There is no one clear definition of Search Engine Optimization. Also, it encompasses a lot of digital elements, such as page speed.
If you think about it, page speed is a matter of usability, and it happens to be an indicator of a website’s quality. Ergo, page speed affects your search engine rankings. Other than that, your website’s usability, design, and accessibility can also increase your conversion.
According to Dragan Nikolic, “Making WordPress [website] SEO friendly means it’s optimized for conversions.”
Make Website SEO Friendly
1. Boost Your Website’s Page Speed
Nikolic advises that you should create a child theme first before you do any optimization hacks. That’s because a child theme allows you to customize further how your website will look.
Good thing, there is a downloadable plugin that can help you do that in just a click.
Once done, you can now move on with testing your site page speed using tools such as PageSpeed Insights. And then you can move on with following the listed suggestions, as well as some best practices that are meant to boost your website’s page speed.
You may also opt to add .htaccess speed hacks and subscribe for a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Another thing you can do is to set up an AMP version of your site. Accelerated Mobile Pages is an excellent approach to Google’s mobile-first indexing.
What AMP does is stripping down your web content of unnecessary elements. As a result, your website loads faster on mobile. Thus, you can provide a great browsing experience to your site visitors who happened to be on mobile.
2. Optimize Your Site’s Architecture
Your website’s information architecture is something that you think about before creating your first content. Johann Carpio defines site architecture as “how a website is laid out and how the pages are interconnected with one another.”
Site architecture has three criteria:
- Technical
- Aesthetic
- Functionality
The goal of optimizing your site’s architecture is to categorize your content. That way, all of it is evenly distributed across your website. Ideally, each web page should be accessible through a single URL.
While WordPress uses archives and taxonomies, there are SEO plugins that allow you to define canonical pages. It also helps you identify which pages and content you do not want search engines to index at all. Thus, you are sure to avoid getting penalized for duplicate content.
3. Which permalink structure is best for SEO?
The permalink structure of a website can play an essential role in its SEO performance. A good permalink structure can make a URL readable, improve user experience, and help in search engine rankings. Here’s a breakdown of the best permalink structures for SEO:
1. Post Name:
https://example.com/sample-post/
This is the most popular and recommended permalink structure for most websites, especially blogs. Using the post name structure ensures that keywords from the title (if optimized correctly) will appear in the URL. This can make it more relevant to search engines and users.
2. Category and Post Name:
https://example.com/category/sample-post/
For websites that have content spanning various categories, this structure can be valuable. It gives users and search engines an understanding of the post’s topic and context by introducing a hierarchy.
3. Custom Structure:
Some websites opt for a custom structure that could include the date, post ID, or other taxonomy. However, for SEO purposes, it’s usually best to keep the URL concise and relevant, so including the date isn’t always recommended unless it’s crucial for the site’s context (like news sites).
For example, including the date:
https://example.com/2023/08/sample-post/
Tips for a good SEO-friendly permalink structure:
Concise and Relevant: Keep URLs short and meaningful. A user should get an idea about the content of the page just by looking at the URL.
Avoid Stop Words: Words like “and,” “or,” “but,” “the,” and “a” can usually be omitted from URLs to keep them shorter and more readable.
Use Hyphens to Separate Words: Hyphens are recognized as space separators in URLs, making them more readable for both humans and search engines.
Maintain Consistency: Once you choose a permalink structure, try to stick with it. Changing the structure frequently can lead to broken links, which can hurt SEO.
Avoid Dynamic URLs: Dynamic URLs with parameters (like ?p=123) are not descriptive and are not recommended for SEO.
Use Redirects Appropriately: If you ever change the URL of a published post, make sure you set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This ensures any existing backlinks or bookmarks don’t lead to a 404 error page, and it also transfers any “SEO juice” from the old URL to the new one.
4. Optimize Important Website Tags
Your tags and meta information are used to label your content. On the other hand, search engines use this information to determine what your website is all about. Also, your tags can be a great place to brand your content.
Here are some relevant tags that you should optimize:
- Title Tags
- Header Tags
- Meta Description
- Image Attributes
- URL Structure or Permalinks
As a rule of thumb, make sure that your keywords are present on your relevant website tags.
On the other hand, Kate Morris advises that your “stick to the core minimum.” That’s because meta tags take up code space, which can compromise your page speed.
5. Internal and External Links
Much like in real life, relationships also matter in the digital world. This comes in the form of internal and external links.
Internal links are those that you use to help interconnect your content to another. Meanwhile, external links are those that you use to connect your content with an external source. Usually, the latter is done to inform readers of your references.
When it comes to your WordPress site, is it essential that you have a good ratio of internal and external links?
Internal links allow your readers to follow through content that is relevant to what they are reading. On the other hand, external links are a great way to showcase that you do not work in a vacuum. You are telling your readers that you connect with sources other than yours.
There is a WordPress plugin that allows you to find the relevant content for your web content. That way, you can link within your content, allowing your readers to follow through in case they want to learn more.
6. Use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin
Your web page will carry most of your content. Thus, it is essential that you optimized it.
Good thing, Yoast’s SEO plugin allows you to do that easily. The plugin comes in with the following features:
- Content analysis
- Technical SEO
- Meta and link elements
- Sitemaps
- RSS optimization
- Breadcrumbs
- Social integration
These features assure you that your content is well optimized before you hit the “publish” button.
Once properly strategized and implemented, SEO can put a company’s brand, products, and services in the front view of potential customers who may want your products or services.
7. Improve Your Site’s Design
After you have the SEO basics covered, the next thing you want to improve on is your site’s design.
Naturally, you want your site visitors to enjoy their browsing experience, as well as read your content. You may opt to follow web design trends or that “best practice” post you just read. Regardless, your website should have a clean and unobtrusive design.
You should also pay attention to choosing the right font since typography is 90% of the design. Nikolic points out:
“Both legibility and readability will increase the chances of people reading what you wrote, liking it, and ultimately doing what you want and ask them to do.”
Is Your WordPress Website SEO Ready?
Just because you are running a WordPress website does not mean you are ready for digital marketing. There are stuff that you need to do, plugins, and online tools that you need to install, and upgrades to make for a basic SEO approach.
Making WordPress websites SEO-friendly is more than the technical stuff. It is all about making sure that your website will serve your audience’s purpose, and that it will perform well on search engines.
So, what’s your idea to make WordPress website SEO friendly?
