Crucial WordPress SEO tips to start ranking better

Doing SEO means you can prepare your website for ranking in Google and get organic traffic for FREE.

If you manage your website yourself then just simple SEO tricks implemented can improve your search engine visibility.

SEO optimization on WordPress isn’t tricky if you know all the tips, which are easy to implement and simply explained in this blog.

Optimize your website for speed

One of the reasons for the low ranking of a website is slow speed. If your WordPress website is slow, Google will always punish you with low ranking or no ranking at all. 

Because a slow website means users have to wait for the website to load.

Google doesn’t rank websites that aren’t a good experience for the visitors. Plus, it causes conversion loss as well.

That’s why you should either hire an expert to speed up your website to the standard of 2 seconds, or you can install WP Rocket plugin.

It’s a WordPress plugin with all the easy-to-use options to optimize your website for speed easily.

After you speed up your website, other WordPress SEO tips will bring results for you.

You must have an SEO-optimized theme installed

No matter how much you optimize your website’s speed and do SEO on it, you’ll still get low results or no results at all. 

Because a poorly designed and poorly coded theme will cause many SEO issues and speed problems.

Choose a high-speed, well-designed, and SEO-friendly theme so all your efforts for WordPress SEO optimization will bring you fruits.

Must install the Yoast SEO plugin

Yoast SEO is one of the popular free SEO plugins for WordPress. It has tons of optimization options to easily optimize your blog posts and help you follow the best SEO practices easily:

It’s best for you, especially if you’re a beginner in WordPress SEO or WordPress itself.

Yoast SEO will check your content for readability issues, edit and optimize your meta tags, help you check your focus keyword, generate sitemaps, and give you more features for easy implementation of SEO.

The premium version of Yoast SEO has even more features like using AI to optimize your meta tags and redirect management.

Redirect management 

Yoast SEO’s redirect feature automatically changes the website pages you moved to the new URL so there won’t be effects on ranking and visitors. 

This helps a lot because if your page has moved and Google doesn’t know it, your website’s page can go down in ranking.

With so many features that make SEO easy with Yoast, you can optimize your pages with ease.

Must turn off this WordPress option! 

Go to your WordPress admin dashboard then:

• Settings > Reading
• Find the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” option.

If it’s ticked, this means you’re not letting Google even index your website.

Indexing means Google’s crawlers visit your website’s pages to check for the keywords and content for ranking and then index them in their database.

If your website pages or blogs aren’t indexing, they can’t rank. Usually, this option might not be enabled, but you must check once again to see if it’s enabled.

Choose one domain name and stick to it

www.site.com and https://site.com are two different websites in the eyes of Google and this can create a lot of problems in ranking.

You must select either one to give Google an address to recognize it as your website to rank.

As you implement more SEO and increase your domain authority, Google will think of your website as a new website if you change your URL from https://site.com to www.site.com or vice versa.

That’s why you must choose one and never change. It depends on the preferences on which one to choose but choosing https://site.com is shorter and therefore better.

You’ll find the settings for it from your WordPress admin dashboard:

• Go to settings > General
• Set the “WordPress Address (URL)” & “Site Address (URL)” to the address you like.

SSL certificate is a must for ranking

If you don’t have SSL security on your website, Google and other search engines will see you as an unsecured and in most cases untrusted website. Because this SSL is related to security.

SSL certificate saves your website from attacks and other incidents like data breaches of your customers. And that’s why customers won’t trust your website either when they see the red warning on the url bar by all browsers.

With the SSL certificate, not only are you going to protect your website but Google will see you as a trusted user and there won’t be any issues for your site’s ranking.

How to make your website SSL-secured

Most of the time, your hosting or domain providers give you a free SSL certificate. 

But if your hosting hasn’t given you an SSL certificate, you can get it from your domain provider like Godaddy or Namecheap.

Request the certificate from your domain provider (might be paid), download the files, and then:

• Go to your admin panel of the hosting provider.
• Visit the security section and then SSL/TLS.
• Upload your .crt file certificate in the certificate section and install the SSL certificate.

You’ll then see HTTPS instead of HTTP on your domain address.

Upload high-quality expert content

Content is the most crucial part of SEO optimization on WordPress. It’s what users are searching for every minute of the day.

That’s why Google and other search engine bots/crawlers constantly look for the best information out there to rank and give the best experience to users.

If your content is best, Google will keep rewarding you again and again with ranking. Whether you have a blog, service website, or e-commerce site.

You must keep uploading fresh, high-quality, and SEO-optimized content to keep increasing your chances of getting a better ranking.

You can hire writers for it or write yourself especially if you’re an expert on the topic of your business. Google ranks websites better with expert, unique, and fresh content.

The deep keyword researching

But content isn’t the only part of WordPress SEO best practices, another crucial thing is keyword researching.

Use keyword research tools (Free or paid) like Wordstream or Google keyword planner tools to research for keywords that can help you rank.

Keywords are the terms of the searches people are doing on search engines. 

If you include these keywords very naturally in your content, it becomes relevant for Google and it ranks for that keyword when the user searches.

How should you choose your keyword:

You must keep 2 things in mind when doing your keyword research:

• Keyword difficulty
• Volume

Keyword difficulty is the score of how hard it is for your website to rank for that keyword. You can match this score with your domain’s authority.

Domain authority is the factor of how trusted your domain is. If you’ve been doing SEO for a while and have gathered many backlinks, your domain authority will be higher.

Volume is the number of people searching that term/keyword every month. The best rule of thumb is to select the keyword with the low keyword difficulty and higher volume.

Even if you have a higher domain authority, you must cover keywords with low difficulty and your ranking chances will be higher. 

But if your website is new, you should especially select low-difficulty keywords because they’re easy to rank for new websites.

The internal linking

While this seems very unimportant or unnecessary, internal linking is one of the most crucial SEO practices.

If you post a new and fresh blog, Google might not be able to discover it that easily. 

But if you link it through your other blog post, Google and other search engines will crawl your website and stumble across your new post with that link. 

And when they stumble across it, they index it and then rank it. Otherwise, without internal linking, it’ll take a lot of time for your content to rank.

Plus, internal linking also helps you give authority to your new blog post. 

If you have one blog post that has ranked higher and has many visitors and you link your new blog through it.

Google will deem your new blog post important because of your internal linking from that performed blog post. That’s why you must add internal links to every blog post.

But remember to link the relevant word or better yet a keyword.

Example: 

Let’s say you’ve written a blog about new t-shirts, you should add the link to it through your “jackets” blog post where you mentioned t-shirts. This will be more relevant for search engines.

Using compressed images and alt tags

If you’re just directly uploading the heavy-quality images with some of them having a size of more than 1MB, then it’s a grave mistake. The heavier your images are, the more it takes for your website to load.

And it’ll take even more time for the website to load if your visitor’s internet is slow.

That’s why you should use online tools to compress your images and then upload them. It’s better for SEO too as well as for the speed of your website.

Using the alt tag on your images

On top of compressing images, you must add an alternative tag on them. Although Google’s AI algorithm can nowadays read images too it’s still crucial for the crawlers to know what the image is about.

If you use relevant keywords in your alt text, this can further increase the chances of more relevance and ranking.

Stop spam comments on your site

Google doesn’t like the spam comments on any website even if it’s written by the spam visitors or bots on your website. This can indeed create some problems in your ranking.

You can either use plugins to automatically detect and remove them or turn on the option of not allowing automatic comments on your website. Turn it into a manual approval system by:

• Going to Settings and then Discussions from your WordPress admin dashboard.
• Turning on “Comments must be manually approved” 

Optimize your URLs 

WordPress calls post URL permalinks. These links are URLs that come after your domain name like this for your pages and blog posts: itsmydomain.com/my-new-post.

But WordPress automatic permalinks are hard to read and not at all SEO friendly for search engines to understand. This can also affect ranking. 

The best URL for your post or website page is your primary keyword like this: itsmydomain.com/topic-main-keyword.

• It’s easier to read and refer to.
• It can help search engines discover your pages easily.
• It can help your page in ranking too because of keyword use

Further, optimize your website for search engines 

The more your website’s structure is optimized, the more it’ll be best for both visitors and search engines.

Visitors will be able to jump to the relevant topics they want and search engines will better know the structure of your website to help them discover and index them for ranking.

Categories and tags 

These are even indispensable if you have an e-commerce brand which has tons of categories and subcategories.

Even if you have a blog, you can have categories of different topics you talk about on your blog.

From your WordPress admin dashboard, click on Posts and you’ll find the tags and categories section.

Categories are more general for the topics and tags are subcategories. Let’s say if you have a blog on fashion for both genders then your main categories are men and women.

Then you’ll add tags of subcategories like shirts, shoes, etc.

Tip: You can even optimize your category pages for ranking by adding content with relevant and ranking keywords.

Google search console and analytics

SEO is a proper process. You must use popular SEO tools like Google Search Console and Analytics to help you know which pages of your website are ranking, how many visitors are visiting your website, and what pages have a problem in indexing. 

This will help you plan your efforts to increase your ranking and know which pages are causing redirect problems or aren’t indexed yet.

Adding your sitemap

Sitemap is a map of all the pages on your website. If you submit your sitemap on Google Search Console. 

Then Googlebot crawlers will know how many pages are there on your website and when your website page content will update so Google will index and then rank it.

Without submitting your sitemap, your pages will take longer to index and may not even index therefore will not rank.

Google Search Console gives even more features to help manage SEO for WordPress websites.

Use SEO tools and manage off-page SEO

The long-term SEO game involves more than just these tips. These are only on-page SEO techniques for ranking.

For advanced SEO, you’ll need to use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to analyze your competitors in creating content that is trendy and creating backlinks to increase the authority of your website to rank consistently on search engines.

If you’re a busy business owner who doesn’t want to go into the complexities of long SEO tasks daily.

We’re offering WordPress SEO services to help your website go from nonexistent to start ranking for terms your dream customers are searching for.