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How to improve WordPress SEO: 9 Ways

Why does everyone want to improve their WordPress SEO? Why is it so important? To answer the question, let’s have a look at some facts first. Do you know how many Google search queries are carried out every day? 3.5 billion. That’s nearly 1.3 trillion searches per year! With those numbers, you may think that your website will get a lot of people. However, there’s one more thing to keep in mind. Every year, around 2 billion blog posts get published. That’s a lot of content!

Considering that 75% of users don’t scroll past the first page of Google if you want to be successful and grow your business, you need to rank your website on that first page. But how can you do that with so much competition? The answer is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

As you can imagine, it requires a lot of different factors to level up your search engine ranking and it’s not a one-day journey. However, there are 9 things you can do to improve your WordPress SEO and get your site to the top page. In this guide, we’ll have a look at them.

How to improve WordPress SEO

1. Publish Quality Content

For any WordPress site, content is key. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, there’s nothing more effective than good content. Easily explained, great content will draw a large amount of traffic organically, which improves your domain authority. Besides the quality of the content, it’s also important to enhance the format of your articles. For example, make sure you use enough bold, italics, heading tags, and write without typos or spelling mistakes.

Aside from the content, there are several relevant elements that you also need to pay attention to. Keyword phrases, for instance. Integrating them into the content is one of the fastest ways to level up your SEO. So, repeat it several times throughout the article – in the first and last paragraphs and also in other forms of text.

However, there’s one thing you must bear in mind: content, after all, should serve readers, not search engines. No matter how SEO friendly an article is, it won’t get you to the top if no one bothers to read it.

2. Use SEO-friendly Themes and Plugins

Themes and plugins are also important things to consider to improve WordPress SEO. A wrong choice could cause you to pay the price and affect your website’s ranking. To put it simply, themes and plugins are two direct factors that impact your site speed and page loading time. Thus, while shopping for themes and plugins, pay double attention and look for those that support responsive design, micro-data, and plugin compatibility.

3. Optimize on mobile Devices

Nowadays, more and more mobile devices, especially mobile phones, are used. In fact, they’re so popular that more than 60% of search queries are made from these little hand-held gadgets. If you don’t embrace mobile site optimization, you are throwing away more than 60% of chances to get noticed, and more than 60% of traffic too. Besides, recent research from Search Engine Watch shows that 77% of business owners use smartphones to research information about new products/services to use for their businesses.

Are those enough reasons for you to start optimizing your site for mobile devices? To make your life easier, you can start with these three actions:

  • Use a responsive WordPress theme
  • Utilize plugins for mobile-optimized content
  • Consider optimizing images to reduce loading time

4. Block Spam Comments

Having spam comments on your WordPress site could damage your reputation and, hence, your SEO. When you’re on Youtube watching a tribute video for your late idol, you scroll down to the comment section to find emotional comments that you can sympathize with. All of a sudden, you see something like “Hey, what’s up!!! Check out my new song at […]”. Isn’t it annoying? That’s how your readers feel when spotting an irrelevant comment on the article they’re reading. But that’s not all. You will also get flagged and penalized by search engines too. Both consequences will affect your prestige.

So, please block spam comments for the greater good of yourself and your visitors. You can have a look at different ways to do this in this post.

5. Improve Site Navigation

The best way to improve your WordPress SEO is to satisfy the users because Google rewards sites that offer a great user experience (UX). To know if your users are happy with your site, you can examine elements such as bounce rate, the time visitors spend, and the number of page views for example. Do you know what these metrics have in common? They all relate to site navigation. If customers find it hard to browse around, they’ll leave.

Therefore, you need to improve the navigation on your website. To do this you can:

  • First, make sure you have a clear navigational structure. Every page must be no more than 3 clicks away, even those at the deepest levels.
  • Second, have a clean and neat menu that’s easily displayed when a visitor lands on your site. You will fail right at the start if your visitors have to look around for the menu.

6. Outbound and Inbound Links

Linking in and out is a wise strategy to increase your SEO ranking. Thus, before publishing an article, make sure it has links to other articles/sites/pages that are relevant and helpful to your users.

Google also rewards when other sites link back to yours because it means that your content is good. Thus, make sure you have good content that is worth sharing and listing as references.

Moreover, don’t forget to link internally – this boosts your ranking as well. Take time to check for relevance between what you’re writing and your past posts, then link them together.

7. Make it Shareable

Social sharing is actually good for WordPress SEO

Search engines like Google look at how users of social media platforms react to your posts to grade websites. If your posts get retweeted many times on Twitter, or you get a lot of likes on the content you share on Facebook, you will rank better in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

So if you want to improve the SEO of your WordPress site, place a social media sharing button on every post you publish. It will only do you good!

8. Be Mindful of Titles

Titles are always regarded as a major factor in determining your rankings. After all, the titles will appear first in search results and attract potential readers to your site. That’s why you should work on the magic of titling – first by researching words that customers are likely to use when typing queries, and then using them in your titles.

It’s worth noting that titles serve users, not search engines. It’s best to choose a title that stays true to the content of the article while able to trigger the curiosity of customers as well.

Do you want to know more about how to write amazing titles? Check out WordPress clickbait headlines: the must-know formula.

9. Select the Right Web Host

To maximize your SEO, your WordPress site must use a good web host. This will improve your website’s speed, which is an important factor that Google takes into account. That’s why you must regularly check your site’s load speed.

Even though the load speed depends on each website and its industry, it’s recommended that it’s under 3 seconds. If your site is slower and you’ve already optimized images and everything on your side, you should contact your web host and ask them for solutions. If they don’t give you a straightforward answer, maybe it’s time for a change.

Should that be the case, Web Hosting Talk is a good place to get some valuable ideas and take part in discussions about the right web host to upgrade your WordPress SEO ranking.

Wrapping Up

Leveling up your SEO skills isn’t a one-day job. Just like any other mission of glory, it takes hard work, experience and time. There’s no shortcut to victory – getting your site to the first page of Google-, but you can start your conquest now by implementing these 9 tips and improving your WordPress SEO.

What else do you have in mind? Don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!

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