Regardless of whether you are a blogger, small business owner or work in the marketing department of a large company with hundreds of employees, search engine optimization is an important part of attracting traffic to the website. Many websites today are powered by a WordPress and intend to go through some basic things how to optimize a wordpress website to rank higher on Google.
Keyword analysis is the be-all and end-all
The first question you should ask yourself is what keywords do our customers use when they search for us and our services? Brainstorm a list of words and phrases, add synonyms, different inflections and longer phrases.
Then find out the search volume of these keywords and phrases using various programs. Ubersuggest by SEO guru Niel Patel is a popular program that is free. see https://app.neilpatel.com/
Sort your list and note keywords according to what has good search volume and low competition. Here you have to make a bit of a trade-off, generally keywords with a high search volume usually have higher competition and are more difficult to rank for than more specific and longer keywords with a smaller search volume. It gives more traffic to be top 3 on a keyword with a volume of 40 searches/month, than place 20 on a keyword with 1,000 searches/month. The majority click only on the top results.
Optimize your content for the search engines
When you have a list of which keywords are relevant and you have a chance to rank high, it is important to optimize the content for these keywords.
Content is king
Google likes content. Write a lot of content, which is good too. It won't work to spam a page with just the keyword you want to rank for. But you must get in a lot of information that is useful, we talk at least 500 words, preferably more. WordPress is a perfect platform for writing longer articles, blog posts and pages.
A good way to think about it is to write content that is what the visitor is looking for. Then Google will find your content relevant to the searcher and present it higher.
Tips on SEO plugin for WordPress: SEOPress
One of my favorite plugins for WordPress when it comes to SEO is SEOPress. Lightweight plugin that does not increase the loading time on the website and is easy to use. SEOPress makes it easier to see how often keywords are used in the text and helps keep a good title and meta description. The free version of the plugin gets you very far.
Work with all the details for the best search engine optimization
When you have text in place, don't stop there. Images presented on the page must have a relevant name, a proper meta description and be relevant to the content. Feel free to use videos too!
The URL is another important factor in the ranking, put a url that contains the relevant keywords. But don't make the url too long, no longer than 50 characters.
Backlinks increase trust and link power
Link building is not easy when it comes to search engine optimization. But oh so important and valuable. Google chooses to believe that your website is more credible and relevant, the more good websites that link to it.
Social media is good for SEO
Shares and interactions on social media are also measured and weighed. Similar backlinks increase trust if more people share and link to your page via social media. Sow and promote your content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and more!
