Currently, 455 million sites around the world use WordPress. Its ease of use and flexibility has made it one of the most popular content management systems. But do you know how easy SEO is on the platform?
Unfortunately, it can feel like an endless task. Read on as we help with five must-know steps to proper SEO with WordPress.
1. Get Basic Site Health Correct
Getting your basic site health correct is the first step. Without this, many of your other efforts will prove fruitless.
Start by checking you have the right hosting. According to WordPress, the correct hosting should have HTTPS support with a version of PHP, MySQL, or MariaDB. You should also upgrade any PHP versions to 7.3.
Follow this by checking the site settings. Make sure you are visible to search engines in the reading section.
After this, look at the permalink structure of the site. Permalinks are the URLs that address the pages on the website. Make sure you change it to the post name option.
2. Optimize Your Content
If people don’t need your content, then they are not coming to your site. Once they do get there, they might not even stay. Optimizing your content is one of the best practices you can do to bring in organic traffic and tackle these issues.
Start by researching the type of content your audience wants. This is not just about good keyword research. Do they want blogs, videos or do they respond best to infographics?
Make sure you are optimizing for readability. Run everything through a grammar checker, and space out text with images and headings. This will help keep people engaged for longer and on the page.
3. Organize Flow
The flow is the path people will take as they move through your website. It begins with your homepage, which should have a clear menu. This should then funnel people into categories and then individual posts or pages.
One trick to always get a good flow is to follow the three-click rule. Visitors should be able to find anything on your website within three clicks of the mouse.
4. Speed Up
Speed is crucial when it comes to websites and is even used as a measure by the Google algorithm. A slow website will mean less traffic. Luckily, most of this can be done using the right WordPress plugin.
5. Be Mobile Responsive
Most people do online searches using their mobile devices these days. This makes it important that you cater to them, and make your website mobile responsive. Pictures should resize and text adjusts to fit the screen of the device being viewed upon.
Mobile responsiveness often comes down to the theme you choose. Quality SEO services will be able to implement these changes for you if you don’t want to make a change.
Get Help For SEO With WordPress
SEO with WordPress is not easy. You can adjust one thing and find other changes that occur as a result. Don’t be afraid to enlist the help of a strong digital marketing company.
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