Blogging is the term which may still unknown to many people. And those who know, are facing difficulty in getting started with it. Blogging needs time and dedication along with the investment of weekend's hours too. To be successful in the area of blogging you have to care about many factors like Blog Design, SEO and many others factors and some vital element
WordPress is the largest CMS( Content Management System) it contains an array of features. Basically, WordPress SEO is the key to increase the blog visibility in the search engines. Here, you will have the top-notch Search Engine Optimization guide for your WordPress blog. The issue is that many newcomers hire SEO experts to get the solution of the SEO and Visibility in Search Engines. The time has come to say no to experts; here you will get the legit SEO guide that you can easily implement on your WordPress blog easily.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it's a strategy commonly used by the owners of the website for getting more traffic by getting higher ranking in search engines.
SEO is not any trick that manipulates the system of Google. In simple words, SEO is about creating a website that has the optimized code and has simple formatting which is easy for the search engines to find your website and rank it higher.
Suppose people make a search about the topic you write about on your blog, and the content is properly Search Engine Optimized then definitely it will appear higher in the search results. And you will get the more traffic on your website and more click rates will be there with the help of Search engine optimization.
Why SEO is important?
You can have the idea now why it is so important, search engines are the biggest source of getting traffic for most of the websites.
Google and other search engines in the market use the most advanced algorithms to understand and do the rankings of the page approximately in the search results. Keep one thing in mind that these array of algorithms are not that much perfect and yes they need your help to understand your content.
Now its simple if your content is not optimized, then search engines will not rank it and if people search for the topics you write about your website is not visible in the search engines. Due to this, you will get traffic to your site and you will be invisible in the search results.
Essentially, SEO is very important for all the website owners to make their website search engine friendly and it will help you in getting the top-notch search result and huge traffic.
SEO GUIDE FOR WordPress Blogs
WordPress Sitemap:
A sitemap is a type of XML file which basically contains an index of all the significant and important link (Posts, Pages, Tags) of your blog. The role of sitemap is to help engine bots to effectively discover the content of your blog content and it also indexes them in the search engine.
You can choose over many WordPress Sitemap plugins. Google XML sitemap is the oldest and the reliable plugin out there. You need to install the plugin and just activate them, move on to the plugin settings and generate the sitemap of your blog.
Just go on to Google Webmaster tool and Bing Webmaster tool, submit it and verify your site along with the submitting of a sitemap. This step will help them to crawl and index the basic internal pages of your blog. You can go and add a Sitemap link at the footer of your blog in the section Robots.txt of your blog.
Check out these Sitemap plugins:
Control Indexing of WordPress Blog:
The most important and vital factors in getting better search engine rankings are to offer the best content in the search index.
Recently, with the Panda updates Google can figure out the domains with low-quality contents and then you may realize that pages like tags, categories, and the Author Achieve are not useful for the basic search engine index.
You can take initiative and just add a noindex tag to such pages. If you want this process to be done quickly then use WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.
WordPress Permalink (URLs):
Permalinks are basically the URLs of your blog post. URLs which are SEO friendly contain the words which clearly explain the contents of the page. They are easy to read and understand both by humans and Search Engines.
Non-SEO friendly URL will look like:
- http:// anynomus.com/?p=356
- http//example.com/archives/3487
You should avoid these types of URLs
When we talk about WordPress Permalink these are not integrated and friendly with search engines. Due to which it will not give any additional value in the on-page optimization of your blog posts. You should set up WordPress Permalink when you install WordPress. You need to visit Settings > Permalinks page just select the post name and click on to the 'Save Changes' to restore the settings.
WordPress will offer post name permalink in its latest version, it's better to select and give search engine friendly URL.
Important: If your website is running for the duration more than 6 months then do not ever change your permalink structure, despite you are using the number option, day and name or month and name, then continue using that.
When you change the permalink of your established site, you will be going to lose all of your social media share counts and there is also a risk of loss of your current SEO ranking.
So before taking that step think a minute. It should be better to hire a professional to change the permalink structure because they will set up the proper redirects. Still, you may lose the social media share count on the pages.
Image Alt tag and Image Sitemap:
When you add images to your content then it will improve the presentation of your content that will be easy to provide the good user experience. If somehow you are not using images then start adding it to your content because:
- Images help in driving more organic traffic via Image Search
- Images make your post presentation better
- Images make your content Pinnable on Pinterest
Above listed points are the advantages of using images with your content. The optimization of WordPress images also plays an important role in Search Engines.
Search Engine bots use Alt tag to understand the images and rank it on Google. If you are not using any Alt tag to the images search engine will never find the image and alas your image will be invisible in the search engine.
The best option is to use SEO friendly images plugin to create the auto alt tag for all the images on the WordPress. Check the Alt tags of the images before publishing your content and make sure your images are meaningful.
You can create a Sitemap of WordPress if your blog is having lots of images and after creating the sitemap just submit it to Google Webmaster tools for the indexing purpose. Doing this will help you in getting better rankings and driving huge traffic.
Unique Meta Title and Description:
The most versatile and biggest SEO blunders which many newbies make is not using the unique Meta title and Meta Description of the Blog posts.
When you add attractively and Keyword rich Meta title then, it will help your content in getting the better rankings and higher CTR rates.
The length of the Meta description should be off (in 160 characters) it will help the searchers to easily understand your content this will help you in getting better CTR. You can use many plugins which will help you in achieving this. You can go for WordPress SEO by Yoast the most trending plugin in the market.
Learn SEO on your own, do the SEO optimization service for you, do not waste money on it. The best part of the WordPress is that you can use the SEO plugins easily but you will need the proper configuration to use it properly.
Make Internal Linking a Habit:
Search Engine always assigns each page on your website a score (page authority). The use of the score is kept secret nobody cannot get the game results. But the most common signals of authority are the links.
You should stick to the internal linking to your own content from your other blog posts and pages. Whenever possible do the internal linking of your own posts whenever possible. This will help you to boost page views and will increase the time users spend on your site and definitely, it will increase the SEO score.
Here I am attaching Neil Patel's SEO guide which may help you out:
Some of the WordPress SEO related articles are here that may help you out:
EndNote: On Page SEO
I hope this article helped you learn how to properly optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Go ahead and implement these WordPress SEO tips and definitely you will see an increase in your traffic within few months and the search engine will rank you better than before.
Do let me know if you are facing any issue in On-Page SEO optimization. Show your love and support by sharing this article WordPress SEO tips on all trending social media platform.