Most people think SEO is complicated, but it’s really not. Search engines have a lot of factors that affect your ranking. In this article, we will discuss the top 3 SEO tips that will help you optimize your WordPress site.
On-Page SEO – Optimizing each individual web page
On-page SEO The first step is optimizing the content of your pages. Search engines are looking for specific elements on your WordPress site. If you are missing them, your site won’t show up in search results. Here are three things you can do to optimize your web pages.
- Content – Make sure it is relevant, unique, has the right keywords, and is shareable
- Title Tags – These are the specific titles of a web page and what are displayed in the search engine results. Make sure yours are unique, descriptive, but brief
- Meta Descriptions – Don’t forget these! These 155 characters that summarize your page’s content, is critical for on-page SEO
Quality Backlinks
Once the content on your site is optimized, you need to go out there and get backlinks from other reputable sites in your industry. The reason this is important is that backlinks remain one of the leading factors in how Google ranks your site. SO the more sites link back to you, the higher your rankings.
Here are the important elements of a backlink that you need to keep in mind:
- Make sure the site that is linking to you is relevant to your content. If the site is a different industry than yours, chances are it’s irrelevant. You can use a tool like Ahrefs, to see all the backlinks of your competitors to get an idea of what is relevant to your industry.
- The quality of the site that is linking to you is really important. The higher the domain authority, or DA score, of the site, the better. You should ideally go after sites that have a higher DA than yours. The more quality backlinks you get the higher your own DA score will be, and that will strengthen your overall site.
- Target the correct pages on your site – It is really important that you strengthen the main pages on your site and not the minor ones. For example, if you are an e-commerce company, you should get links to your category and collection pages, as opposed to an obscure product page. The number of links you should shoot for varies by industry, but you should use Ahrefs or MOZ to give you a good idea of the number of links your competitors get to their site.
It’s hard to tell how many links will get you to your goal, but this combination of factors will improve your search engine ranking.
Optimized WordPress Theme
Our third tip to improve the SEO of your site is getting a WordPress theme that is optimized for SEO. That means the theme you get should have all the right elements and features to allow you to do your on-page SEO correctly. It should have an easy way to edit the URL’s, meta tags, and meta descriptions. It should also be optimized for mobile devices and should have a good loading speed, as that is a big factor for search engines. Google wants to display sites that work well, load fast, and provide a good experience for the user. SO make sure that the theme that you pick has ALL of these elements. If you have any questions, you can always ask a WordPress SEO Company to take a look at your theme for you.
Recap
Though there are a lot of elements in SEO, these are three you should start with:
- On-Page SEO- make sure all your elements are optimized for search engines
- Backlinks- make sure to get the right quality backlinks from reputable sites that are relevant to your industry
- Pick a WordPress theme that is optimized for SEO
