Website blogs are a great way of interacting with current and prospective customers. It’s also great for building website authority and popularity with search engines. Here is your complete WordPress SEO guide so that you create more SEO friendly content.
The top priority for your website is gaining as much visibility as possible. This means implementing methods that’ll expose your brand in a positive light and in the process, drive as much relevant traffic as possible.
This is exactly why having a blog is essential. WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) on the block for a number of reasons. For one, it’s very easy to use. And two, it’s very SEO-friendly– which means a better ranking for your blog.
But in order to make the most of WordPress, you’ll need the complete WordPress SEO guide we provide below. We’re going to give you some tips to provide your WordPress blog max discoverability.
Let’s quickly review why SEO matters…
Why SEO Matters for Your WordPress Blog
Most people today turn to search engines when looking for anything – a product, service or business. Internet users type in keywords to help them find whatever they’re searching for and they click on whatever they see on the first page.
Rarely will you find anyone that goes beyond the first page. That’s why it’s so important to ramp up your SEO game. If you’re not on the first page for your target keywords, you’re not going to get the kind of traffic your business needs.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at our WordPress SEO guide and see what you can do to improve the visibility of your site.
Make Sure You Have a Good Hosting Provider
The service you use to host your WordPress site is critical to your SEO and to your customer satisfaction. If you have a site that’s always down, it’ll show Google, Bing, and Yahoo that it’s not a reliable resource. This will, in turn, hurt your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
As you’re shopping around for a host, ensure it can provide you with 99% uptime. It’s also essential to look at the host’s storage and bandwidth capacities. This will determine how large a blog you can have and how many people can be on your blog at once.
You don’t want your blog crashing just because it gets too many visitors. Your best bet is to opt for a host that allows flexible scaling both upwards and downwards, allowing you to increase and decrease on-demand and as your needs change.
Choose a Theme that’s SEO-Friendly
Yes, the theme you select for your blog can and should be SEO-friendly. All this means is that it’s optimized for search engines.
Another way your theme can positively or negatively impact your SEO is the theme’s associated site speed. If the theme bogs down your page load speeds it’ll hurt your ranking– and vice versa. It’s also good to have a theme that has heading tag options and other SEO features.
Use SEO Plugins Designed for WordPress
Here’s a tip in our complete WordPress SEO guide you don’t want to ignore. This one can really give you a big boost in optimizing all of your blog posts and it’s a simple addition: Yoast SEO.
Yoast SEO is a great tool that’ll identify weaknesses in your title, tags, and content. Insights provided allow you to determine what needs better optimization.
Knowing where to improve your SEO is key to making your blog perform better in the SERPs.
Change the Permalink Structure of Your Blog
What’s a permalink?
Simply put, it’s the permanent URL that directs traffic to each blog post, page, and any other content on your site. If visitors want to go back to that specific page, they’ll have to reference that particular URL.
What’s so important about permalink structure?
Well, since this is the address people can find your content with, you want to ensure it’s descriptive and clear. This will help users understand exactly where the link will take them to when they’re on your site.
Plus, it’ll help search engines better rank your posts. Isn’t that why you’re reading this WordPress SEO guide in the first place? Better rankings are the end-game.
As a rule of thumb, your URL should only contain letters and numbers; no symbols should be present. It’s a good idea to include the title of the post after the forward slash, like this: www.myblog.com/how-to-write-a-blog-post.
Check Out Your Visibility Settings
WordPress comes with many other great tools and features you can use to enhance your SEO. This includes the capability to hide the visibility of your website. (Always good to use while you’re still setting up your blog and don’t want it to appear on search engines yet!)
However, since you don’t want to discover later down the line that your website is not ranking because its visibility is turned off…CHECK it.
Go to the admin area of your WordPress site and click on Settings; then, find and click Privacy. You’ll have options including Public, Hidden, and Private. We always recommend the button next to Public be ticked. You want engines to find, index, and rank you, right?
Make sure you save your changes before you leave the section. Also, it’s important to know: selecting Hidden doesn’t necessarily mean your content can’t be searched. This is because not all engines respect that setting.
And remember, while you can control the basic privacy settings, (even at the individual blog post level), you won’t be able to control when that content gets picked up by the search engines.
Add a Sitemap for Your WordPress Blog
An XML Sitemap is essential to helping search engines find and rank your site. Search engine bots will use it to crawl through the pages of your blog and more quickly index them.
If you install the Yoast SEO plugin, an XML sitemap is created for you. What’s great about sitemaps is that they can help your new blog not just get crawled faster by search engines, they can also help get you ranked faster.
Make Sure to Follow the Complete WordPress SEO Guide
It’s not enough to implement only some of the above methods. It’s important that you use all of them to ensure you’re getting the most from your WordPress SEO.
What’s great about WordPress is that it makes ranking your blog easier. It does this by providing a ton of tools and features that are user-friendly, even for beginners.
However, you don’t want to stop your SEO efforts there. If you don’t have extended knowledge of search engine optimization, consider hiring professionals.
At Bear Fox Marketing, we offer SEO services that provide predictable and scalable results. Our SEO team specializes in helping businesses expand their visibility and increase revenue.
If this is what you’re looking for, then contact us today!