You wrote a great blog, what’s the value of it if people can’t read it. And to get it to the right audience, SEO is the main weapon you can use.
There’s some tips for SEO for beginners:How and what techniques should you use to get better rankings in search engines.
Contents
- 1 What is WordPress SEO
- 2 Some tips for WordPress SEO beginners
- 3 1.Original content
- 4 2. Provide value to your reader
- 5 3. Improve your page speed for better rankings
- 6 4. Increase quality links and backlinks
- 7 5. Use an SEO-friendly permalink structure
- 8 6. Nofollow untrusted and useless links
- 9 7. Use an SEO optimized WordPress theme
- 10 8. Using a caching plugin
- 11 9. More internal links
- 12 10. Write a good article title
- 13 11. Use your focus keyword throughout your article
- 14 12. Title and meta description tags
- 15 13. Alternative text for images
- 16 14. Use the right title tag
- 17 15. Getting the Most Out of WordPress SEO Plugins
- 18 16. Remove invalid link
- 19 17. Add a sitemap link to your robots.txt file
- 20 Summary: Should you write for search engines or for humans?
What is WordPress SEO
The key to blogging success is to think like your readers. You have to think like your readers in order to provide them with ideal content.
One obvious mistake that many bloggers make is that they don’t write content specifically for their readers – they write it for search engines.
As a result, sometimes the information and communication are not expressed correctly. While you may understand what you are expressing, your readers simply don’t understand it and find the content hard to relate to. Optimizing your website for search engines is the main focus of SEO.
SEO means “search engine optimization”. If you are proud of your content and think it will help others greatly, you can be sure that your content will get ranked on Google.
However, always remember this: SEO content talks to search engines and people. For those who don’t know yet, SEO refers to a process of organically amplifying website traffic and rankings. The goal is always to increase the natural traffic to your website and rank in the top positions of the search engine results page (SERP)
One thing you must know and believe is that you cannot cheat Google with shortcuts. Eventually, your website will be penalized and lose your ranking on Google.
Some tips for WordPress SEO beginners
1.Original content
Unpublished, unique content that has not been published anywhere on the web before is known as original content. Original content is loved by Google.
Now, original content does not always mean new content. If your story has not been told before anywhere on the internet, that automatically means it is original. However, giving a professional opinion on a particular subject also counts as original.
Apart from that, it is a great way to show your expertise in a particular field to your audience. Always publish original content or information. If you can bring something new to the community, you will be rewarded with higher rankings. In any case, search engines love to filter out content that they consider to be duplicate.
Professional WordPress SEO Tip: You must eliminate duplicate content on your website to get better rankings. Also, it is recommended to do keyword research before optimizing your content for search engines.
2. Provide value to your reader
Provide something of value to your readers – not just to boost your SEO or get ad view traffic.
Whenever you write a blog, make sure you provide more information than your competitors so that your audience can get more value from you.
3. Improve your page speed for better rankings
Page speed and user experience play a vital role when Google ranks pages. Since January 2018, Google has been using page speed as a metric for ranking sites in mobile searches.
Speeding up WordPress means you have to check the following list and make sure you apply all the techniques
Choose a great fast hosting provider
Minify JS, CSS and compress HTML
Use caching on your WordPress site (Also read: WordPress caching guide and cache plugin recommendations)
Use a CDN
Enable Gzip compression, etc.
Optimize images
4. Increase quality links and backlinks
Your website cannot perform well without backlinks from other people. If other websites don’t recommend you, don’t mention you as a reference, your website will most likely not rank well. Backlinks are one of the important ranking factors.
For example, you get mentioned in other blogs, new websites, Youtube videos, Twitter, etc. These mentions create a very healthy, organic presence for your site in the eyes of Google.
In other words, other sites linking to your site act as “votes” for it, and each vote means that the page the link points to is one of the best resources on a given topic. The more votes you get, the better for you. This whole thing is called backlinks. More backlinks from quality sites = better SEO.
5. Use an SEO-friendly permalink structure
If your article is ranking for a different keyword, it would be good to include that keyword in the URL of the page. This can be done quickly in WordPress. You have to go to Settings -> Permalinks. You have to select the article name.
You can also customize other permalinks, but we prefer the format “yourdomain.com/category/post-name/”. Feel free to experiment, but don’t forget to include the post name.
6. Nofollow untrusted and useless links
A link on a web page with the rel=”nofollow” attribute means that the web page tells search engine robots to “don’t follow” the link and that the website does not vouch for the reliability of the linked page. Adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute ensures that it does not gain ranking benefits from the page that posted the link.
7. Use an SEO optimized WordPress theme
Pagespeed and SEO friendly themes are crucial when you want to rank well on Google. Let’s be honest. No one likes a slow website. If your theme takes a long time to load, Google will not rank you well.
Good themes are properly coded, load very fast, and provide a great experience to the user. These themes are also highly responsive and mobile-friendly.
8. Using a caching plugin
Now there are ways not to make your website fast.
47% of visitors expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
40% abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load.
79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with a website’s performance are less likely to return.
A one-second delay reduces conversions by 7%.
To choose the perfect caching plugin for your WordPress website
9. More internal links
If you want some articles to be more important, link to them more often. You should link your special content more often than other content. This will help search engines understand that it is special and deserves more user attention.
Internal links help to execute your SEO strategy well. Internal links not only help you improve your search engine rankings but also get more traffic from your pillar content
10. Write a good article title
You can include the number of “something” you will be talking about in your title. This is a great WordPress SEO trick that can increase user engagement.
Tell readers upfront that they are looking for a quick solution. Users like the idea of what they are getting. Another tips, unique numbers like 11, 7 are more likely to be clicked.
11. Use your focus keyword throughout your article
Before you start writing your content, do proper keyword research. Choose a main keyword and write the entire content based on that main keyword. Also, you should choose a few focus keywords to use throughout the content.
Make sure you try to be as natural as possible when injecting your primary and LSI keywords. Don’t exceed the requirement.
Using too many keywords is bad for SEO. A 1800+ word content should contain 4-5x of your primary keyword.
Writing your focus keyword naturally is the best way to please Google and human readers.
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Title tags should be concise. You should keep your title tags short, 50-60 characters maximum.
Meta description is a small paragraph that appears under the title tag on the search engine results page. The optimal length of meta description is between 150-160 characters.
Use an SEO plugin to conveniently place a title and meta description for your blog. Also, an SEO plugin will suggest how your title and meta description should be.
13. Alternative text for images
While multimedia elements are great for attracting human visitors, Google crawlers rely on text to figure out the information contained on a page.
Alt-text helps crawlers understand what it is about. It also improves your SEO likelihood of getting higher rankings. There is a best practice to sourcing alternative text for images. That is to mix your primary keyword or LSI keyword with the alternative text.
You should use this practice while placing the ALT attribute in the tag to describe the images on your website to search engines.
14. Use the right title tag
Google bots check HTML header tags, such as H1, H2, H3 tags, to determine the relevance of your site’s content.
Screen readers also refer to title tags to understand the structure of the page’s content and present the information correctly to users with disabilities. Screen readers will read the code and tell the user that there is a title (e.g. beep, announce the level, etc.). Screen readers also use titles to quickly scan content, so users can easily jump from one title to the next.
If title tags are not used properly, search engines and screen readers become confused about the structure and priority of the content on the page. This can lead to a confusing user experience and increased page abandonment rates.
The best practice is to have one H1 tag per article. Then you can have multiple H2 and H3 below it. Hierarchy is important. It’s best to include your focus keyword in the title, but don’t overdo it.
15. Getting the Most Out of WordPress SEO Plugins
You must use a good SEO plugin for your website. Such as Yoast SEO、Rank Math and All in One SEO Pack .
16. Remove invalid link
Broken links or bad links can harm your ranking on Google. It is recommended to remove all the bad/wrong links on your website to improve your links.
You don’t have to find the broken links manually and then remove them from your website. There are free WordPress plugins that can help you get rid of this. Plugins like Broken Link Checker will help you find all the broken links of your WordPress website. Once you find all the broken links, remove them at the earliest.
17. Add a sitemap link to your robots.txt file
Are you aware of the robots.txt file? The file is also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or Standard. If not, don’t worry. The robots.txt file determines which parts of your website can be indexed by search engines. Typically, the robots.txt file is placed in the root directory.
For example, if your website name is example.com, then you should be able to view the robots.txt file by visiting example.com/robots.txt
It’s a good idea to add a sitemap link to your robots.txt file. Whenever a robot crawls your robots.txt file, they’ll know where to look for your sitemap. This little file is very important because it also communicates with web robots, letting them know which pages not to crawl.
Leaving the sitemap link in the robots.txt file gave us positive results in our research.
Summary: Should you write for search engines or for humans?
Writing content for your website or blog means balancing search engines and human readers. On one hand, you need to write content that includes specific keywords for SEO purposes so that search engines like Google can find you. On the other hand, you also want to write material that readers want to read. Our best WordPress SEO tip is to optimize your content later and make sure the keywords appear naturally.
Write the article you want to write, then go back and look for places where the keywords would naturally fit in. Once you’ve identified your keywords, you may want to revise some sentences to blend them in.
The best approach is to strike a balance between the two. Both are equally important in increasing your chances of being found in Google searches.
You’ll also want to make sure your website has tight security, has all the best plugins, and is running the latest version of WordPress.