Techniques for Search Engine Optimization of WordPress Sites

SEO is as important as the development of a site. If you have a website that is not optimized for the search engines, you might not get the full benefits out of it. SEO is not very hard, all it takes is unfeigned efforts. If you get to know the white-hat techniques, then you can simply do optimize your website for search engines. Therefore,at Templatetoaster website builder ,we decided to let our readers know about the simple and effective SEO techniques.

Unique and Useful Content

You must have heard one or more times that the content is king. This is absolutely true. All your efforts and tactics applied will go in vain if you don’t have the focus on the “content”. Google prioritizes the content of a site over other things. But, this doesn’t mean that you write anything, and Google will like your site. Google likes “good content”. So, be utmost fair when you are writing the content of your site.

Let us tell you that how you can come in Google’s good graces, in context of the content of your website.

• Unique, no copied content at all
• Sharable, means loved by the readers
• Thoughtful, providing solution to people’s queries

Give your readers something that is interesting and informative for them. Bring your own experiences, from which the readers could learn something new. Whatever you write, write by keeping the user in mind, who is going to read this. Don’t just write for the sake of writing. It would be best, if you could use real images, infographics, and videos in your content. They make the content more interesting.

If you provide the readers with correct and timely information on the subjects of their interest and relevant to your website, they will certainly like to visit your website over and again. And, the search engines will also start counting your website’s authority.

There are some more things that should be kept in mind for producing good content that will benefit your website coming top of the search results.

• Use heading tags in proper manner and include keywords in them
• Use keyword properly, but don’t do stuffing of it in your whole content
• Make the keyword anchor text, but not every keyword should be made anchor
• Alt text on images, always add an Alt text with the images
• Interlinking, try to interlink the pages and post in a natural way
• Outbound links, link to the similar niche sites and authority sites

All in all, be true to your content practices. Write original, give useful information, give the people solutions, and be sure on implementing the above points in bullets for your content.

Optimized Theme

Theme plays an important role in optimization. An optimized WordPress theme boosts the search engine optimization efforts. Therefore, every time our recommendation goes to the use of an optimized theme. There are two key factors of an optimized theme that it must have a clean structure and validation with W3C & WordPress coding guidelines. It ensures that the theme will not cause performance issues and will not conflict with the WordPress SEO plugins. The TemplateToaster WordPress theme builder  and WordPress website builder software takes care of these two factors for producing templates and free WordPress themes. You can use this software for making optimized WordPress themes with no coding at all.

Set up Pretty Permalinks

The Permalinks are the particular URLs of the pages, posts and categories of a website. Like https://blog.templatetoaster.com/improve-performance-of-your-wordpress-website/ is the permalink of our post, published a short time back on our site. Whenever you create a new post or a new page, WordPress auto generates its permalink as per default settings. That auto generated permalink is not as clean and friendly as is recommended by the SEO experts. So, the customization of default permalink is advised to you.

For changing the default permalink structure, go to Settings and select permalinks. You will see the following screen. We suggest you to set the simple structure of permalinks, therefore “Post name” option is a good option to choose.

Saving the changes, WordPress will always generate the permalink according to the saved settings. In fact, WordPress allows you to change the permalink for individual posts even. When you craft a new post or page, you can see the option to edit the permalink of that particular post. For instance, the highlighted part of the permalink, below the post title, can be edited.

Following points can be considered while editing the permalinks.

• Erase the stop words from permalinks, such as “is”, “and”, “are”.
• Make use of a keyword in the permalink
• Keep it short and meaningful

In one line, we would say that short, meaningful and keyword included permalinks will give you search advantage. So, make this your rule for setting your permalinks.

Take help of an SEO Plugin

An SEO plugin will help very much in search engine optimization. It will aid your efforts of optimizing your website. WordPress repository has some best SEO plugins. Check out this post about best SEO plugins on TemplateToaster’s blog to know if which plugin will be suitable for your website.

As expected, an SEO plugin will help you do some utmost important things for your site. The foremost thing is that it will help you add Meta Titles and descriptions to your pages and posts. Besides this, you can define Meta robot attributes, which tell search engine crawlers whether the content should be indexed or not.

Besides executing the basic SEO functions, it might get you the XML Sitemap generated in an automatic way. The Sitemap helps the search engine crawler to crawl the site better as it consists all the URLs of the website and additional information about them.

Improve Performance

Website speed has also a significant impact on being in the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Faster loading websites are more likely to be ranked well by Google. Fast speed causes better user experience. Slow loading websites are not liked by the users, be they are having good content. Therefore, if you’ve a good content for the users, ensure their good experience too. If you do the both the things for the user that are good content and fast speed, then, certainly the outcome will cheer you up.

You may use a cache plugin for improving site’s speed. Read this post, consisting the information and advice regarding WordPress cache plugins, to know about the best cache plugins.

You can check your web speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It gives the speed score to the website, and show the fixes to resolve the issues with the page speed.

Make Your Website Responsive

Google love mobile-friendly websites. With the roll out of Mobilegeddon algorithm of Google, now it has become very important to make your website responsive for mobiles. Google gives heavy weightage to the responsive websites during their raking in search results. Hence, being responsive can give your the SEO advantage.

If your website is already responsive, have you tested it with Google? You should put your site on Google’s Mobile Friendly Test. If Google verifies the website, you can rest assured on this aspect of your website.

Social Media Sharing

Google uses the social media sharing as a ranking signal. The search engine uses the data of social media to determine the rank of a site. More the people would like, comment or share your content on there, more are the chances of getting your content ranked well by the Google. We would recommend you to share your content on your social platforms. Your social media activities for spreading worthwhile content through the social channels will accelerate the SEO of your site and it is a direct and most genuine way of marketing too.

Wind Up

Top ranking is all that you would want in the end. Google and the other search engines aim at providing their user with the best user experience. Hence, the key to success is to provide the people best experience, as much as you can. But, the search engine robots are not humans, how would you provide them their best experience. After all, people would reach to your site when search engines will give it a place on the front page. So, it is important to please them. For this, you adopt the practices like setting up pretty permalinks, genuine link building, social media recognition, faster web speed, updated XML sitemap, and good content.