for your website to load quickly, and it should display correctly as it loads.
4. Using Categories and Tags
Learn to properly use categories and tags to organize your content. Categories and tags can make it easy to manage your content, along with helping search engines understand your website structure, but only when you use them correctly.
A category is a broad way to group posts together, and you can think of it as a table of contents. Tags are used to describe individual posts, usually with specific keywords. Tags enable someone to search for posts based on keywords.
5. Linking to Others’ Content and Your Own
Internal and external linking are a major part of SEO, and that is particularly true for WordPress. Internal linking means you link to your own content from your other web pages and blog posts.
However, don’t link to unimportant pages from every other page within your website. For example, don’t link to your About Me page in your content posts. External links are links to websites you don’t own, and this is typically the way you earn links that prove your website’s credibility and trustworthiness.
However, it’s a good idea to NoFollow external links with no value, so that search engines don’t try to associate those links with your website. Check your website regularly for broken links. Broken links will confuse both search engines and internet users, and will result in lower rankings in search results.
It’s always a good idea to go through your website occasionally and check all links to make sure they work correctly. When you find a broken link, either repair it or remove it completely. (WordPress SEO Best Practices)
6. Social Media Integration
Integrate social media sharing buttons into every part of your website, including each time you publish content. Social media has become a big part of SEO, and having your content shared on social media is a great way to drive more traffic to your website.
If you have a social media profile for your website, make sure you fill out the entire profile. The more information you can provide about your blog or website, the better. Using WordPress is a great way for both business owners and personal users to share their thoughts on topics, or give information to the rest of the internet world.
As with all computer content, you want your WordPress site to achieve higher rankings in search results, so it’s important to optimize your website as much as possible for SEO.
7. Effective Use of On-Page SEO tricks
On-Page SEO tricks are a set of rules and regulations that are used by SEO professionals to optimize websites and its pages to rank well in the SERPs of different search engines. You should use different components of on-page SEO tricks to promote your website on the web. Keep reading 17 best WordPress SEO tips for beginners below.
8. Regular and Fresh Content
Google always prefer those websites that offer high-quality, unique, and informative content to the targeted audience. Websites with low-quality content have slim chances to rank well in Google because it hates the use of lousy materials in website optimization.
Therefore, you must use only high-quality content in website optimization. Update your website with fresh content regularly and optimize it very well for visitors and search engines.
If it happens, search engines will visit your website regularly and it or its pages in search results with key terms and phrases under your niche and give you its SEO and business benefits.
9. Catchy Titles
Your content title should be catchy and attractive & let users easily understand the main idea of the presented material. So, while creating content, write unique and catchy titles that have potential to attract the audience and motivate them to read the content from A to Z.
10. Attractive URL
The URL of your website or its posts must be clear and easily understandable format. There are many SEO professionals who use the default URLs created by different content management systems. Search engines doubt such URLs and avoid them while displaying web pages/websites in search results.
So, you must edit the default URLs and make them beautiful by adding high-performing keywords, terms, date, etc. Search engines always love web pages with clean URLs and there is a high possibility of getting more eye-balls on such pages.
11. Internal Linking
Internal Linking an important aspect of on-site SEO in which SEO professionals interlink different pages on a website with each other. This facilitates the better ranking of the website/ its pages and allows visitors to read the useful content in an easy way.
12. Mobile-First Approach
As Google loves responsive websites, loading speed of websites/webpages and their responsiveness to various mobile devices matter a lot for SEO professionals if they want to see their website in Goole’s top search results.
So, you must optimize your website with a mobile-first approach and take all possible measures to make it super-fast. Faster websites bring more business opportunities than their slower counterparts. Keep reading the list of 17 best WordPress SEO tips for beginners below.
13. Social Sharing of Website Posts
Whenever you publish a new content on your website, do share it maximum on different social networking websites. It will give more exposure to your website and help you get more traffic and lead generation opportunities. More social sharing of your posts=more traffic and business opportunities.
14. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is an art of getting your posts published on other’s website or blog. Through this practice, SEO professionals seek quality backlinks to their website, improved ranking in Google and other leading search engines, free marketing of their brand, and more business opportunities. The successful guest blogging attempts help you to meet your business targets easily and quickly.
15. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a process of sending personalized newsletters (content) to subscribers, seek their attention towards new products/services and generate more leads. It is also an effective tool to increase traffic to websites.
So, create high-quality content for newsletters and dispatch them to interested subscribers at the right time and date. You will definitely get a positive response from them.
16. Premium SEO campaigns
Sometimes, you don’t get the desired results through free SEO practices and your web-based business starts to trail little by little. So, should you sit idle and be a mute onlooker? No, not at all even for a single moment.
You can resort to premium SEO campaigns to give a fresh lifeline to your website and boost its ranking on different search engines.
Premium SEO campaigns, such as PPC and social media ads have the potential to help your website rank on the first page of Google, divert more traffic to your website, and help you get more business chances.
17. Analysis of SEO Campaigns
Best WordPress SEO tips for beginners keep changing regularly following sudden Google’s Algorithm updates. So, there are chances that the SEO best practices you are using in website optimization are no longer valid. Therefore, you must analyse the performance of your SEO campaigns and do everything possible to improve its output as far as possible.
Best WordPress SEO Tips: Conclusion
All individuals involved in the web-based business want to improve the ranking of websites on Google and boost the lead generation opportunities. They can use the above-mentioned Best WordPress SEO Tips for Beginners in 2020 to improve the ranking of their websites in the SERP of different search engines.
- 17 Best WordPress SEO Tips for Beginners in 2020 - January 8, 2020