SEO Tips To Rank Your WordPress Website

Think about the last time you searched for something online. Did you click on the first result, or did you take your time and scroll down endlessly while carefully analyzing the options shown?

We bet you clicked on one of the first results, as many people do. This goes to show how much high search engine rankings matter for online visibility. Your business needs clients. To reach clients, your brand needs to be seen. To be seen, your website has to appear at the top of search engine rankings. It’s as simple as that.

Still, Google’s search engine has changed so much throughout the years that nowadays, just being well-designed and informative isn’t enough for a website to organically rank highly. So, optimizing your WordPress website’s content and overall structure to improve its ranking isn’t just important – it’s vital.

There are many effective SEO strategies, including keyword research, on-page SEO optimization, quality content creation, and link building, all of which we’ve detailed below:

Build a Keyword Research Strategy

If you want your content to be found, you have to write in the way that your potential visitors are searching for. Using keywords and terms related to the subject is one of the simplest and most effective SEO strategies.

So, it’s essential to research and plan the main and relevant keywords before creating content. Many tools can help you with this:

• Google Keyword Planner: A free tool that helps you discover new keywords related to your website, see monthly searches, and organize keywords into categories.
• Semrush: An all-in-one paid tool that helps improve online visibility with keyword research and other services, such as competitive research and marketing insights.
• Moz Keyword Explorer: Another tool that can be used for free to discover keywords, the demand for specific searches, and even the strength of other websites targeting the same keywords.

3 Essential Actions to Develop a Keyword Strategy

Now that you know how important it is to find the right words, it’s time to develop a keyword strategy for your WordPress content. The following straightforward actions may help you with the process:

1. Start with thorough research using a keyword research tool. Look for the most popular keywords for your specific market and list the ones that match your website. Then, search for each keyword, analyze the results, and assess your competitors’ articles to understand how you can rank your content higher than theirs. 
2. Focus on long-tail keywords (three words minimum), as short keywords (up to two words) have more competition and, consequently, are harder to rank. So, after listing the short and long-tail keywords, it’s worth using the research tool to see which short keywords are too challenging to rank highly and replacing them with long-tail keywords with reasonable volume results.
3. Constantly review your keywords list to find variations in search volumes and rearrange the keywords accordingly.

Enhance Your On-Page SEO

Optimizing your web pages for search algorithms is also vital to achieve high ranking and attract organic traffic. To do so, follow these best practices:

• Optimize meta titles and meta descriptions: Write brief and unique meta title tags. Use active voice for meta descriptions and add a CTA (call to action) to attract more clicks. Most importantly, include your target keywords on both of them.
• Use header tags properly: Organize the structure of your titles in H1 (header) and H2 and H3 (subheaders) tags. Remember to include your target keywords, or variations, in all of them.
• Create simple URL structures: Use words that align with the subject of your content. In the best case scenario, use your target keyword.
• Incorporate keywords into your content naturally: Including keywords is essential, but your content must make sense to the reader. So, don’t add keywords just for the sake of SEO. Instead, organically have them where they add value to your content, making it worthwhile for the reader.

Create High-Quality Content

It’s no use having a well-structured and keyword-rich website if your content isn’t up to high standards. Creating relevant and engaging content matters the most for your website to rank highly, as people won’t rely on content they don’t trust or find valuable. Focus on providing the best user experience by incorporating multimedia elements like images and videos. Finally, remember to regularly update your content to keep it relevant.

Use Link-Building Strategies

Incorporating high-quality backlinks into your content is extremely important, as Google uses them in its ranking algorithm to establish the authority of your page. Plus, a page with many backlinks attracts more organic traffic from search engines.

Of course, you also want other pages to include backlinks pointing to your site. Contacting external websites to make this request is called outreach, and guest posting is one of the best strategies.

To make it work, it’s important to develop a relationship with the owners of the targeted website. Only then should you ask them to feature an article in which you include backlinks to your website.

Additionally, internal linking is another essential link-building strategy. It consists of including links to your own website’s pages throughout your content. This enhances your site’s user-friendliness and helps search engines identify your website’s structure. Some of the best practices of internal linking within WordPress are:

• Making sure your content is high-quality, relevant, and trustworthy.
• Using different anchor texts when creating an internal link, as using the same repeatedly is a red flag for search engines.
• Adding alt tags with relevant text to your images.
• Avoiding having too many links on a single page, as this may signal to search engines that the page contains spam.

Improve Website Navigation With Technical SEO for WordPress

Technical SEO strategies are vital technical requirements for enhancing your website’s navigation so that search engine robots can crawl through your page successfully, making it rank higher. One of the most important aspects to focus on is a mobile-friendly design, as Google predominantly crawls websites’ mobile versions.

Optimizing your site’s speed and responsiveness is also key to improving user experience. The user will most likely leave if a page takes too long to load or doesn’t respond how it should.

Another technical SEO tactic is creating and submitting an XML sitemap, making it easier for search engines to navigate around your website, understand it, and index your pages.

Additionally, implementing schema markup helps search engine crawlers understand your content. The strategy consists of marking up the content on your pages so the crawlers can index it properly.

A page with well-structured data has more chance of the search engine algorithms displaying it in rich snippets, which are SERPs (search engine results pages) that may include a picture or review scores. These results are more compelling and, consequently, more likely to be clicked on.

Finally, reaching out to professional assistance shouldn’t be overlooked. Hiring WordPress developers is a great way of ensuring the coding part is correctly implemented. Being focused on WordPress development, Codeable is an excellent place to find specialists to help you.

Use WordPress SEO Plugins

SEO plugins can help you with your website’s technical SEO without requiring you to be an expert. There are plugins to help create an XML sitemap, optimize title tags, and build schema markup, just to name a few.

Among the popular SEO plugins are Yoast SEO and Rank Math. Both have user-friendly interfaces and an extensive list of features.

To install WordPress SEO plugins, simply do the following:

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to ‘Plugins’ and select ‘Add New’.
3. Search for the plugin you chose and click ‘Install’.
4. After the installation is finished, click the ‘Activate’ button.

Once installed, configuring the plugins is usually straightforward and easy. There are step-by-step guides and SEO customization preferences to set up.

Although many plugins can be used for free, only paid versions provide additional features that fully cover virtually every technical SEO strategy. As a final note, bear in mind that over-installing plugins may slow down your website or lead to incompatibilities. Hiring expert help will prevent this from happening.

Monitor Traffic Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are essential tools for tracking traffic and checking whether all the strategies you’ve been applying are working. To access these tools’ insights, install Google’s plugin ‘Site Kit’.

10 SEO KPIs to Keep Track Of

After installing the plugin, keep track of essential Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to enhance your SEO performance and achieve success. The insights and metrics come either from Google Analytics or Google Search Console.

1. Overall traffic and traffic sources: the number of visitors on your website and which website they come from.
2. Mobile: the number of visitors that use mobile devices. The tool also shows the model of the mobile device used.
3. CTR (click-through rate): the percentage of people who clicked on a search link compared to the total number of individuals who viewed it.
4. Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page.
5. Load time: the time it takes for the page to load.
6. Keyword and search ranking: the position your website is listed in Google when a searcher types your search phrases and keywords.
7. Domain authority: a prediction of how well a website will rank on SERPs.
8. Total number of backlinks: the number of pages and domains that link to your website.
9. Number of page views: total number of pages viewed.
10. Average session duration: the average time your organic visitors spend on your website.

Monitoring and analyzing all these data insights and metrics is crucial to see how effective your SEO strategies are, as well as to refine and improve them.

Prioritize Your WordPress Website’s Security

As search engines prioritize user experience, your website’s security is crucial for it to rank high. Safety plays a vital role in your WordPress website’s usability and trustworthiness, which directly affects its SEO performance.

5 Best Practices for Securing Your WordPress Website

Take the following measures to protect your WordPress website from online predators and keep your visitors safe and sound while navigating it.

1. Keep themes, plugins, and WordPress up to date: When developers find a vulnerability that may impact users’ security, they usually release and update it to fix it. So, keeping everything up to date may sound basic, but it’s an extremely important measure.
2. Use complex and unique passwords: Another simple yet efficient action is to use strong and unique credentials for admin accounts, databases, and FTP.
3. Enable two-factor authentication: An effective tactic that adds an extra layer of security to your credentials.
4. Limit login attempts: An excellent way to protect your website from brute force attacks.
5. Run regular security audits: Constantly use security plugins to identify vulnerabilities and proactively act on them.

Optimize Your Google My Business for Local SEO

In addition to all these SEO strategies, owners of brick-and-mortar businesses should consider optimizing local SEO so their businesses can be found in local search results.

Fundamentally, the key strategy is to sharpen your Google My Business listing. This dynamic snapshot displays the main features of your business, working as a virtual business card. It allows potential clients to quickly learn about your business and engage with it directly from the SERP.

Some tips for optimizing your Google My Business listing are:

• Complete all the sections of your account.
• Correctly choose the primary and secondary categories.
• Write a concise yet effective ‘from the business’ description.
• Provide as much up-to-date contact information as possible.
• Carefully add the products or services your business provides.
• Answer questions and reviews.
• Upload photos regularly.
• Set up messaging.
• Constantly update your profile with any changes that come up.

Finally, it’s also essential to target local keywords throughout your content. By doing so, your page is more likely to appear in SERPs when visitors look for related products and services around your business location.

Strategize Your Way to Top Search Results

When it comes to boosting your WordPress website’s position in search results, developing a keyword research strategy is the best place to start.With your target keywords list ready, focus on improving your on-page SEO and incorporating these keywords into your high-quality content.

Then, improve your website navigation using technical SEO for WordPress and WordPress plugins. Once you’ve applied all the strategies, remember to monitor traffic and keep track of the SEO KPIs.

Additionally, don’t overlook your WordPress website’s security. Plus, if your business has a physical location, optimize your Google My Business for local SEO.

To go above and beyond, keep up with SEO trends and the latest SEO algorithm updates to adapt your strategies accordingly. Join SEO communities to stay informed and keep on learning.

These effective SEO practices bring long-term benefits to your website, such as increased visibility, credibility, and competitive advantage in your industry. If you want to make your WordPress website appear as one of the first results when people search for things related to your business, implement and consistently refine all these SEO strategies.