7 Ways to Improve SEO on Your WordPress Website

WordPress is the best content management system as compared to other platforms such as Drupal, Joomla. The reason is it’s easy to use and customize the theme of the site without any technical skills. In this post, check out the seven effective ways to improve SEO on your WordPress website.

1. WordPress.org VS WordPress.com

   These are two platforms managed by WordPress. A WordPress.com has the hosting which is free with no FTP access. You don’t need to customize the themes, widgets and plug-ins.

   It is mainly used by the people who have small blogs or business. The best thing you can optimize the site with SEO techniques to improve the rankings. On the other hand, WordPress.org provides a complete control over the website but you need to take backups and buy the hosting plan.

2. Choose the Preferred Domain

   Most of the times site opens from www and non-www version both. This can lead to problems as search engines bots will confuse that which is the main version of the site.

   You can easily select the preferred domain in the Webmasters and use redirection. In WordPress site, 302 redirection is mainly used. Thus it is important to redirect the 301 redirection by using the coding in the .htaccess file.

3. Optimize the URL / Permalinks

   URL structure should be optimized and not contain PHP or % characters. For instance, the URL shouldn’t be www.abc.com/20%.php. The website URL structure should be optimized including the main keyword.

   The URL should be like www.abc.com/mainkeyword.com. In order to set the permalinks in the WordPress, go to WordPress dashboard, select settings and then click Permalinks and select the required structure.

4. Implement Authorship

   It is important to have the Google authorship so that you don’t miss the potential SEO Value. In fact, if you have performed authorship properly then your image will also appear along with the search results. According to study, this improves the click-through rates significantly.

5. Use of Proper Plug-ins for WordPress

   Install the important plug-ins for your WordPress site. Here is the list of some of them

   • Sucuri– It is important for the security and reduces malware attacks.
   • Vault Press– Helps in taking the backups so that you don’t lose the data
   • Limit Login Attempts– It reduces the login attempts so that hackers will get blocked for sometime
   • SEO Wizard– It is an important plug-in for providing redirections if you are not familiar with the .htaccess file
   • Optin Monster– The best plug-in for generating the leads and increasing the traffic.
   • IP Blacklist– Blacklist the IP when you see too many failed login attempts. You can add your IP to the whitelist as well.

6. Set the Robots.txt file

   Robots.txt file is very important as it tells bots which pages to crawl and which aren’t. The file should be proper for blocking certain pages and allowing important pages.

   Let’s say you have a thank you page which appears after certain action on the website. But you don’t want to crawl and index those pages so you have to give the tag no follow and no index. Thus robots.txt file can be an effective tool for SEO when optimizing WordPress site.

   WordPress Yoast Plug-in

   It is one of the best plug-ins for performing the Search engine optimization of any site. There are two key factors Google consider while ranking web pages- Readability and SEO. Both should have good scores in order to appear higher in the search results.

   Readability includes less usage of passive tone, use of more transition words, shorter sentences, and good Flesch reading scores. On the other hand, SEO should include optimizing heading tags, Meta tags, ALT tags.

   The content should be properly optimized for the main keywords. Maintain the keyword density and keyword proximity. Your blog appears higher in the search engine results pages if you have got the two green radio buttons.

The Bottom Line

WordPress is widely used content management system. It makes your site to appear higher in the search results with proper techniques.

There are many other CMS available such as Drupal, Joomla, etc but when comes to SEO, WordPress sites are easy to optimize, customize and get the best results to boost the performance of the site.

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