Optimizing your WordPress SEO is essential for increasing traffic to your website.
Unfortunately, you might find it difficult to to optimize your WordPress SEO because you don’t know how to or the majority of WordPress SEO guides are too complex for you to understand.
Many bloggers and writers have always leveraged WordPress as a veritable tool for Content Management System. WordPress remains one of the most popular and versatile content management systems (CMS) available worldwide including Nigeria .
This write up will dwell on the complete guide to setting up Search Engine Optimization for WordPress best practice practice.
Internal links
Link building is usually one of the most effective ways of getting a strong SEO strategy right. Two or three good quality internal links to relevant content, using accurate anchor text, spread throughout the article is considered best practice. Linking to content within WordPress website is a great indicator to search engines that your site has value.
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Permalinks
The permalinks are the permanent URLs to your blog posts. When you write a headline in the ‘Add New Post’ section of your WordPress dashboard, a permalink will be automatically created. WordPress will automatically save what’s written in the headline field as soon as you click anywhere else on the screen, whether you’ve finished writing the headline or not.
Some people usually copy directly what’s in their headline to the permalink, and that is absolutely wrong. It’s not necessarily best practice to copy exactly what’s in the headline directly to the permalink, even though this is done automatically.
Always use three to four key words in your permalink, and that you should put the most important keywords first. And it’s best to remove any numbers that form part of your headline from the permalink itself as these are considered insignificant by Google.
Google has powerful machines and an algorithm that actually helps to figure out if you are developing good content or not on your WordPress website.
If you’re not producing good, relevant, entertaining, helpful content at a regular rate, then Search Engine Optimization tactics may not work.
Google and the other search engines are just interested in websites that produces healthy and quality contents, hence good quality content gets recognition
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That recognition will come with repeat traffic, social shares and links within other websites. This will drive traffic to your site and improve your chances of being found not just within the organic listings, but also through social media.
How often do you post?
How frequent or often do you publish content on your WordPress website? The more frequent you publish good content on your website, the more you increase the chance of appearing in search results. Producing content, regularly and as often as you can is also a must for appearing in the SERPs.
Though, Blogging could be very time consuming, but you have to ensure that you write as regularly as possible. If you don’t update regularly, search engines will view your site as irrelevant over time and rank you lower.
Headlines
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Your headline should actually contain your most important keywords. In order to benefit your readers and because search engines tend to give keywords at the beginning of a headline the most attention it might be best to rework your headline if it doesn’t match with keywords.
Evergreen content
Evergreen content does not get fade away, they are always useful whenever you need it. Readers are always interested in those contents in as much as the relevance is there. Evergreen content doesn’t date like news can, it can deliver value in terms of traffic, leads, social shares and can occupy valuable search positions for a prolonged period of time.
Meta description
Your meta description is important as well, and it will normally be found just below the main text entry box in ‘Add new/edit post. The meta description is just a small descriptive text that appears beneath the URL in SERPs, and will often be used when sharing the link on social media channels.
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Always remember to fill the meta description section. Your meta description should be less than 156 characters long, with your keywords as near to the front as possible, but still make sense as a readable sentence.
Images
With accurate tagging, you will increase the likelihood of your post being found through image searches. An important part of SEO is how you name and tag your images. There are usually the ALT Tags, Title and Image Description.
- ALT Tags: are used as a ranking factor by Google, so it has meta to be accurate as possible. It apparently describes the image or images of your content. This is important for visitors with accessibility problems, and will also help search engines index your content accurately. After all search engines cannot actually ‘see’ your images.
- Image Title: This section gives the name of the image. This is for your benefit when searching your media library, so you’ll want to use clear accurate keywords.
- Image Description: section is where you want to describe your image in a slightly longer, more detailed way. This text can be displayed on the attachment page when a visitor clicks on the image.
Length
It is obvious that readers often prefer to read short articles instead of long boring one. Whether you’ve been recommended that a post should be at least 300 words long, or 500-1,000 words try as much as possible to stick to it.
Be as concise as possible. A reader would rather read a shorter article that gets to the point than a long-winded epic.
That being said, if you’ve written a 1,000 word masterpiece stuffed with fascinating, completely relevant and helpful content, where you’ve been as tightly controlled and clear with your text as possible, search engines will prefer this to one that’s half the length on the same subject.
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