Our blog video:
Here we will discuss WordPress SEO tutorial which includes foundational things like, What WordPress is? What are WordPress SEO techniques? How to optimise WordPress Site? And different other questions that may arise in curiosity.
WordPress:
- WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users that you can count on your fingers and toes.
- Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by ten millions of people every day.
- Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little co-founded WordPress.
This blog contains:
- Optimise your site for dynamic indexing
- Make your site responsive – 3 easy steps
- Speed Up Your Website
- Improve Your Search Results Using Schema
- Install Yoast
- Use SEO-Friendly URLs
- Add XML sitemaps
- Do a thorough keyword research
- Optimise your titles and description for SEO
- Verify Google search Console With Yoast
- Implement and execute an excellent Internal and external Links strategy
- Optimise your site for dynamic indexing:
If you have a website that generates dynamically created web pages make sure that it uses only one or two parameters to create those pages, then there would no issue in indexing.
There could be an issue of duplicate content in case of dynamic URL creation. In some cases, PHP scripts can generate the same content with different URL strings. If this is the case, then Google spider will find two URLs with identical content and that could be a big problem, which can lead to penalties.
Fixing Problems with Dynamic Pages
In cases like above an easy fix is to assign one URL as the canonical URL. This tells Search Engines that link is the most important version.
- Make your site responsive – 3 easy steps:
(i) The layout:
When you’re done with your non-responsive website, the first thing to do is to paste the following lines within the <head> and </head> tags on your HTML page. This will set the view on all screens at a 1×1 aspect ratio and remove the default functionality from iPhones and other smartphone browsers which render websites at full-view and allow users to zoom into the layout by pinching.
Once done, let’s see how responsive your layout is. To do so, use this tool.
(ii) Medias:
It’s the time to work on videos and images.
The CSS code below will ensure that your images will never be bigger than their parent container. It’s super simple and it works for most websites. Please note that the max-width directive is not recognised by older browsers such as IE6. In order to work, this code snippet has to be inserted into your CSS stylesheet.
img { max-width: 100%; }
(iii) Typography:
Until now, most of the developers (including myself!) used pixels to define font sizes. While pixels are ok when your website has a fixed width, a responsive website should have a responsive font. Indeed, a responsive font size should be related to its parent container width, so it can adapt to the screen of the client.
- Speed Up Your Website:
10 things you can do to speed up your site
- Minimise HTTP Requests
- Reduce server response time
- Enable compression
- Enable browser caching
- Minify Resources
- Optimize images
- Optimise CSS Delivery
- Prioritise above-the-fold content.
- Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site
- Reduce redirects
- Improve Your Search Results Using Schema:
What makes you click a particular result on the Google search results page?
Ideally, it might be the matching keywords in the title and persuasive meta description of what you were looking for, right?
SERPs (search engine result pages) have evolved over time to contain as much useful info as it can. A commonly displayed rich snippet markup, for example, is Star ratings and reviews for product results came into the picture.
The latest research points out that more than 36% of the Google search results integrate rich snippets that attract audience and traffic when displayed in the SERPs.
Optimising your blog and content with proper schema markup can give you
i) Boost in search engine rankings
ii) An increment in organic clicks on SERP.
Firstly, a study revealed that pages with Schema markup rank better by an average of 4 positions compared to pages that have none.
Secondly, adding rich and structured markup can significantly increase your click through rate (CTR).
Commonly used schema.org item types:
- Person
- Product
- Event
- Organisation, Places, Business, Restaurant
- Movie, Book, or other creative works
- Review, Rating
Google uses schema markup to display rich snippets for Elite Swimming website as shown in the image below.
WP Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin
This plugin provides you tools supporting all popular schema.org markup types we discussed in our previous slide.
- Install Yoast:
Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) is the complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users.
How to install the plugin?
- Go to Dashboard > Plugins > Add New.
- Write WordPress SEO by Yoast in the Search box.
- Click the Install Now
- A pop-up will ask if you really want to install the plugin, click OK to confirm.
- The plugin will be automatically downloaded and get installed.
- Use SEO-Friendly URLs:
SEO friendly URL is very important as far as URL structure for SEO is concerned. Google does not like numbers in URL as shown below
https://syscomminternational.com/?p=123
Instead, like something with keywords in the URL
https://www.syscomminternational.com/digital-marketing-strategy/website-audit/
To get these kinds of URLs in WordPress, it’s not difficult at all.
Just go to Settings->Permalinks and choose “Post Name”. Your page will look like this:
- Add XML sitemaps:
Sitemap helps crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. It shows the URLs of all the internal pages of your website.
Sitemap code is something you do not have to code yourself, use WordPress plugin, instead.
There is a plugin by the name “Google XML Sitemaps” that can be used to generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog.
- Do a thorough keyword research:
Keyword research is an essential part of SEO, needed to rank your site better and eventually making your business popular.
There are a lot of things that need to be taken care of, some of them are as follows:
Start with seed keywords:
Seed keywords are the foundation of your keyword research. They define your niche and help you identify your competitors.
If you already have a product or business that you want to promote online, coming up with seed keywords is as easy as paraphrasing your product or brainstorming how other people might search for it.
Generate keyword ideas:
See what keywords you already rank for
If you own a website that’s been around for a while, you should probably be ranking in Google for a few hundred keywords. Knowing their status is a perfect way to kick-start your keyword research.
A good source of this information is a report called “Search Analytics” in Google Search Console:
Search Console shows your average position for each of the keywords you rank for and how many impressions /clicks this brings you.
Use keyword research tools:
There are a lot of keyword research tools available such as:
Google keyword Planner tool is one of the trusted tools for keyword research.
You can login to Google Adwords and then go to Tools, click on Keyword Planner.
You will see the window shown below with a particular keyword’s permutations & combinations. Here, we have searched for “website audit” keyword and found the following:
- Optimise your titles and Description for SEO:
Meta Title:
Your Meta-Title tag is visible to users and search engine spiders showing them what your page is all about. As it describes your site as well as your business so it needs to be well defined and optimised using targeted keywords.
Meta-Description:
Your meta-description appears directly below your meta-title when your site information displays in the search engine results page:
It’s important that your meta-description is interesting and gives your visitors a reason to visit your site. Use targeted keywords in here as well so that when the user searches for a keyword then search engine should be able to see it in your description and report the same.
- Verify Google search Console with Yoast:
There are different ways to verify your site under Google search console and start viewing your site statistics however the easiest one is through Yoast plugin for SEO.
Go to Google Search Console, sign into your Google account and click the red button to add your website.
Once you’ve clicked the button, just type your site URL in the box. Click the Add button to continue.
Get the code. You need to go to HTML tag under the Alternative Method and copy only the code that is in the parenthesis after content, as per the image below.
Log in to your WordPress “wp-admin” section. After you are logged in, you will be in your ‘Dashboard’. Click on ‘SEO’ on the left-hand side.
Click on the ‘Webmaster Tools’ tab and add the code to ‘Google Search Console’. Click ‘Save Changes’.
Switch back to Google Search Console and click on ‘Verify’.
- Implement and execute an excellent Internal and external Links strategy:
What is an Internal Link?
Internal links are links that go from one page of a site/domain to a different page on the exact same domain. They are commonly used for the navigational purpose.
These types of links are useful for three reasons:
They allow users to navigate a website.
They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
They help spread link juice (ranking power) around websites.
This structure has the minimum amount of links possible between the homepage and any given page. This is helpful because it allows link juice (ranking power) to flow throughout the entire site, thus increasing the ranking potential for each page. This structure is common on many high-performing websites (like Caraselle.com) in the form of category and subcategory systems.
What is an External Link?
- An external link is a link that points to an external domain.
- Top SEOs believe that external links are the most important source of ranking power.
- External links pass “link juice” (ranking power) differently than internal links because the search engines consider them as third-party votes.
- Top SEOs don’t believe that the “title” link attribute is used for rankings purposes.
Today, the major search engines use many metrics to determine the value of external links. Some of these metrics include:
The trustworthiness of the linking domain.
The popularity of the linking page.
The relevancy of the content between the source page and the target page.
The anchor text used in the link.
The number of links to the same page on the source page.
The number of root domains that link to the target page.
A number of variations that are used as anchor text to links to the target page.
The ownership relationship between the source and target domains.
External linking depends on Page and Domain authority as well. If the link to our website is coming from a site with high domain authority, our site will rank better.
So, now is the time to share our thoughts and experiences.
With our years of experience, we can say that if you follow the steps explained above, you will find doing Wordpress SEO much easier and comfortably. You may enjoy some other related topics on Wordpress SEO tricks.
- How Internal links tactics improve website’s SEO and uplift business?
- 8 On-Page SEO Techniques That’ll Boost Your Rankings
Also, it would be lovely to hear about your experiences and success stories while doing Wordpress SEO. We hope that you found some great tricks of your own while doing Wordpress SEO and trust that you enjoyed this post. We would be very grateful if you help spread it through email or sharing it on Twitter/Facebook. We are rolling out our SEO plugin post next and will share more insights in there.
For more than a decade, we’ve helped many small and medium sized businesses prosper online. If you are looking for an SEO consultancy or someone to manage all your digital marketing or digital training, please contact us to know how we can help bring traffic to your website and enhance your sales.
For a limited time we are offering a detailed website audit and half an hour of consultancy for free please click here –https://www.syscomminternational.com/digital-marketing-strategy/website-audit/