Top 7 SEO tips for WordPress sites

Like Some SEO tips? Making small changes to your site can have a positive effect on SEO.

Don’t give up hope! There are a couple of things you can do to help improve how your WordPress site ranks. These are quick and easy and have been proven to work in the past.

1. Make sure HTTPS is enabled

An SSL certificate is an easy way to show your site is secure, allowing you to rank higher.

Non-secure web pages have pretty much become a thing of the past thanks to SSL certificates. To get started with one, simply order and install it for your site. If you’re using WP, we recommend checking out Really Simple SSL to encrypt all content served on your site automatically.

2. Optimize your URLs

Permalinks are crucial for great SEO and should be set up from the start with WordPress. What’s really great about it is that you can change the preset permalink structure with a plugin.

URL optimisation is essential when optimising your pages on your site for certain search queries and keywords. The primary keyword that you’re targeting should ideally be at the front of the URL.

It is important to understand how search engines crawl your site. When they do, they can easily identify the purpose of your content and serve it to searchers. In order for them to identify the purpose accurately, you need to add a header tag called “content-type.” This will help the crawler know whether the specified content is HTML or text.

3. Use an SEO plugin

Installing SEO plugins is the perfect way to uncover exactly what is stopping your site from ranking as high as it deserves.

Yoast SEO is one of WordPress’ most popular plugins. The free version has a variety of tools to help improve the search-ability of your content and make it easier to read.

Rank Math has an intuitive panel on your post or webpage that lets you see positive changes to your SEO

4. Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions or tags are an element that summarises the content of your post or page. They give search engines a brief description of what they will find on your website.

A meta description should not be longer than 275 characters long as that is all Google will display.

A compelling meta description will get readers interested and click on your post, which will keep you on top of the search engine ranking. Add your keyword to your meta description for easy lookups and do so in the content itself for an optimal SEO rank.

5. Craft good content

High-quality content is significant for SEO. Good quality content goes deeper than just what you write or create on your website.

Do your research and make sure you have a strong grasp of the topic before drafting anything. This will ensure that you not only attract attention from your desired audience but also that you deliver a quality article.

One major thing you should avoid when working on your site is creating duplicate content. This is when you include ideas or topics that have already been created and discussed on your website. Having duplicate content has a negative impact on search engine optimisation and your rating will suffer as a result.

Following the E-A-T model is a great way to get users to trust your brand and have a higher SEO ranking.

What is E-A-T content? Google uses search quality guidelines to ensure the content on a site is good for users. It is not a ranking factor for SEO, but it affects how your content is read.

E-A-T, or Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, content is a new Google search quality guideline that determines how your site is read by Google. It has nothing to do with SEO ranking factors but it affects how the content on your site is read. E-A-T content can be anything from academic articles to blog posts to forum discussions.

E-A-T stands for the expertise of the writer, authoritativeness of the content or site itself and trustworthiness of the content provided.

Having an about us page on your site is a great way to show visitors that you are an expert in the field. This can also drive up your SEO, plus it’s a nice opportunity for you to collaborate with other experts.

6. Site optimisation

Site speed is said to be the next big thing in SEO. The more time you waste on loading a webpage, the less time your customers have to spend on your site and they’ll move on to using someone else’s instead.

Optimize your hosting provider for WordPress with powerful & fast server-side caching options like NGINX or Redis.

Images should also be optimised. If they’re too large or take too long to load, it will strain your website & affect the user experience as a whole. Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve your content can help reduce these load times.

The Jetpack plugin provides a free image CDN, but there are other hosting resources that can be used such as Cloudflare.

Server-side caching is not supported on your hosting plan? Try W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket.

7. Keep an eye on your analytics

See how your website is performing with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You can track both the impact and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and improve how people interact with your site.

There are many tools out there to help with SEO. Bing’s Webmaster Tools and third-party applications like Semrush can be quite useful during the process.

Utilising these tools also allows you to review your site’s keyword rate and speed. , which can be a good way to judge your success on the search engines.  Optimize your site for user experience This is something not many people are aware of. It’s generally assumed that developing a website and changing its content is enough, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Final words

SEO can be tough, particularly for new website creators and entrepreneurs. The following tips will help you on your way to ranking. And if you start with a solid foundation and carefully produce good quality content, your chances of success will be high.