SEO for WordPress can increase and optimize traffic on your website, allowing leads to engage with the content you offer as well as your services.
With this in mind, We brought some tips to make this traffic more constant and improve the ranking of your pages in search engines.
1. Think about WordPress SEO from behind the scenes
SEO needs to be well structured from the beginning, therefore, the choice of hosting, theme and plugins must be chosen with this in mind, as they also influence ranking.
→ Hosting : it is important to choose those that deliver faster page loading speed, allowing good performance and navigability on the site. These mechanisms guarantee a good score in SEO because the user feels comfortable navigating more fluid transitions.
→ Security : observing the security protocols required for websites is essential to guarantee ranking on Google. The use of your own domains also makes the website more trustworthy, both in the eyes of SEO and in the eyes of users. Submitting the sitemap also influences this aspect.
→ Themes and plugins : choose a theme and plugins that are oriented towards good SEO practices, as this will make it easier to adapt pages and content to your requirements, like Yoast, for example.
→ SEO friendly links: when structuring your website’s URLs, choose forms that are accepted by SEO. This way, Google identifies that navigability will not be harmed and places your pages in better positions.
2. Work on SEO on your website content
Creating pages and content is of great importance for SEO. When building it, the ideal is to follow the recommendations we highlight below:
→ Keywords: analyze the terms that come closest to your segment or topic covered on the page to attract leads who are searching for the subject. In addition to checking the volume of keywords (Google Ads is a good tool for this), it is important to assess whether the term is not too generalized, as this way you can place your pages at the top of the search, but the person searching may not be your target audience.
→ SEO Title: a good page or article title must include the keyword in full, but must be presented in a balanced way and appear organic. On Yoast, you can evaluate whether the title is suitable for SEO practices, including size.
→ Meta description : an important factor in the pages is to write a brief description of what it is about. To adapt to SEO, it is important that it is within the recommended character limit and that it contains the keyword. Yoast can also help with this training.
→ Internal and external links: you may have already noticed that internet pages are full of links while reading. This is an SEO recommendation because the user may be interested in other content provided by your brand or others. That’s why it’s important to add links that redirect to other content produced by you and also from other brands (ideally the most relevant) that are related to what you’re talking about on that page.
→ Descriptions in images: here we are not referring to the caption, but rather to the alt attribute , being an internal description of the images. Ideally, it should be written containing the keywords, but make sense for the illustration.
3. Pay attention to the performance of your website
Even paying attention to these details about structuring the website and producing content focused on SEO for WordPress, it is still essential to observe the performance settings . In addition to making the website more fluid, they guarantee a good user experience.
What to consider:
→ Cache plugins : the loading speed of images, pages, links and even transitions is a factor that Google evaluates when ranking websites. And caches end up slowing down the site. By installing a caching plugin, such as W3 Total Cache , you guarantee a much faster website.
→ Mobile experience : as many people today access websites via cell phones and tablets, it is important that your pages are “mobile friendly”. This means that pages adapt fluidly to mobile screens and resources. And yes, there are WordPress plugins that will help you with this.
→ Broken links : as we have discussed before, bringing internal and external links to your content increases its ranking position, but if it is broken (redirects to non-existent pages), this harms SEO quality. WordPress offers plugins that check these links, Broken Link Checker is an example.
→ Canonical tags : through plugins , WordPress can evaluate whether there are duplicate tags by comparing the codes that authenticate the originality of each page. Pages with duplicate tags make SEO ranking difficult.
→ Noindex tags : it is possible to prohibit Google index tags that do not make sense for your brand or content and end up hindering the organic flow of leads. WordPress also has tools that can help you.
Another element that is not greatly influenced by WordPress, but that contributes to good search engine rankings, is off-page SEO , that is, the settings outside of your pages.
You may think that you have no control over what happens outside your website, but that’s not the case. By creating relevant content, for example, your page becomes attractive to other sites that will want to use it, pointing links to it.
And Google assesses that if other brands are redirecting to your website, it means it is relevant . This increases the authority of your content and the brand, positioning your content higher.
Creating authentic pages with relevant content is important, but you also need to be aware of broken links, as explained previously.
Imagine that another website adds your page’s link to its content, trusting its functionality and it doesn’t redirect anywhere? The user who clicked on this link will be dissatisfied and will probably no longer trust either the original website or yours.
By understanding this dynamic, Google then lowers your page, damaging your site’s ranking and authority. Therefore, it is important to evaluate what happens indirectly to your website.
