Introduction
WordPress is built with the initial concept of working with search engines. Its features and functionalities lead a search engine through articles, pages, and categories to assist the search engine in crawling your site and gathering the information required to include your site in its database.
WordPress includes various built-in search optimization methods, such as using .htaccess to generate seemingly static URLs known as permalinks, blog rolling and pinging. There are also a variety of third-party plugins and hacks available for search engine optimization (SEO).
Boost your WordPress Website
A few basic SEO Optimization recommendations for optimizing your site might provide you with a substantial increase in internet traffic. Few suggestions to keep your WordPress site as friendly as possible to search engine spiders and crawlers:
Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider
Site speed is a major factor in SEO performance of your WordPress site, and both low uptime and security issues can lead to site issues. You must ensure that a reputable provider hosts your site. Site performance, uptime, and security are essential factors when choosing a host. Don't go with the cheapest option because you'll be more likely to experience performance issues.
Install SEO-friendly WordPress Theme
Theme sets the style and layout of your site, can add new features, and plays a part in its SEO. While many themes promise to be SEO-friendly, it is typical for themes to come packaged with unnecessary scripts and plugins, slowing down your site's speed. Run a theme demo through Google's web. dev tool before installing it to gain insight into potential performance and SEO issues.
There are dozens of free themes available directly from the dashboard and many more premium themes. Don’t adopt a theme that isn't SEO friendly. At the very least, this should assure you that you are selecting a theme that will not hold you back.
Source: Semrush
Install WordPress SEO Plugin
If you're new to WordPress, you might not be aware of plugins. These are small bits of add-on software that you may install on your site to add new features and capabilities. There are a plethora of plugins helping your site rank higher in search engines. In reality, there are numerous plugins available that are expressly designed to increase the SEO of your website.
These plugins can provide minor, specialized capabilities like building a sitemap (more on that later). Install a complete SEO plugin like Yoast SEO for even better results, which will add a slew of optimization-focused features to your site.
Source: Wpbeginner
Set Your Preferred Domain
It makes no difference whether you use https://domain.com or https://www.domain.com for your preferred domain. Nevertheless, you must ensure that your site is accessible via just one of them, as Google considers these separate URLs.
Navigate to Settings > General. You can select your favorite domain here:
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After that, the other domain version will be redirected to your desired domain. If you're starting a new website, you can use any option, but if you're replacing an existing one, select the same version you've always used.
Site’s Visibility Settings
WordPress has an option to discourage search engines from crawling your site, which means it won't rank. Developers widely use this to prevent a site from being indexed while the pages and content are not ready.
This block is more common than you may imagine being left in place after launch. You should double-check your site's visibility settings in Settings > Reading.
Source: Semrush
Enable SEO Friendly Permalinks
WordPress has various alternative options for how URLs are constructed, and you must use the most SEO-friendly one.
WordPress utilizes URLs like this by default: https://domain.com/?p=123. These URL’s are not search engine friendly, and there is no way to tell what the website is about only by looking at the URL.
Fortunately, you may select a custom URL structure at Settings > Permalinks.
Source: Semrush
Submit XML Sitemap
If you haven't already, you'll need to validate your site with Google Search Console. Following the verification stages, select the 'HTML tag' method. Then navigate to the Yoast plugin: SEO > General > Webmaster Tools. Then paste the HTML tag's contents into the 'Google verification code' box.
Carry Out Keyword Research
After you conduct keyword research, you will know which search phrases to optimize your site's content. In reality, keyword research should come first in any SEO effort, and it should be utilized to create your site content and on-page optimization.
Craft Unique Optimized Title Tags
The title tag of your website notifies users and search engines what your page is about and is widely recognized as a key ranking element. It is the basis of the clickable page title that appears in Google search results.
Yoast automatically determines your page's title tag based on the page heading, but you may rewrite it to improve it and work in variations of keywords that you may not have included in your page's title.
Source: Semrush
Add Alt Text to Images
When utilizing photos in your article, make sure to include alt text for each one. Not only are alt tags an online accessibility principle for visually impaired people using screen readers, but they also help search engines provide context and a description of images.
Make sure your alt tags provide a clear description of what the image depicts. Within WordPress, you can add alt text to any image in the 'Image Settings' part of the 'blocks' menu.
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