It has been sometime since I’ve talked about SEO for WordPress. But this year, search engine optimization (SEO) will be more than important, that ever. Especially when you want to save up on the marketing budget.
Organic reach or organic SEO will help your website gain more visibility for free. A well-written content can easily drive up thousands of traffic daily instead of spending hundreds of dollars a week just to drive the same amount of traffic in a week!
So, today’s post is all about how do I optimize a WordPress site for SEO? Are you ready to dive in?
How Do I Optimize A WordPress Site For SEO?
According to Brian Dean from Backlinko, there are over two hundred factors that affect the website performance on search engines.
Let’s face this. You are running a WordPress site and probably either a blogger, freelancer or a business owner. Either way, you certainly doesn’t have all the time to run through the 200 factors checklist.
And this leads us to the next part. You want to know exactly what you can do right now to optimize a WordPress site for SEO.
Guess what? That’s what you are going to get. Continue reading below to get started.
Step 1: Choose The Right Keywords For Your Homepage
Do you know that your homepage plays a huge role in SEO? As a matter of fact, any SEO company would tell you that choosing the right keywords is an important SEO strategy.
Your homepage need to be optimize and you can start with the description of your website.
You can find the option to custimize the description of your website on the WordPress setting tab.
Step by step guide: Click on the Settings tab on the left column (on your WordPress dashboard) > General > Find for Tagline
Tips to writing the best website tagline
- Start with your own creative brief
- The English language is your best friend
- Don’t settle for the first great tagline idea you have
- Keep it simple
- Use taglines to connect with your site visitors
- Longer tagline is better (but avoid TOO long)
- Avoid using buzz words
- Some humour are recommended
- Be bold
- Check before using the tagline
- The tagline must represents what you truly believe (and can offer)
Step 2: Choose The Best Keywords For Your Content On The WordPress Site
Wait a minute. Keywords again?
Keywords play an important role in optimizing your WordPress site for SEO. However, how do you do know if the selected keyword is the right one?
I use KWFinder to make the keyword selection easier. Type in the keyword of your choice and hit the search button. For this example, I used “dog training” as a sample.
The level of easiness to rank for a specific keyword is through colour coded; the goal is to find green or yellow keywords. Refer to the image above, easy keywords to rank are “german shepherd training” and “dog school.”
Let’s take a look deeper by clicking on the keyword “german shepherd training.”
This specific keyword has 14,800 searches in a month and on the right, you can see the top search results. The websites ranking on the 3rd, 4th, 8th and 9th are easy to bear because the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are below 35. YouTube is an authority site but having YouTube showing up in the top 10 search results shows that this keyword has very low competition level.
Ready to optimize your WordPress site for SEO?
The next step is to find the right keywords that resonate with your content and website visitors.
Imagine you run through the exact steps before publishing any content on your WordPress site.
All your articles will rank highly on search engine and without you spending a dime on Internet marketing (such as paid ads).
Step 3: Optimize The Content Een More To Be SEO Friendly
You may have heard about Yoast SEO and All-In-One-SEO Pack. Both of these are SEO plugins that you can install directly to your WordPress site to optimize it further.
By using WordPress SEO plugins such as Yoast, you can optimize the content for it to rank better on search engines. Here’s what I mean.
If you want to optimize a WordPress site for SEO, make sure you solve all the problems, improvements and considerations recommended by SEO plugins. These are best practises to ensure that your content will rank higher and better than most of your competitors.
Bonus: The Most Complete Yoast SEO Setup (Step by Step Guide)
Step 4: Optimizing Images On Your WordPress Site
Want to optimize your WordPress site for SEO? Start optimizing your images now!
There are some very quick fixes when it comes to optimizing your images for SEO. Those includes:
- Use a relevant image that matches your text
- Pick the right file name for your image.
- Make sure image dimension match the image size as displayed
- Reduce file size for faster loading
For me, the most important thing for optimizing images for SEO is the file name. For example, instead of naming a file, “WordPress,” change it to “How_To_Optimize_WordPress_Site_For_SEO” as the file name.
Step 5: Optimize WordPress Site Using SEO Friendly WordPress Themes
Do you know that not every WordPress theme is SEO friendly?
There are WordPress themes that are badly coded and this can lead to many negative impacts on SEO.
Negative SEO can results in:
- Not ranking well on search engine result pages (SERPS)
- Penalization from Google
- Drop in organic traffic
What makes the a WordPress theme SEO friendly?
- Clean codes
- Free from bloatware and malwares
- Fast loading speed
- Bulletproof security features
Most WordPress premium themes are well-coded simply because they are premium and isn’t free to download.
If you can’t decide which WordPress theme to use to optimize your site for SEO, I highly recommend you to take a look at Thrive Themes (read Thrive Themes review here).
With over 10 SEO friendly themes available in Thrive Themes, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be using it to optimize your WordPress site.
BONUS READ: What Are The Best Premium WordPress Themes 2018?
Step 6: Get A Better (WordPress) Hosting Provider
Does your website takes more than 10 seconds to load? If the answer is anywhere near “yes,” this is one of the most important factors for you to start moving to a better web hosting company.
A slow loading website will make not only make you lose your visitors, you will also get penalization by search engines. On average, a WordPress site needs to load anywhere below 1.5 seconds to ensure that you are having the best SEO advantages.
Here are two tools you can use to test your website speed.
Help! My website takes more than 2 seconds to load!
Don’t panic. You can easily move your WordPress site to a better host in just a few clicks. Yes, there is no crazy and messy migration you need to be worried about.
Here are three web hosting services that I highly recommend based on your needs:
- WordPress Hosting by BlueHost (for small WordPress sites)
- Cloudways (for affordability and small to medium sized WordPress sites)
- WPEngine (for businesses running on WordPress and looking for the best performance)
You can request for free migration (yes, you don’t need to pay a dime for it) when you use any of the WordPress hosting companies above … thus, saving you time and money!
Are You Ready To Optimize WordPress Site For SEO?
The process of optimizing WordPress site for SEO should be an ongoing task, regardless if you are running a business or a personal blog.
I hope you find the 6 steps above easy and effective in helping you to optimize WordPress site for SEO. Leave a comment below if you have any questions!
Happy to answer them 🙂
