5 Best SEO Tips for WordPress
This will be a short article, so we won’t be spending too much time trying to convince you that you need good SEO for your WordPress website. If you’re reading this, chances are you already know that Google is one of the most effective marketing channels and can send countless visitors to your site if used correctly.
What we will tell you is that you don’t need to spend years learning how to make your site rank well.
Sure, there are global and UK SEO companies out there that can help you eke out every drop of performance out of your search engine optimization strategy, but the truth is, you don’t need to be an expert to get started.
You can improve your ranking in weeks using the five quick WordPress SEO tips below. And the best part? It takes less than ten minutes to do most of them.
5 Quick SEO Tips for Your WordPress Site
Let’s get started by giving you a quick overview of everything we’re going to talk about:
- Structure and internal linking of your site
- Image optimization and alt text
- Removing weak content
- Mobile optimization
- Site speed and performance
In this post, we assume you already have a basic understanding of SEO and are utilizing SEO best practices, including on-page optimization and keyword research. Start by learning those if you aren’t familiar with them already!
Internal Links and Structure
The navigation of your website plays a crucial role in SEO. Think of it in terms of farming or irrigation. A link to an important page within a site is like a stream of water flowing into it. A website gets more “water” if it has more internal links.
Do not link to too many pages — stick to the essential ones, and remember to keep your navigation clean and simple. Check out your analytics to see which pages receive the most traffic if you aren’t sure which ones are the most important.
On top of that, base a few interlinking decisions on your gut feeling. After all, you know which pages you put the most effort into, and they should get the attention they deserve.
Image Alt Text
Google’s indexing algorithm does not know what an image contains unless you describe it in the alt text. So, adding this text to images is a crucial way to help the algorithm rank your pages and get more traffic.
The alt text can even help you rank higher on non-image searches because Google uses it to determine the topic of a page as a whole.
An image analysis tool like Screaming Frog can help you identify all images without alt text on your site. Although the free version doesn’t display all of them, it does show a good chunk.
Shedding Dead-Weight Content
If you have pages on your site that objectively do not provide any value to the user, you should probably get rid of them.
Think back to the irrigation analogy. You don’t want your SEO “water” wasted on dead-weight pages. Instead, you should uproot these and help your already healthy “plants” thrive.
Keep in mind that a page doesn’t need to be full of life-changing insights to provide value to the reader.
A well-written product description on an e-commerce product page is worth keeping, even though it may not seem like a particularly valuable piece of writing at first glance. So, try to be very selective with what you cut out.
Mobile Optimization
The number of people browsing the Internet on mobile has long surpassed that on desktop. We can only expect this trend to continue as phones improve and voice search becomes more sophisticated, and Google knows this. So, the ranking system rewards mobile-friendly sites.
Every search engine’s primary objective is to provide the best experience possible for its users. It goes without saying that a mobile-optimized website will provide a comparatively better experience on a mobile device.
So how do you make a website more mobile-friendly? Thankfully, with WordPress, this is quite simple. All you need to do is pick a mobile-friendly theme and use responsive plugins.
Site Speed
There are many reasons why site speed is essential. For example, taking too long for a site to load will cause people to leave. But site speed matters to Google as well.
If your site is too slow, Google will penalize it in its rankings, so speeding things up could give you instant results.
Firstly, set up Google Analytics and check out your site speed there. Don’t freak out if the number is quite high — it most likely will be unless you’ve already done some purposeful optimization. There are a few things you can do, such as:
- Compressing any unnecessarily massive images
- Setting up a caching plugin
- Upgrading your hosting provider or plan
If you’ve already tried all of these and still don’t see a significant decrease in loading times, you may need to seek the help of a professional to iron out some more complex kinks.
Conclusion
For now, we will leave you with these quick WordPress SEO tips. We believe it’s important not to get stuck in a loop, reading tips on how to improve. Instead, try to go out and implement these things as soon as possible.
Although these tweaks won’t necessarily work miracles, don’t be surprised if your pages jump to page one of Google within a few weeks.
