When the Internet was invented, its primary goal was to spread information and connect different parts of the world. Now, the Internet is not only a form of communication but is a hub for information, knowledge, entertainment, and many more. Also, the Internet is not just limited to computer systems anymore; it is available on almost every smart device such as tablets, phones, smart TVs, etc.
Web pages are the building blocks of websites, and the Internet is a hub for millions of websites. The contents of any organisation, company or personal blogs are shared through the Internet as web pages on any website, mostly created using WordPress. These websites collect and hold different types of data depending upon their creator.
Moreover, the importance of websites is overgrowing because of the digitalization in almost every field of our life. Whether gaming, entertainment, studies, business, or office work, we interact with websites daily to handle our day-to-day tasks. These websites use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to show their website on the top of a search result when you search any keyword in any search engine.
And when the WordPress Website SEO analysis is correct, there are more chances of visitors to that website, thus gaining more traffic. This article will discuss some of the main aspects of SEO for the website, especially those made by WordPress.
What is WordPress?
Before understanding the concept of WordPress Website SEO, one has to know the basics of WordPress and its purpose. In simplest terms, WordPress is one of the most widely used tools that can help you create your website or blog.
These studies have shown that over 43% of websites that are running on the Internet were created with the help of WordPress. WordPress is an open-source content creation and management system from a more technical perspective. WordPress is licensed under the GPLv2 and is free to access by anyone.
Thus, the primary reason why it is so popular amongst users is that it is free and easy to use. Further, a content management system can be defined as an essential tool that can manage the different aspects of websites without the technical know-how of the programming behind it.
When WordPress came into the market, it started its business as a tool for creating personal blogs, and there was no such system for making it look like traditional websites.
With the changes in the core codes, WordPress has made a massive ecosystem. Now, there are dozens of plugins and themes available to the user for making their dream website.
Why is WordPress So Popular?
In recent times, technology has taken over the world, and one of the critical components that have been evolving since the invention of computers is the worldwide web. Almost every device is connected to the Internet, and websites contribute as its fundamental functional element.
WordPress has evolved over the past couple of years. It has created an extensive content creation ecosystem on websites for the general public.
Ever since its release, this has been accessible to the public, and because it is free, almost half of the websites built today are created with the help of WordPress. There are numerous tools to design and create awesome-looking websites in WordPress, attracting many users to use this software.
And the most crucial reason behind its popularity is because it is effortless to use. The countless plugins supported on this software for website creation are another factor for its success.
Whether you want to create a business website, eCommerce store, write your blogs or create any social network, WordPress can help you with these things very quickly.
What is WordPress SEO?
Creating a website or personal blog on the Internet using WordPress is saved and updated in all search engines. And when someone searches the particular keywords used in your website, your website appears on the search results of the query.
The bottom results websites don’t get a good volume of web traffic. But so do other dozens of web pages and their links that have similar contents. And it is known that over half of the users go for the first search results to seek their search queries on the Internet.
Here, WordPress Website SEO comes into the picture. WordPress SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, and this is a strategy that website designers or owners use to create more traffic to their websites.
Search engine optimization in WordPress isn’t any magic work. Instead, it is about optimizing the codes used to create the website by formatting them. This optimization helps the search engines easily find the contents the user is looking for.
Thus, the topics you write about will appear more often than the others if it is appropriately optimized. So, when your website using WordPress Website SEO is updated, your website will be on the top of the search results, thus creating more traffic for your website.
You can optimize your content using plugins such as Yoast and many others. It gives you every detail about the overall readability score and keyword density. If you have any internal or outbound linking going or not, your keyword is present in required areas, such as in the title heading.
WordPress SEO Checklist
Search engines are the fundamental tools used on the Internet that helps users to find the right content and the website more easily. This creates a more significant amount of traffic for that particular website, and thus the website gets more popular.
Google and other search engines available today have different advanced algorithms that help them understand and rank the web pages appropriately in the search results.
And if your content is not optimized, the search engines are unable to rank your website, and thus when someone searches for your particular topic, some other website may appear at the top of search results.
So, you can maximize the search topic by performing WordPress SEO, and to do that; you need to tick off these items from your checklist. These factors affect the WordPress Website SEO, and these should be taken care of when you are trying to work with different SEO tools:
Google Search Console (GSC) Setup
To start with WordPress SEO, one of the first tasks you must add to your list is the Google search console(GSC).
As we all know, Google is the largest available search engine globally, with over 3.6 billion searches each day.
And GSC is one of the free tools provided by Google that helps the admin of different web pages track the site’s performance. GSC helps in keyword analysis, fixing website errors, keyword analysis, page experience score, etc.
Google Analytics (GA) Integration
After GSC is set up, we should look for GA integration. This is a free Google tool available to WordPress users google analytics(GA). The GSC focuses on the website’s performance, and GA helps give insights into the audience’s behaviour.
Thus, it helps determine the traffic you get from Google and identifies the particular pages that bring you more traffic. It also helps identify the websites that send you traffic and defines the critical metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, and many more.
Bing Webmaster tools
Like Google, Bing also has its SEO tools that can help you generate more and more traffic. It is called Bing Webmaster tools, and it is free to download.
Here, you can track the performance on the Bing search engine platform and upload sitemaps for your website. Along with this, you can also perform a keyword search on Bing and submit different URLs.
MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is another free-to-use google plugin that is available for WordPress users. This plugin helps track the website’s performance from within the WordPress dashboard without going anywhere else.
Good keyword research tools
Another point that is very important in determining the right WordPress Website SEO strategies for your website is a good keyword search tool. SEO analysis can help you get a good rank, but keyword search tools will help you achieve perfection.
Some excellent keyword search tools are Semrush, Serpstat, and Moz.
Long-tail keyword focus
Long-tail keywords can be defined as keywords that consist of two or more words. They can be answers to the public and be used in forums. There are some benefits of using long-tail keywords because they come under Google’s auto-suggest feature.
User intent
One of the critical factors that you should always keep in mind while creating any website is to create content specific to a target audience.
This means that the visitors to your website should find the information value provided on your website. This improves the quality of your leads and helps you gain more web traffic.
Question-based keywords
Another way to create content according to user intent is by making featured snippets and queries in the form of questions. Since most of the queries are in question format, creating question-based keywords can help.
Nailing the Headline
The headline of your website should be catchy so that the readers should be interested in clicking your link. When a user searches for some content and your website is shown in the results feed, the reader should find the headline valuable enough to click and go through your website.
Increasing dwell time by adding videos
Dwelling time is any user’s total amount of time on your website. And the dwell time is high. Google will rank you to higher positions with its information from bots. And one of the key ways to do that is by adding videos to your content.
The videos you intend to add should be informative and easy to understand. This way, not only the visitors will be able to know about your products, but you will also get chances of going high in the Google video search results.
Keywords in the first and last paragraphs
Last but not least, try to incorporate all the keywords in your first paragraph and the previous paragraph of your webpage.
These are the sections usually looked into when someone opens your website. The SEO analytics tools will find your website more relevant if the keyword density in these paragraphs exceeds.
Installing a WordPress SEO Plugin
SEO plugins for WordPress are the tools that help you to gain complete control over-optimization of the website. The plugins help in writing better content and help in keyword analysis.
They also help in changing the metadata descriptions. Along with all this, they help in enabling breadcrumbs and auto-generate XML sitemaps.
Optimizing the title tags
One of the most acceptable ways of optimizing title tags is to add the keyword in the title tag. Having essential keywords in the title tags can help grow organic traffic on any website.
Further, you can also use click-through rate (CTR) optimization tools. CTRs have been proved to be 20 per cent more effective in gathering potential leads than the traditional methods.
Another way of getting more traffic is by using the company name at the end of your website title tags.
Proper meta description
As discussed, click-through rate or CTR is essential for the website’s growth, and meta descriptions are a significant part of it.
Though meta descriptions don’t affect the rankings of your website, they can help you achieve more CTR, thus helping google recognize your content as a popular one. This indirectly helps your SEO to be more robust.
Optimizing the URL
Another critical factor that can give you more possible leads and take you high in the google search results is optimizing your URL. When creating any website, you will need to create a unique URL. And this URL should be such that the internet user is intrigued to click on it to find out more.
It would be best to keep in mind that the URL you will use should be easily understandable and short. This way, it can be easily embedded on blogs and other links and shared by the visitors themselves, thus adding more chances to your website’s popularity.
Word count
Word count is another factor that affects the amount of traffic for any website. The amount of content you provide can attract both Google and visitors to rank your website at the top.
Although it is unnecessary to have a high amount of content or word count on all the web pages, the topics needing more explanation should have a higher number of word counts for better SEO analytics.
Crafting key pages
The credibility of any website can be defined as the amount of trust the audience can have in your website. Three key factors are essential for google in search quality ratings.
These are expertise in the content, authority in the points, and the trustworthiness of the information. It would be best to consider these things when creating SEO analysis for your website.
Quality backlinks
Backlinks are the website that can be provided on your website, and it shows how much authority your webpage has with such supporting information. Backlinks are vital, and in WordPress SEO, they help create high authority domain links for you.
If the number of referring domains linking to your web pages is on an upward trend, this is a good sign for your website.
Competing sites
You will need to find the websites that link to your competitors in the market. It is not very easy to connect other sites to your content.
Also, when you look for competing sites, you can uncover opportunities where you will find the links that are interested in such content. Tools like Ahrefs help you point to specific pages to get such links.
Outbound links
Defining and highlighting the relationship between your website and the website you link to through different web pages is very important.
So, when you provide “rel’ attributes, it helps the search engines to understand the type of link that has been used. You can also take the help of do-follow links, no-follow links, and sponsored links to create better content for your website.
Few more Crucial WordPress Website SEO Factors
Affiliate links
You will also need to add sponsored attributes to your affiliate links because they will help you track the commission or any referral of a product available between different websites.
This has been used by thousands of bloggers who use WordPress to create their websites. But it would help if you always kept in mind only to add those affiliate links relevant to your content.
Internal linking
Another strategy to enhance your WordPress Website SEO analysis is to link the websites internally. You can then allow users to jump from one post or webpage to another within the same site.
This is a crucial step in SEO, as well as it helps in more straightforward site navigation. Usually, these are incorporated while referring to other content. However, you can also take the help of plugins such as Moz to do that.
Fixing broken links
Broken links are the main reason for the drop in rank of websites by different search engines. There are generally three types of broken links. The first one includes links that point to other websites.
The second is a broken internal link that points to other posts or web pages on the same website. The third is the inbound link that helps users navigate from other websites to yours.
Any broken links from these categories should be immediately fixed.
Linking external sources
Linking to external resources often brings more traffic to the website, but most WordPress users fear this method.
Although there are risks in adding external links, they help provide extra content for your website’s visitors and thus will help you grow more audience and potential leads in no time.
Proper site footer
Footer links are the website links that appear on every page of your website. Well, they are an essential part of WordPress Website SEO analysis. They are the links that the users can use for better navigation.
These can signal to search engines that these pages are essential for you. The examples of footer links are About Company policy, contacts, and many more.
Negative SEO consideration
Negative SEO is a forgotten topic that should be considered to plan and execute WordPress SEO analytics properly. Typically, WordPress Website SEO helps gain more organic traffic to your website.
But when you link too many links to your web pages, the search engines might get it as if you are trying to manipulate the search results. Thus, you will be charged a link penalty. To avoid this issue in your other work process, you must rapidly monitor your backlink profile.
Choosing preferred domain
Earlier it was necessary to include “www” in your domain name. However, with the new regulations, it is not required today. Now you can choose whether you want to have it in your website domain name or not.
So, it is a matter of personal preference in choosing a domain name with “www” or a non-www name. Along with this, you should always consider that your website doesn’t resemble anyone else’s. This will decrease the rating of your website.
Installing SSL certificate
Google provides HTTPS with a ranking factor, and you can use it by installing the SSL certificate on your website.
HTTPS is the present-day internet standard. Also, having an SSL certificate can make your website work smoothly in multiple browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, etc., without any warning signs.
Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console
Setting up XML sitemaps is also vital in WordPress Website SEO analytics. After creating a perfect XML sitemap for your website, you must submit it to the Google Search Console.
After this, you can access the additional data available on your WordPress site status. This will help you to see the number of posts and pages that have been submitted and indexed.
Now that you understand the above-listed and explained WordPress Website SEO factors, it’s high time you get in touch with LSS and choose Local SEO Services as your Web Development Partner.
