WordPress is an excellent blogging platform that is easy to use and navigate. Its user-friendly interface makes it the go-to system for beginners and savvy bloggers alike. What’s cool about WordPress is once you’ve set it up, it offers a way to optimize your website content and improve your site rankings on search engines, such as Google and Bing.
Since WordPress has emerged to become one of most popular and preferred blogging platforms, many website owners are working double time to step up their game in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Here are five ways to boost your WordPress blog’s SEO performance:
1. Learn about useful tools for SEO.
The world of SEO is blessed with (mostly) free tools, which are created and developed for specific purposes. You can practically search a specific function, for instance, you need a free tool for providing “SEO reports or audits”. Simply key in this phrase and your search engine will give you a list of tools that you can choose from. Of course, the developers of these tools offer them in free and paid-for versions. You can choose either depending on your needs.
2. Focus on Link Building.
Link building is an act or process of gaining outside pages to link to your site. This is one of the most effective SEO strategies used to increase the number of site visitors and over time, your site ranking. To do this in your WordPress blog, you can first group the content through Categories and Tags. Afterwards, you can look for sites that discuss similar topics and ask them to partner or link to your own page. Doing this will strengthen the searchability of your site.
3. Understand the role of Permalinks.
In a nutshell, Permalinks are “permanent” URLs to each of your blog posts. This is what other bloggers use to link to your page, article, or any section on your WordPress site. WordPress automatically creates your blog permalinks by mirroring the title of the content that you produced. Nevertheless, if the original title is too long or unattractive, you always have the option to edit the permalink. Just make sure you avoid keyword stuffing to avoid penalties.
4. Master Yoast SEO Plugin.
The great thing about WordPress is it has all sorts of plugins for your needs. WordPress plugins lets you increase your site’s functionality and offers a way for better optimization. Yoast SEO Plugin incorporates real-time page analysis and snippet editor to help you optimize your site fast. With Yoast SEO plugin, you can optimize XML sitemaps, image titles, meta tags, page content, and more. You can visit Yoast.com to check out its outstanding features.
5. Make sure your site is fast and online
Uptime and page load time are now ranking factors. If your website is slow, visitors will not be satisfied. And therefore, google pushes slow sites down in the rankings. Do no evil, right? Moving to uptime, a website that is not online to serve content also hurts UX and will not rank as high as a reliable one. Long story short, choose a WordPress host that offers guarantees in terms of performance and uptime, even if it ends up costing a little bit more. It’s worth it!
These are just five ways to maximize your WordPress blog. The SEO world is an ever-evolving field and as it continues to grow and advance, there’ll be more and more strategies that will unfold.