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Apart from being beginner-friendly, one of the other main reasons why people choose WordPress as their CMS is because it is also SEO-friendly. However, this does not mean that simply launching a WordPress website is enough to rank at the top of search engine result pages. You still need to use the right SEO tactics and the good news is that WordPress makes it easy to do this. In this article, we are going to look at ten tips you can start using to improve your WordPress SEO right away.
Pick the Right Hosting Company
Google ranks website speed very highly and the hosting provider you choose for your WordPress website will determine how fast your website is. Additionally, the hosting provider determines how much downtime your website experiences and this can have a tremendous effect on rankings. When choosing a hosting provider, check online reviews to see how fast it is as well as how much downtime it experiences.
Pick the Right Theme
In addition to determining how your website looks, your WordPress theme also determines how fast your website is as well as how easy it is to crawl. Fortunately, there are lots of SEO-friendly WordPress themes to choose from.
Change Your Permalinks
Permalinks are links that point to individual pages and posts, and how they are structured and appear is very important. You want to pick a permalink structure that is both easy to read and share. When it is easy to read, it is also easier for people to know what a page or post is about by looking at it on the result pages.
Ensure Your Site Is Visible
WordPress gives you a setting that lets you decide whether your website can be crawled by search engine bots. While this can be useful when the website is in development, it is important to disable it once the site goes live. You can find the setting by going to Settings and then Reading. Tick the Search Engine Visibility box.
Use the Right Headings
Using the right headings makes it easy for search engine bots to follow and understand your website’s content. You can choose the right headings on the WordPress editor when creating a new page or post.
Use Keywords the Right Way
Best practices dictate that you should use relevant keywords in your permalinks, headings and the main content. However, do not overuse keywords as Google and other search engines will penalise you for keyword stuffing.
Use Links to Create Content Relationships
Search engine bots look at how your content is connected and the best way to direct them is to use links within your content. This way, they can easily find related content and this increases the chances of more of your posts and pages appearing on search result pages.
Ensure Your Website is Responsive
Google takes how easy your website is to use on mobile devices into account when ranking pages. Ensuring your website uses a responsive theme is a great way to improve your SEO.
Optimise Your Images
Images increase your page and post size and make them slower which impacts your ranking. Optimise your images by reducing their quality and size.
Update and Add Content Frequently
Google also takes into account posting frequency when taking websites. While adding new content is great, updating your content also counts and can be helpful when you do not have new content to add.
SEO encompasses many strategies so it can seem overwhelming. Fortunately, WordPress has many of the features you need to make your website SEO friendly. Using the tips above will also help immensely.
