Top 7 SEO Hacks for WordPress Site You Should Know

WordPress is unquestionably the most preferred content management system across the world – half of the websites that run on a CMS make use of WordPress. The ever-increasing popularity of the WordPress CMS is because of the tons of customization possibilities it provides by offering a plethora of themes and plugins.

Another great benefit of using WordPress powered site is that you don’t need to invest much of your time and efforts in making the website SEO-friendly. This is because WordPress by default comes loaded with features that are search engine optimized.

However, merely depending on built-in WordPress SEO features might not be enough to improve your website rankings on search engines results pages. Besides, in a competitive web world such as today, a lot of factors needs to be considered for implementing significant search-optimized functionality on your site.

Through this post, I’ll share with you some useful and must follow hacks that will help make your WordPress site even more search-engine friendly.

1. Make Your Code Clean and Readable

Bugs and errors in your website code will likely hamper search engines from crawling throughout the site successfully. That is why a lot of emphasis is laid on choosing (or creating) a theme with good and clean code. So, make sure to follow best coding practices and conform to the standards to validate the code.

2. Content is Your Best Optimization Trick

Whenever search engine crawlers enter your website, they pierce through the content and other information provided on the site (and ignore CSS and styles) for assigning ranks. After all, search engines cannot see a website and can just read the site. But your good looking theme design won’t talk to the search engine. Rather, the content in your site helps search engine bots in understanding what value you are adding to the users. And thus, the words and written material you use on your WordPress site are crucial for getting “good” ranks.

3. Write Content Focused on Most Searched Phrases

When it comes to finding any information on the web, we have a tendency to use commonly used words and phrases that can help find a piece of data quickly. Thus, while writing content for your WordPress site, focus on including most searched phrases more than once after a gap. Most importantly, you must become familiarized with the process that search engines follow to scan website content and evaluate it for good ranking.

4. User-friendly Site Navigation

Today, users have become increasingly impatient and will leave your website if they can’t find what they need once they visit the site. This results in high bounce rate and less number of your pages viewed. However, a clear navigation structure is significant in helping visitors find the desired information on your site, which eventually helps fulfill their goals and encourage them to visit your website repeatedly. Needless to say, repeated visits is critical for improving search engine ranking.

Also remember, a search engine spider crawls through any WordPress site from one page to another. Therefore, you must design navigation structure with relevant and easy to understand navigational links to your various pages, categories, etc. – this will help search engines to move through one page of your site to the other in a smooth and seamless manner, by visiting all your website links.

If you’re a web designer and want to improve your designing skills for creating an aesthetically pleasing WordPress site, be sure to look at our article: A Collection of 10 Inspiring tutorials for Web designers

5. Make Sure Your Site is Mobile Optimized

Last year, Google released a mobile-friendly update algorithm and started penalizing the sites that aren’t mobile optimized by lowering their search engine ranking. More and more users are accessing sites and content via their mobile devices, not having a mobile-friendly website can have a profound impact on your user experience and conversion rate. Even if, you’re using a responsive WordPress theme make sure that it is fully optimized for mobile users.

6. Optimize Your Images

Do you have an idea of how the images used on your site can be optimized for search engines? If not, then you should get started with image optimization to boost SEO. In fact, the task of optimizing images for SEO is pretty simple. All you need to do is to add details of the photos of your site to areas such as:

• Title

• Caption

• Alt

• Description

Most importantly, you must focus on the “Alt” area as search engine bots can only see the alt text that you’ve added instead of images. And so, in the “Alt” area write something associated with your images and posts. Bear in mind that large size images can make a page load slowly causing an adverse effect on your site’s search engine ranks. Thus, make sure to optimize the uploaded images on your website. Such an objective can be achieved by using the Smush.it plugin – that helps in compressing images without losing quality.

7. Use Tools to Boost SEO

Lastly, the most obvious trick to improving your WordPress site’s search engine score is to make use of tools that could lend you a hand in your efforts to augment your SEO. Ideally, you can use plugins such as the ones discussed below to accomplish such an objective:

• WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin: This plugin helps in making a WordPress site fully optimized for search engines, by helping you write quality content. It guides you to work on some settings that are essential for SEO. For instance, the plugin will make you remember to enable pretty permalinks. It even helps in generating XML sitemaps, and much more.
• SEOPressor: You can easily learn how good your website’s SEO is, and also provide suggestions to improve your site ranking on search engines. Moreover, it comes bundled with features that could help in accomplishing your evolving SEO needs with efficiency.
• All in One SEO Pack: It is one of the most downloaded plugins that is extensively used by site owners to improve WordPress blog SEO. The plugin offers support for XML sitemap, Google Analytics and SEO on custom post types. It avoids duplicate content to be added to the blog. Also, it optimizes your website titles for search engines automatically.

In Conclusion

These are some of the most useful tricks and easy tricks that will help in optimizing your WordPress install for good search engine ranks.

Author Bio :

Sophia Phillips has been working as a professional in WordPrax Ltd- WordPress web development company and loves sharing information about leveraging multiple benefits of WordPress CMS in the best possible manner. Currently, she has an impressive count of WordPress development-related articles under her name.