Want to know how to improve SEO on WordPress? Then, this article is for you.
By choosing the best CMS platform, i.e., WordPress, you’ve already taken a major step in SEO optimization. It’s because the platform is designed to make your site embraced by search engines.
However, creating a website with WordPress isn’t enough to rank in search results. There are still many SEO strategies that you need to follow for higher-ranking opportunities.
However, there is nothing to worry about because this article shares the best WordPress SEO tips for ranking highly on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Let’s begin the WordPress SEO Guide!
What is SEO? Why Optimize WordPress SEO?
The major website traffic sources are search engines (Google, Baidu, Yahoo, Bing, etc.). It’s a good reason why SEO remains such a vital topic in the digital world.
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. To put it simply, SEO means optimizing your site for better ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Broadly, Search Engine Optimization strategies can be categorized into 2 parts.
- Improve your website so that search engines can easily crawl your content and make it appear on top of the SERPs.
- Publishing relevant and quality content so that users find it useful, engage with it, link to it, share it, etc. Search engines analyze various user engagement factors and determine your page rank.
You may be wondering why you need to rank higher in search results.
It’s important to rank higher because the higher the search engine position, the more users will come to your site.
Consequently, more traffic leads to more conversions and revenue. We’ll explain it in detail in the next section below.
Why It’s Crucial to Optimize Your Site for Higher Positions?
Every website owner wants tremendous users to visit their site.
However, the site that doesn’t rank in the top 10 results on SERPs is barely noticed. SEO statistics by Intergrowth suggest that the top three Google search results get 54.4% of all the clicks.
Hence, the most straightforward reason to optimize WordPress SEO is to increase the number of visitors to your site.
Here, we’ve enlisted the major benefits of improving WordPress SEO:
- A well-optimized site for search engines has greater visibility and a higher ranking.
- Ranking higher in the SERPs increases organic traffic (traffic from unpaid search results).
- It improves the site’s authority, making it more trustworthy and relevant to your users.
- You’ll be able to generate more leads and make good sales.
- You’ll be able to earn good revenue.
Last but not least, it’s important that you keep pace with the best SEO practices. If you stop working on your SEO for WordPress websites, then there is a chance that your site will vanish from the web.
As a result, you’ll lose your customers. So, always update your WordPress with the latest SEO measures according to the WordPress SEO guide.
With that said, now let’s check out the tips on how to improve SEO on WordPress.
35 Actionable Tips on How to do SEO on WordPress
As SEO is a vast area that covers many crucial and noteworthy facts, WordPress SEO comes with some ease and a helping hand that positively impacts the entire site.
Meanwhile, you can use SEO plugins on your WordPress website to improve your ranking.
In this article, we will explore WordPress SEO tips that are recommended by major search engines like Google, according to their published algorithms.
As this blog is about SEO tips for WordPress, it’s time to explore the SEO techniques for WordPress websites that will work for your website.
SEO is mainly divided into three categories: Technical, On-page, and Off-page. Thus, we’ll explore WordPress search engine optimization tips for each category.
Let’s start off with Technical SEO.
I) Technical SEO
So, what’s technical SEO, you ask? It’s the process of optimizing your site’s technical elements that affect the SEO of your website.
Below, we’ve mentioned a few ways to optimize your website’s technical SEO.
1. Choose Your Web Hosting Carefully
The first and most important tip on how to improve SEO on WordPress is to choose the best web hosting solution for your website.
Web hosting is a primary requirement for creating a website of any kind (business, portfolio, blogging, or eCommerce). It’s defined as a space on the server that stores your website code and all your files.
Web hosting determines your site’s overall performance, which directly impacts your site’s SEO. Hence, you must choose the web hosting service carefully.
Having said that, here are some key factors to consider when selecting web hosting for your site.
Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best Web Hosting
- Speed: A fast-loading site provides a better user experience and also improves your site’s SEO score. So, you should choose hosting that provides fast server speed to ensure a fast and smooth-running website.
- Security: Your web hosting should be able to provide strong security for your website against cyber-attacks, hacks, and other possible malware that can take it down or, even worse, crash it entirely.
- Uptime: Uptime is the amount of time a hosting server works and is available. To ensure that your website is highly available for your users, you must choose hosting with a good uptime guarantee.
- User-friendly Interface: Choosing a web hosting service provider that is easy to use is wise. Buy a hosting account where it’s easy to manage important settings like emails, domains, backups, and so on.
- Customer Support: Sometimes, you may encounter a problem with your site. Therefore, the hosting company you choose should be able to provide you with reliable support to solve your website issues immediately.
For more information, you can check our article on how to choose the best WordPress hosting service.
If you haven’t created your website, we recommend choosing from the following hosting providers:
- Bluehost: $2.95/mo for Shared WordPress Hosting
- SiteGround: $2.99/mo for StartUp Managed WordPress Hosting
If you want fully managed WordPress hosting, then you can try the following web hosts:
- WP Engine: $13/mo for Lite Managed WordPress Hosting
- Kinsta: $30/mo for Starter WordPress Hosting, billed annually
WordPress also officially recommends some of these hosting services.
Want to explore more hosting providers and their details? Feel free to check our article on the best WordPress hosting companies.
2. Select an SEO-Friendly WordPress Theme
A WordPress theme can control your site’s visual aspect and improve your site’s visibility in search engines. However, this is only possible when you choose from the best SEO-friendly WordPress themes.
The SEO-friendly WordPress theme has clean code and is designed to load fast pages. Both are important factors that Google considers when ranking higher in SERPs.
Besides, the theme provides better support for the SEO plugins that further boost your site’s search engine performance.
Zakra is one of the best examples of an SEO-focused theme. It’s a multipurpose theme perfect for almost any kind of website and follows the best SEO practices to ensure your website’s popularity.
Its clean code is well-optimized for search engines, resulting in better indexing. Further, it supports the major SEO plugins and has a blazing-fast page loading speed.
However, Zakra isn’t the only option. You can check our ultimate list of SEO-friendly WordPress themes for more alternatives.
3. Install the Best WordPress SEO Plugin
WordPress has many great plugins for almost everything, including SEO. Installing the SEO plugin is one important tactic for increasing traffic to your WordPress site.
SEO WordPress plugins are tools specifically built to help you improve your SEO.
They assist in writing better content, optimizing keywords in your page and post, adding proper meta descriptions, creating a sitemap, and much more.
However, selecting a comprehensive plugin like Yoast SEO is a wise decision that you can make.
Yoast SEO is the best on-page SEO plugin for optimizing your site. It offers robust SEO features like XML sitemap, schema markup, search console, breadcrumbs, and so on.
For more options, you can also explore our handpicked list of the best WordPress SEO plugins.
Installing the Yoast SEO Plugin in Your WordPress Website
You can follow the simple steps given below to install the plugin and start configuring your WordPress SEO with Yoast.
Step 1: Log in to your WordPress dashboard. After that, navigate to Plugins >> Add New.
Step 2: Type in Yoast SEO in the search box and install and activate the plugin.
Step 3: Once the plugin is activated, the Yoast SEO icon will appear on the sidebar menu.
Step 4: Now, you can start optimizing your website with Yoast SEO.
4. Set Up SEO-Friendly Permalinks
Another useful tactic on how to improve SEO on WordPress is to set up SEO-friendly permalinks.
Permalinks (Permanent Links) are simply the URLs of your post or page on your WordPress website.
URLs act as clues for both visitors and search engines to understand the content and index your site. That explains why it’s important to focus on your permalink structure.
By default, the WordPress URL has a chaotic structure. But there isn’t anything to worry about, as WordPress provides several options for structuring your URL.
To create an SEO-friendly URL, log in to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Settings >> Permalinks, and choose the Post name option under Common Settings.
Finally, click on Save Changes to save your settings.
Choosing this setting enables you to include your content title and keywords in your URL. This makes your permalink clean and descriptive, which is good for your site’s SEO.
5. Check for the Broken Links & Redirect
Broken links are inactive URLs that users cannot access for various reasons. Some examples are ‘404 pages not found’, ‘Bad URL,’ and ‘Timeout.’
Broken links negatively affect your site’s ranking. They make it difficult for search engines to crawl your site and hamper user experience, resulting in a higher bounce rate.
Therefore, you must check and fix the broken links immediately.
One of the easiest ways to check for such links is to use a Google Search Console.
Alternatively, you can also use online tools like W3C Link Checker. They help you identify broken links on your site and fix them immediately.
How to Fix the Broken Links?
The most common method for fixing broken links is to use redirect plugins.
For example, Simple 301 Redirect is a simple WordPress redirect solution that helps you replace the broken link and redirect it to a different page.
If you’re a Yoast SEO premium user, then you can find the redirections feature in the plugin. Also, the Rank Math SEO plugin includes a redirections feature.
Alternatively, you can update 301 redirects by editing your .htaccess file. However, this method is a little risky if you aren’t familiar with it.
6. Check Your Site’s SEO Visibility Settings
WordPress comes with a built-in option that can discourage search engines from indexing your site. This option is useful for the websites under construction to prevent them from going live before it’s completed.
However, it can be a disaster if your site is completed and ready to go live and you are still checking this option. No matter what WordPress SEO technique you follow, your site won’t show up on search engines.
Hence, checking your site’s SEO visibility settings is a good idea. To do this, log in to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Settings >> Readings.
You’ll see a Search Engine Visibility option at the bottom of the General Settings page.
This box should be left unchecked to make your site visible on Google and other search engines. Finally, click on the Save Changes button to save the setting.
7. Perform an SEO Audit of Your Site Regularly
Performing an SEO audit of your site on a regular basis is yet another important strategy for improving your WordPress SEO.
An SEO audit helps you understand how well your site is performing. It provides insight into various issues regarding your site’s technical SEO, on-page or off-page SEO, and more.
Hence, you can improve upon them for better WordPress SEO optimization.
However, SEO auditing by yourself is time-consuming as you have to review all the aspects of your website. Numerous SEO audit tools are available to help you with this.
For example, you can use an intuitive free online tool like SEO Site Checkup to audit and analyze your site and identify the problems affecting your organic search performance.
You can also use other tools such as SEMrush, RavenTools, WooRank, etc.
8. Optimize Your WordPress Site’s Speed
Your website’s speed is another important factor that Google considers when ranking higher on SERPs. Fast site speed is also a key factor in providing a better user experience to your visitors.
Thankfully, improving the site’s speed with WordPress isn’t a big deal. We’ve discussed choosing the best hosting, themes, and optimizing images previously, each of which directly impacts your site’s speed.
Several other WordPress SEO tactics can help you optimize your site’s speed. To get a better insight into your site’s speed, you can start by measuring it using a free tool like GTMetrix.
GTMetrix is a popular tool for testing a website’s speed and getting useful suggestions for improvements.
Additionally, there are many speed optimization plugins to improve your site’s speed. For instance, you can use all-in-one WordPress speed plugins like Hummingbird, WP Rocket, etc.
You can even install cache plugins such as W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, etc.
On top of that, you can also use CDN (Content Delivery Network) services.
It’s a network of servers distributed across the globe that stores versions of your site data for the fast delivery of the content. Some of the best CDN services are Cloudflare, KeyCDN, etc.
9. Add SSL (HTTPS) to Your Domain
Google also uses HTTPS as a ranking signal for your website. Simply put, HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure.
HTTPS allows secure communication between your browser and a website by encrypting the data, i.e., converting data to code.
Adding HTTPS to your domain is important to prevent unauthorized access to your data. This is beneficial, especially when a website includes sensitive information like your personal or financial details.
In web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and others, secured websites are indicated by padlock signs in the URL bar.
On the other hand, unsecured websites are indicated by the Not Secure warning signal.
To enable HTTPS on your site, you need a TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificate, formerly known as an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate.
Some of the best hosting services, like Bluehost, SiteGround, Kinsta, etc., offer SSL certificates for free.
You can also get the TLS/SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA) like Let’s Encrypt and install it manually.
Check out our comprehensive guide on adding SSL and HTTPS to the WordPress site for more information.
10. Create XML Sitemap of Your Site
The next useful tip on how you can improve SEO on WordPress is to create an XML sitemap for your site.
An XML sitemap is simply a list of your site’s URLs that acts as a roadmap for search engines to crawl to your pages easily. It also enables search engines to understand the structure of your site.
Though creating an XML sitemap doesn’t directly influence your WordPress SEO, it still helps search engines quickly find all your important pages.
Your pages can be indexed better and start ranking on SERPs.
How to Create an XML Sitemap Using Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO helps you create a sitemap quickly, easily, and without any extra effort. So, if you’ve already installed and activated the plugin, as mentioned in your post earlier, go to SEO >> General >> Features.
Now, scroll down the page to see the XML Sitemaps option. Toggle on the button and hit the Save Changes button. Congrats! You’ve successfully created a sitemap with the push of a button.
Further, to confirm that your sitemap has been created, click on the question icon. After that, you’ll see the option to see the XML sitemap.
Click on that link, and you should be able to see your site’s XML sitemap.
Your site’s XML sitemap looks something like this.
11. Submit Your Site to Search Engines’ Webmaster Tools
After you create your site’s XML sitemap, you need to submit it to a webmaster tool like Google Search Console.
Doing so enables you to analyze your site’s performance in Google search results. You can also locate issues affecting your site’s ranking and improve it.
You need to have a Google account before you can add your site to Google. Chances are high that you already have one, so you can quickly head to the Google Search Console homepage.
You can select the domain or URL prefix property type to get started.
Site Verification via Domain
If you enter the domain name, you must verify your domain ownership. To do this, sign in to your domain provider and copy and paste the TXT code provided by Google Search Console.
Site Verification via URL Prefix
However, if you fail to verify using this method, you can choose to verify using a URL prefix. Entering your URL prefix recommends various verification methods.
If you’re using Yoast SEO, the easiest method is to use the HTML tag method. In this case, you need to copy the meta tag.
From your dashboard, navigate to SEO >> General >> Webmaster Tools and paste the code to the Google verification code box.
Again, go back to Google Search Console and click the Verify button. Finally, your ownership will be verified.
After verification, you can add your sitemap URL to Google Search Console. Navigate to the Sitemap menu, copy and paste the URL, and hit the Submit button.
You can repeat the process for your other sitemap URLs. And that’s all.
Similarly, you can submit your sitemap to Bing and Yandex.
12. Integrate Google Analytics into Your Website
Integrating Google Analytics is an important strategy for improving SEO on your WordPress website.
Google Analytics is a web analytic service that allows you to analyze your visitors and track your site’s performance to make smarter decisions.
With Google Analytics integrated into your site, you’ll easily be able to track your site’s traffic, demographic data of visitors, their interest, incoming conversion rate, and so on.
These data and reports can help you evaluate your marketing activities and campaigns. Further, they also help you decide the type of content you should be creating.
As a result, you’ll be able to optimize your pages in a well-organized manner and boost traffic to your site.
How to Integrate Google Analytics into Your Website?
To add Google Analytics to your site, you need to sign up for Google Analytics first, which will automatically land you on the Tracking Code page. You need to copy the tracking code, as shown in the image below.
Go to Plugins >> Add New from your dashboard and search for the WP Code Insert Headers and Footers plugin. Now, install and activate the plugin.
After that, go to Code Snippets >> Headers and Footers.
There, paste the tracking code and press the Save Changes button. That’s it. You can also insert them on the body or footer if you scroll down a bit.
For more detailed information, check out our guide on how to add Google Analytics to WordPress.
13. Include Schema Markup
Schema markup has become a trending topic in WordPress SEO, as it plays a crucial role in improving a site’s ranking.
In a simple word, it’s defined as the microdata added to your HTML to enable search engines to understand your content better.
Schema markup can help you get rich results (formerly called rich snippets), i.e., additional information appearing in search result pages.
This improves your site’s click-through rate, ultimately resulting in better ranking opportunities.
One major benefit of having Yoast SEO on your site is that it can automatically include the schema markup in your pages and posts. However, you need to configure a few settings to implement the schema on your site properly.
How do you implement schema on your site using Yoast SEO?
From your dashboard, navigate to SEO >> Search Appearance.
Then, under the General tab, you’ll see the Knowledge Graph & Schema.org option. Under this option, you can represent your site as a personal or an organization.
Now, fill in the organization’s or the person’s name and add the logo. Then click on the Save Changes button.
You can also add the schema to each of your posts or pages. To do this, scroll down to the Yoast SEO meta box at the end of your post.
Under the Schema tab, you can adjust the settings, such as page type and article type, to describe your content as you see fit.
You can also use How to and FAQ Yoast structured data blocks for rich results in your respective sections.
Now that you’ve included schema on your site, it’s time to see if it has been successfully implemented. For this, you can rely on the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
If a schema is added to your webpage, it’ll look something like the image below. If not, it’ll be blank.
14. Improve User Experience
Google and search engines are continuously keeping an eye on how users interact with your website. This has a direct impact on your search rankings on SERPs.
That’s why user experience (UX) is integral to your WordPress SEO strategy.
User experience greatly impacts your site’s credibility and audience retention rate. It also reduces the bounce rate, positively impacting your site’s health.
Hence, optimizing your website with a good URL structure, a clear navigation menu, and proper heading tags is essential to providing a good user experience.
Here are a few tips for providing a great user experience for your visitors.
- Optimize your site speed
- Implement mobile-friendly design
- Avoid adding too many pop-ups
- Add social media links and icons to your site
- Improve your customer service
15. Optimize Your Images
Adding media files like images can improve the quality of your content. This provides a better user experience and keeps your user engaged.
But just adding images isn’t enough. You need to optimize these images to improve your WordPress SEO further.
First, you should choose the proper format for your images: JPEG, PNG, WebP, or something else. Then, you must compress your images to minimize the file size and ensure the site is fast-loading.
Compressing your images using a free and convenient tool like TinyPNG reduces the size of your image without degrading its quality.
Several image optimization plugins, such as Imagify, Smush, etc., can also compress your images.
For more information, check our article on WordPress image optimizer plugins.
You can optimize your images by adding titles, alt text (Alternative text), and captions. Alt tags allow search engines to understand the context of your images and help your images rank better.
With the best CMS (Content Management System) platform like WordPress, you can easily add image alt text, titles, and captions to make your images SEO-friendly.
16. Create a Mobile-friendly Site
You might wonder how a site’s mobile-friendly design affects SEO. Isn’t its whole purpose to allow users to access your content from any device?
Well, as of 2015, Google has declared that your site being responsive plays an important role in search algorithms.
This means there’s a higher chance your site will increase in rank if you create a mobile-friendly website that makes it easy for users to access and go through your content.
Your site should load quickly, be easy to navigate, and be easy to control for users.
We’ve created articles containing a list of responsive themes for portfolio, spa and salon, fitness, and magazine sites. Check them out if you need any of them.
17. Prevent Duplication of Content
Duplication of content can confuse search engines regarding which might be the original and relevant article.
Search engine algorithms may not prioritize your content or, worse, not index your page/post. But worry not! There are loads of solutions to prevent these problems from happening.
First and foremost, try hard not to duplicate your content. It can occur knowingly or unknowingly.
If you find any, the best option is to create 301 redirections to those pages to redirect them to a single, original post/page.
However, if you need both posts/pages, we suggest you apply the Canonical tag “rel=canonical,” which declares that it’s the original one, to the search engines.
This leads to your original post, i.e., being declared canonical to be indexed. The other one will not be ranked.
Moreover, unintentionally, you might have multiple versions of your site. This can occur when your site’s “WWW” version isn’t redirected to the “non-WWW” version or vice versa.
The same is true for HTTPS and HTTP sites. You should carefully redirect them to one single version of your site as quickly as possible.
For example, below are different site versions redirected to a single one. However, it’s not necessary for you to redirect to https://example.com.
II) On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to optimizing individual web pages for better ranking. It involves elements that directly control your website.
Here are a few tips on how to optimize your website’s on-page SEO.
1. Focus on the Quality of the Content
Your users are always searching for fresh, useful, and relevant content. If they don’t get what they want, they will leave your page, no matter how good your site looks.
This results in a high bounce rate, which isn’t good for your site’s health.
To capture your visitors’ attention, you need to create quality content. This motivates them to stay on your site longer and improves your authority. It’ll also help generate a high click-through rate (CTR).
Hence, high-quality content is an enormous part of your site’s SEO. It’s next to impossible to reap the full benefit of SEO in its absence.
Now you know that content is king. Here are some quick tips for writing quality content to engage your users.
- Know your target audience
- Emphasize your users’ search intent
- Create fresh and original content
- Avoid complex words and jargon
- Speak to the point
- Include multimedia content like images, videos, gifs, etc.
- Make your content scannable
For more details, please check our full guide on SEO content writing.
2. Perform Keyword Research & Plan Your Site’s Content
A keyword is a term that users type into search engines to solve their queries or find other relevant information.
Performing keyword research is a vital SEO technique that helps you discover the words or phrases users tend to enter into search engines.
For a detailed beginner’s guide on keywords, read our article, What is a keyword?
You can plan your content accordingly and increase search traffic when you understand what people search for.
Hence, keyword research should be the first thing you should be doing as part of your WordPress SEO strategy before planning your content.
There are quite a few paid and free keyword research tools to help you discover great keywords.
However, with a magnificent tool like SEMrush, you can also easily overview the keywords of interest for keyword difficulty and search volume.
For instance, you can see the keyword difficulty and search volume for the keyword Fastest web hosting, as shown in the image below.
As given below, SEMrush also provides keyword variations, questions, and related keywords for your seed keyword.
Besides, it even reveals the competitor’s marketing strategy and features much more to improve your site’s health and SEO performance.
3. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords
Targeting long-tail keywords comes in handy when it’s difficult to rank for the main keywords.
Long-tail keywords are nothing but the long and more descriptive form of keywords themselves. As the name suggests, they’re long, consisting of 3 or more words.
For instance, boots is the main keyword, which is short and vague. On the other hand, cheap leather boots for women are a long-tail keyword with a more specific meaning.
The use of long-tail keywords is helpful in SEO, mainly due to the following reasons:
- They have a clearly defined purpose that Google understands well. As a result, they attract visitors who are truly interested in your products/services, thereby reducing your site’s bounce rate.
- Long-tail keywords usually get lower search volumes, but that’s not a problem at all because they come with the benefit of low competition. That means you can easily rank higher in the SERPs.
Just like the short keyword, you can also perform long-tail keyword research using various free and paid tools.
Google’s Autocomplete feature, Searches related to, and People also Ask box are convenient long-tail keyword research tools.
Additionally, you can use SEMrush to find related keywords, questions, etc., which are usually long-tail keywords.
You can check out the detailed information on long-tail keywords here.
4. Aim to Rank for Low-Difficulty Keywords
Keyword difficulty is the measure of how tough it is to rank for a certain keyword. It helps you determine whether the particular keyword is worth your time and energy.
In other words, it enables you to choose the best keyword for SEO.
The higher the keyword difficulty value, the higher the competition for the keyword. So, to maximize your time and SEO efforts, it’s wise to target low-competition keywords.
Moreover, as experts advise, choosing keywords with high search volumes and low difficulty is best.
For example, let’s evaluate the difficulty of the keywords Optimal health and wellness. Here, we’ll use SEMrush for this purpose.
The image below shows that the keywords have quite a low difficulty and a pretty good search volume. Such keywords can be a great winning strategy, especially for small or medium businesses seeking growth.
Hence, aiming for a keyword with low competition can be a source of huge SEO success.
5. Write Catchy Titles for Your Blog Articles
The title of your blog article is the first thing every visitor will notice. It doesn’t even matter how great your content is. No one will ever read your content if your title cannot grab your users’ attention.
Besides, WordPress automatically wraps your title as an H1 heading tag, enabling search engines to understand the context of your content.
This means the success of your post largely depends upon your blog title.
Therefore, you should write a catchy title that matches your users’ search intent. It should be descriptive and to the point.
You should also focus on the length of your title, as Google won’t display your whole title if it exceeds 60 characters.
Further, you must not forget to include the keywords in your title. For instance, the title of our blog post is ‘How to Improve SEO on WordPress, ‘ which is our focus keyword.
Adding SEO Title to Your Page/Post Using Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO lets you easily add titles to your page/post. Just scroll down to the bottom, and you’ll see an SEO title section where you can manually input well-optimized titles for your post. Make sure it’s green, as green color signals a good SEO title to rank better.
Further, with WordPress Google Analytics plugins like Monster Insights, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your heading.
Monster Insights 7.12 and greater is featured with the Headline Analyzer Tool to help you create attractive headlines. This tool will provide a score of 1 to 100 for your heading.
Again, when you click on the headline analyzer, it also provides useful suggestions for improvements right from the WordPress dashboard. Thus, you can create catchy headlines that will get more clicks.
6. Optimize Your Heading Tags (Across the content)
Headings tags have a crucial role to play in structuring your content. They break down the long walls of text and make it skimmable.
This makes it easy to understand the content for your readers as well as search engines, improving your site’s visibility.
WordPress enables you to manually add separate heading tags from H1 to H6, depending on your specific needs.
However, do not use the H1 tag inside your content because your post title is H1. You can use multiple H2 to H6 tags in a hierarchy to make your content more readable.
To add headings, click on the ‘Plus’ icons in the block editor and then choose the ‘Heading’ block. Thereafter, you can select the required heading tag to divide your content into small, readable segments.
You can also include the keywords in your headings for better WordPress SEO results without keyword stuffing (the irrelevant use of keywords).
7. Use Internal and External Link Properly in Your Content
Proper use of both internal and external links is a strong SEO strategy for boosting WordPress’s SEO capacity.
Internal links refer to the links that direct users to another page/post on the same website. The major benefits of using internal linking are:
- Prompts visitors to read more and keeps them engaged with your site for a long time.
- Improve the authority of your overall site.
- It helps search engines crawl your content and improve site traffic.
External links refer to the links that direct your users to the pages or posts of various other reputable websites.
When linking externally, you should always link to a trustworthy and informative website; otherwise, your site may suffer.
The major benefits of external linking are:
- Linking to a high-domain authority website enables search engines to understand what your content is about.
- Improves the credibility of your site.
- Helps connect with other websites, which can be beneficial for both sides.
Adding Internal/External Links to the Anchor Text
Adding internal and external links is easy. However, it’s important to note that the anchor text for the link addition must be a group of descriptive and relevant words.
After selecting the words, click on the Link button in the toolbar.
Then, paste the URL of the internal or external content that you want to link. Finally, click on the Enter button at the side.
8. Keep Your Page or Post URLs Short
If you remember, in our previous section, we recommended choosing post names in common settings for SEO-friendly permalinks.
This means WordPress will automatically create a URL from your post title, which might sometimes cause problems with long and complex URLs.
For example, if you see the title of our blog posts, it’s quite lengthy. Lengthy URLs often look like spam and have a low click-through rate.
On the other hand, short URLs are clean and organized. Also, they are easy for search engines and visitors to understand. That’s why Google prefers short URLs. Additionally, they help boost your click-through rate.
However, WordPress always allows you to overwrite your URLs to make them short. Here, we’ve set our slug as to how to improve SEO on WordPress. Therefore, the new short and clean URL of our blog post is:
“https://themegrill.com/blog/improve-seo-on-wordpress/”
If you want to shorten your URL further when sharing on marketing platforms, check out our article on URL shortening tools.
9. Add a Compelling Meta-Description
A meta-description is a short text (usually a line or two) appearing below the search engine’s title. It’s a summary of what your content is about.
Although it doesn’t directly influence your ranking factor, it plays a vital role in your WordPress SEO by improving your site’s click-through rate.
A well-written meta description with keywords can persuade visitors to click on your post.
Adding meta descriptions becomes easy with the availability of several WordPress SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, Premium SEO Pack, etc.
These plugins allow you to add meta descriptions easily in their meta fields.
For instance, this is what the meta-field of Yoast SEO looks like.
Yoast SEO also has a Snippet Preview option, which allows you to preview how your page/post title and meta description are displayed on mobile and desktop.
It even bolds your keywords to highlight them in search results.
10. Update Your Posts Frequently
Google and other search engines evaluate the freshness and relevance of your content to decide the ranking of your page or post.
So, if you want to consistently do well on SERPs, you must consider regularly reviving your old content.
When you update your posts regularly, your content becomes up-to-date and gets indexed more often in Google. Likewise, you also have a better chance of ranking for more search terms.
Other SEO benefits of frequently adding fresh content to your site are listed below:
- Drive-in more traffic
- Enhance click-through rate
- Improve shares
- Increase authority potential
- Improved Conversion rate
11. Aim for the Featured Snippet/Position Zero
Aiming for the featured snippet is another helpful tip for improving your WordPress SEO.
You might have noticed the box at the top of the SERPs when you searched for specific terms. The content displayed at the top spot of the Google search results, i.e., position 0, is known as a featured snippet.
Obtaining position 0 in the SERPs matters a lot these days because it improves brand awareness, increases website traffic, and even boosts revenue.
Though there aren’t such proven ways to get your content as a featured snippet, some of the best practices that increase your chance of getting featured in position 0 are:
- Target the questions your readers might be asking
- Aim to provide the best answer
- Use suitable headers (h1–h6) to highlight content
- Keep your answer short and sweet
- Implement schema markup to your site
12. Create Video Content & Optimize It (Implement YouTube SEO)
According to video marketing statistics, 69% of people prefer watching videos to learn about products and services. That’s huge, isn’t it?
Video marketing is continuously growing, and if you’re interested in reaching out to your potential clients to grow, it’s important to add video content to attract more customers.
You can use YouTube to demonstrate your product and display your brand.
YouTube is the second most visited website by search traffic after Google. It has billions of searches every month.
Attempting proper YouTube optimization can help your site rank at the top of search engine results. Moreover, it can also increase traffic to your website.
That being said, let’s briefly discuss how to optimize the YouTube video content.
How to Implement YouTube SEO?
Google acts as a bridgehead for people searching for videos. Though it has the potential to understand the video details automatically, it’s still a good practice to make your YouTube videos more SEO-friendly.
Here are some important YouTube SEO tips that you can follow:
- Perform YouTube keyword research
- Add keywords in the video title
- Optimize video description
- Add video tags
- Add hashtags
- Upload custom thumbnail image
- Add Video0bject Schema to your videos
13. Add No-Follow to External Links You Don’t Want to Pass Credit
As discussed earlier, Google uses links/backlinks to determine the page’s quality and decide how to rank them on SERPs.
So, whenever you link to an external website, Google will pass a portion of your SEO score to that link.
Therefore, if you don’t want to pass credit to external links, you can add no-follow to imply Google or other search engines not to follow those links.
Doing so will save your SEO score, and you will have a better chance of ranking within the search engine results pages.
You can add a no-follow attribute to WordPress using two methods:
- By adding HTML attribute rel=“nofollow” manually
- By using the WordPress plugins (Ultimate Nofollow, Pretty Links, etc.)
You can also use the Yoast SEO plugin to add no-follow external links. It allows you to add no-follow to your external links with a click of a button and eliminates the need to add rel=“nofollow” manually.
14. Write Proper Length Content
Writing content of proper length can also help improve WordPress SEO.
Publishing longer-form content is a strategy used by every marketer, business owner, and SEO copywriter to rank higher and engage readers.
Several studies have found that long-form content has more potential to rank better in search engines compared to short content.
You can see from the graph above that the content holding the top position in Google is longer than the others.
Though this doesn’t necessarily mean that short content doesn’t rank, writing good-length content can still offer several benefits, such as getting more shares, backlinks, and so on.
OkDork says content with 3000-10,000 words tends to get more shares. Again, according to Backlinko, long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short content.
And you already know how much getting shares and links matters for the higher ranking of your site.
Besides, it also increases the average time users spend on your page and improves your site’s click-through rate. In conclusion, longer content is valuable for Google as well as your readers.
You can also check our guide on how long should a blog post be for more information.
III) Off-Page SEO
Lastly, the off-page SEO practice helps optimize the external side of your website. It mainly includes increasing trust, authority, and relevance.
Take a peek at a few ways you can do so.
1. Optimize Your Robots.txt File
Allowing search engines to crawl your website is vital to keeping your site healthy for SEO.
Crawlers or bots may have been blocked from crawling over your website. This can affect your site indexing process.
A robots.txt file specifies what directories, files, pages, or posts web crawlers can and cannot crawl. The easiest way to manage it is to use a WordPress SEO plugin.
You can do so using any popular SEO tools, like Rank Math SEO or Yoast SEO. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, the plugins will allow you to create one for your website.
Once you access the file, you’ll find a few terms that might be confusing. We’ve explained them below:
- User Agent: This specifies which crawl bots the rules apply to. A “*” sign applies to all web crawlers.
- Disallow: Instructs crawlers not to access the specified files or directories.
- Allow: Override the Disallow tag directive and access its subdirectories or files.
- Sitemap: Makes crawling easier by mentioning the location of your sitemap.
2. Build High-Quality Backlinks
Want to know how to improve SEO on WordPress? Building a quality backlink can help. A backlink is simply a link used by a third-party website that points to your website.
It’s also called “inbound links” or “incoming links.”
For instance, let’s assume two websites, website X and website Y. Now, let’s say that website X is linked to website Y in a post. This means website Y has a backlink from website X.
Backlinks are an important ranking factor for your site. Google and other search engines consider backlinks to determine your site’s quality and credibility.
Hence, the more quality sites link to your page/post, the higher its ranking opportunities are.
However, it’s important to note that not all backlinks boost your site’s ranking. Some backlinks from low-quality domains can even hurt your site’s SEO rather than help it rank better.
That’s why building high-quality backlinks should be your priority.
How to Build the Quality Backlinks on Your Site?
In reality, earning quality backlinks isn’t an easy task. So, if you’re confused about where exactly to begin, you can start by performing competitive backlink research. It’ll provide you with useful ideas about link building.
For this, you can depend upon SEMrush’s Backlink Gap Tool, which helps you gain quick insight into the link-building strategies of up to five competitors.
Want to know more about how to build quality backlinks to your site? Then check out our blog on the best ways to build backlinks.
3. Use Social Media Platforms
Yet another technique you can use to improve your WordPress SEO is using popular social media platforms. SEO experts consider social media platforms to be powerful SEO tools for marketing and branding websites.
They can add more visibility to your content and serve as an important source of traffic to your website.
If a lot of people share your content, chances are high that more people will link to it. And getting more backlinks means better ranking opportunities for your website.
According to Statista, social media users worldwide are expected to reach around 4.41 billion by 2025. That sounds incredible, right?
These statistics make it clear that you cannot afford to ignore the power of social media, as doing so would mean ignoring many audiences visiting your site.
Fortunately, there are lots of social media plugins for WordPress to get started with social media campaigns.
They enable you to add social sharing buttons for content sharing, social icons for adding links to your profiles, and so on.
If you’re looking for a few suggestions on how to get started with social media, we’ve got an article on the best social media plugins for WordPress.
4. Localize Your Website
Localizing your website means making it available in multiple languages. This can improve your WordPress SEO and drive traffic from diverse audiences.
As per Statista, only 25.9% of internet users use English. Other common languages used by internet users include Chinese (19.4%), Spanish (7.9%), Arab (5.2%), and so on.
However, content is usually created in English, so ranking for the SEO keywords is likely difficult.
But if your site is multilingual, you can easily rank for the keywords in other languages with less competition and get more site traffic.
Further communicating with your audience in their local language can help you gain their trust and provide a good user experience.
As a result, your products and services will appear more appealing to your customers, thereby enhancing your site’s marketing potential.
Localizing your website doesn’t require spending a lot of money or hiring an expert. All you need to do is install the best WordPress translation plugins, like the WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML).
Such plugins help you make your site multilingual.
For a detailed guide, read our article on how to make a website multilingual in WordPress.
Concluding How to Improve SEO on WordPress!
WordPress is a great platform for SEO. However, just creating your website with WordPress won’t suffice.
There’s a competitive world out there, so to get ahead of the competition, you need to follow the best SEO practices mentioned above.
If you prioritize these WordPress SEO techniques with high-quality content at the top of your priority list, you should have no trouble building your website’s visibility in search engines.
Well, this is the end of our article on how to improve SEO on WordPress. We hope you found this article helpful.
Are you having trouble deciding on an SEO plugin? We’ve differentiated between them in the following articles: All in One SEO vs. Rank Math and All in One SEO vs. Yoast.
If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to let us know in the comment section below. You can also follow us on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook to stay connected with us.