Search Engine Optimization, shortened to SEO, improves a website’s rankings on search engines. This includes Google, of course but is not limited to it. As well, SEO drives more organic traffic to your website. If your website is on WordPress, you may wonder if there are any specific things you should be doing in your SEO strategy in order to achieve your rankings goals. In fact, there are!
WordPress is no stranger to SEO. It was actually designed with SEO best practices in mind in order to make it easy for its websites to rank well on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Here’s what you need to know to get started:
1. Check Your WordPress Visibility Settings
WordPress has a setting allowing you to hide your website from search engines, intended for developers who are building or rebuilding a website and don’t want visitors to see the work in progress. Rule number one is to make sure the box is checked for your website to actually be crawled and viewed.
2. Manage Your Security
Google loves secure websites. You can count on your website’s authority and ranking to improve the more secure your website is. Secure Sockets Layer , or SSL, is a now industry standard security technology that manages an encrypted server and browser link. With SSL, any sensitive information shared between your website and visitors remains secure. This makes your users happier, and Google sees you as more trustworthy. They feel better recommending your website to users.
3. Optimize Your Images
You can and definitely should optimize just about everything on your WordPress website, including your images. To optimize images, you will use Image-Alt-Text, which are descriptions of the images. Search engines read Image-Alt-Text to rank your website and determine whether or not your photos have the information being searched for by users.
For a WordPress website, there are plugins made specifically for this task, like SEO Optimized Images. Also be sure to read through the list of your current plugins’ features to ensure they allow you to add Image-Alt-Text.
4. Optimize Your Comments
WordPress allows readers to leave comments on blog posts. These comments are an excellent method to boost engagement on your website. Google loves to see engagement! Engagement typically means more traffic, link sharing, and interaction, and eventually improved SEO. Spam in your comments could ruin your SEO and ranking though. Ensure your website is only receiving genuine comments from real people, like you’ll see here on On The Map reviews.
Are you move forward with WordPress SEO best practices in order to improve your website, boost organic (free!) traffic, and increase your company’s authority on Google? Optimizing your WordPress website and content makes you more likely to reach the people actively searching for information about services and products related to yours. Don’t worry if the advice mentioned above sounds difficult. A dedicated team of SEO experts can handle all of this for you!