Selina Jenkins — December 12, 2016 What’s the essence of having a beautiful and enhanced website with no traffic? The joy of every website owner sees the tremendous growth of traffic; a feat that is perfectly achievable through SEO. A website, however, glamorous it is, is not worth it if it is not to search engine optimized.
Knowing that search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing care less about web design and embedded photos is a critical step towards ensuring a perfect search engine optimized website.
It narrows your scope to what you should focus on; keywords, alt tags, file name, links, and content. So how do you use this knowledge to ensure notable search engines notice your WordPress website?
1. Reset Permalinks
The default permalink setting in WordPress doesn’t have an efficient structure for SEO. To reap the most out of it, you need to adjust the URL to post name manually.
Although (/%postname%/) is an ideal option, some prefer using /%category%/%postname%/. The latter can, however, result in various issues when there’s no optimization of contents of categories.
In the default settings for WordPress, all pages are designed to run via URL parameters. This is against Google’s recommendations. Changing the default settings maximizes the potential of your website for SEO.
2. Capitalize on Update Services
It takes time for URLs of newly added posts and pages to be indexed by search engines. To enhance the speed of this process, WordPress offers the opportunity of adding an update to the service, a feature that is visible in the general settings.
It is not worth adding content periodically if the search engines cannot update it as soon as possible. Having your pages indexed is the most important thing for any website owner.
Without URL indexing, it will never be possible for it to be shown in any SERP. It becomes even worse when your site relies on recent or breaking news, and the indexing takes time before being reflected. You might end up missing on great organic search opportunities that would have changed the destiny of your business.
3. Customize Media Settings
Another critical WordPress SEO tip is capitalizing on the media settings. To make the most out of media settings, it is advisable to customize all the available image options including thumbnails, medium and large. Using the default settings denies you the opportunity of reaping some hidden SEO benefits.
Thumbnails enhance the appearance of images smaller than their full sizes. Thumbnails increase bandwidth performance and ensure that the uploaded photos on your site fit on most screens. The result is different from uploading a bigger image then resizing it after the upload in the image settings.
4. Embrace Google Analytics
The worst thing you can do is to try managing a site without tracking. You might never have any idea of whether you are making progress or not if you do not have critical records using suitable software. Google Analytics eases the whole process by supplying you with relevant and necessary data regarding your performance.
All you need to do is create a simple analytics profile and then follow the directions by installing the Google Analytics version for WordPress. With this, you wouldn’t have to struggle with copying and pasting when connecting your profile to WordPress. To get the most out of Google Analytics, it is advisable to activate site search in your analytics profile.
Using Google Analytics can help you with critical data such as the average time a user spends on your site. Also, you can also learn the amount of traffic gained from search engines, making it possible to enhance your SEO campaigns based on the results.
Even better, Google Analytics allows 404-page errors to be identified quickly. The WordPress version of Google Analytics makes it possible to track users by their usernames. Top SEO companies particularly recommend this for e-commerce sites where extremely high page views count.
5.Install .xml Sitemap Plugin
It is important to install .xml sitemap plugin for WordPress sites. This enhances the provision of links to various pages on your site, which improves the indexing of various pages on your site. One such plugin that enables easy creation and update of sitemaps is Google XML sitemaps.
6.Go Beyond the Norm
Most people don’t reap the most out of search engines because they are too conservative. It comes to a point where your traffic can never increase if you stick to your way of information dissemination. Going beyond the norm and embracing trending topics in your niche puts you in a better position of getting the most out of SEO. It becomes particularly important for WordPress bloggers who can escalate traffic on their sites by simply blogging about the recent updates in their niche. Once in a while, you need to change something in your style of writing, or it’s structure and observe the possible results. Remember always to make one significant change to measure because implementing many of them will make it impossible to identify the impact of single optimization.
If there is the significant increase in traffic because of certainly added content, more energy should be focused on producing that extra content.
7.Focus More on Content Quality
To be able to rank high on the search engine pages, you need to ensure your content is perfect. Websites with long and highly optimized pages tend to rank higher in search engine pages. Many search engines prefer lengthy and detailed posts, and the reason is simple; users love it that way. As such, your top articles should be detailed and contain the right keywords. However, that should not make you lengthen even the non-extendable posts like reviews and other brief articles.
It is not just about the length; your content should be well researched and appealing in nature. You ought to put finer details into your article. Carry out some research and link your site to related sources of information. This will not only enhance the credibility of information held therein but also steers up your search engine rankings because link building is one of the fundamental ranking factors.
Having your WordPress site rank highly in important search engines does not have to be as hectic as many people perceive it. All you need are simple idealistic steps like embracing Google Analytics, changing the default media settings, focusing on the updating services and enhancing the quality of your content!
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