WordPress is without a doubt the most popular and the most useful CMS tool ever made. It is for this reason that most of the blogs and websites are powered by none other than WordPress. The biggest reason for its popularity is that it makes website management pretty easy. However, for you to take the most out of your WordPress website or blog, you must optimize your website to get organic search traffic. WordPress provides you a great platform and just a bit of hard work and imagination on your part can take your website to the top of SERPS!
Here are seven of the most successful SEO WordPress tips which, if properly followed, can take your website/blog to the top!
Optimize Your Title Tags
Title tags are very important in terms of SEO and a lot of the relevance quotient of a post is derived from its title tag…especially the initial three to four words of the title tag. So, your targeted keyword or phrase must lie at the very start of the title tag. However, WordPress default settings normally constitute your title tag like this: Website Name>Category Name>Page Title/Post Title. The opposite of this setting would help you the most with SEO. So, make sure that your title tag starts with your post title with your blog or website name being displayed later to get the best results.
Get your Permalink Right
The default permalink settings on WordPress are its biggest problem to say the least. It gives your post a permalink ‘yourwebsite.com/?p=31’. This permalink is so poor that even without any regards for Seo, you just know that it won’t work. So, you can change the permalink by going to your Settings and then clicking on Permalink settings. The best way to go about it would be to customize it and make it ‘http://yourwebsite.com/%posttitle%’.
Preserve Link Juice by Deciding on either WWW or non-WWW
There are two ways a website can be normally accessed i.e. with the www address and without the www address. ‘Google.com’ and ‘www.google.com’ both yield the same result. However, Google prefers ‘www.google.com’ and so, even if you will type ‘google.com’, you will be redirected to ‘www.google.com’. WordPress does the same for your website too and gives a 301 redirect to either users who type the website name along with www or to those who type the website name without the www. However, a 301 redirect is temporary in nature and your link juice might get divided between the two address types. So, in order to preserve link juice, it’s best that you put a 302 redirect on either of www or the non-www address and notify Google as well of the address type you prefer. You will have to Google Webmasters Tool to notify Google of your preference.
Speed up Your Website
Newer Google updates like Penguin and Hummingbird have introduced Google’s newfound interest in fast loading websites. These algorithms actually prefer websites that load quickly and automatically rank them higher for search results. So, you must also take steps to get your website to load quickly so that the bounce rate is less and so that your rankings don’t get affected just because of poor loading time. ‘Googles Page Speed Insights’ is a helpful tool which can do wonders in this regard.
Deal with Duplicate Content
This doesn’t mean that you are posting duplicate content on your website, it’s just that WordPress sorts out your pages and posts on the basis of tags, categories, page numbers, date, ID numbers, Archive and so on and in doing so creates duplicate URLs for the same page/post. Since Google qualifies two URLs with the same content as copied or duplicate, the presence of such URLs or the indexing of the same page for two URLs can seriously hurt your website’s SEO ranking. So, the best way to go about it is to put the nofollow tag for categories like session ID based URLs, date generated URLs and so on and allow Google spiders to index only one URL for each page.
Tags Don’t Help With WordPress SEO
WordPress gives you the option of using tags for posts and pages and people tend to add a huge number of tags with each post thinking that it would help with SEO. It doesn’t. If you really want Google spiders to go from one page to the next, you should interlink them within your content. So, go easy on the tags as they are simply not worth your time.
Use the <H1> <H2> <H3> tags Properly
The H1, H2 and H3 tags are extremely important as they standout within the sea of content. The H1 tag is the most important and should be reserved for the title (must include the keyword in the title) while H2 and H3 tags should be used for subheading and sub-subheadings (try including the focused keyword in them too)
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