“It always seems impossible, until it’s done.” If you’re reading this, you’re probably ready to beef up your Search Engine Optimization to get better listings on search engines and attract more visitors to your site. This checklist contains some easy to use practical tips on how to improve the SEO on your WordPress site. Let’s get started.
The easiest way to get better SEO on your WordPress site is to install an SEO plugin. There are quite a few out there, but the ones that stand out and are the most popular in this area are Yoast SEO and All-In-One SEO. Plugins like these will help guide you to optimize your page titles, individual posts, and much more.
Yoast SEO Yoast is the complete website optimization package. Apart from adding titles and descriptions to your articles, it also allows you to do page analysis, add open graph meta data, publish an xml sitemap, and much much more. It’s very easy to use. We put this on all sites that we develop.
All in One SEO Pack All in One SEO Pack isone of the most downloaded plugins for WordPress. Use All in One SEO Pack to automatically optimize your site for Search Engines. It’s great of the box, and even better with the Pro version.
You should typically only have one SEO plugin installed on a site. Installing more than one will give you conflicts and potentially break things.
This is something you should have already done when launching your site. If not, now is a good time to do so. In your Admin Dashboard under , there is a setting for . Make sure “Discourage Search Engines from Indexing this Site” is is .
Sometimes this is enabled during development phrase for better control over what is being indexed. Unless you have a private site that you don’t want listed on any of the search engines, you’ll want to have this unchecked to t o get listed.
Sitemaps are great in helping search engines index your content. It’s basically a list of all your pages in a certain format that is readable by the crawlers. If you haven’t made one yet, you can use a plugin like Google XML Sitemaps. Sitemaps. If you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, a sitemap generator function is already included there. You just need to enable it in the settings. settings .
When you give your web pages titles, be sure not to go over 55 characters. Your description tag should contain contain 155 or less total characters. characters. Following these guidelines will ensure the title and/or description of your site doesn’t look wonky on the search results. Google likes nice clean titles and helpful descriptions. This is a core functionality of most of the SEO plugins, which will guide you in optimizing your titles and descriptions accordingly.
The big search engines such as Google and Bing offer tools which allow you to better manage your web site listing with them. These tools also give you useful feedback on your sites. They’ll alert you if their crawler their crawler found a missing page, you can also use these tools to submit sitemaps, exclude pages from their results and much more.
https://www.google.com/webmasters
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
The Robots.txt file is another way to control what on your site g ets indexed, and what shouldn’t. Make sure you’re allowing search engines. You engines. You can read more about it at robotstxt.org robotstxt.org.. The structure of a Robots.txt file is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Once you have a file, it should be uploaded uploaded in the root directory / main folder of your site. If you don’t do n’t want to mess around with FTP, you can grab a plugin called Virtual Robots.txt to assist you within the WordPress Dashboard.
Search engines love header tags. Header tags are preformatted font settings that are usually found in the editing bar on your page or post edit edit menu. Using these preformatted options is better for search engines than typing the text and formatting it manually. You should try to have at least one H1 tag on each of your pages with titles. You can also use the H2 tag for content content headers. Some WordPress themes will automatically automatically use a header tag with with your page and post titles.
If you haven’t already, add icons to make your content easily shareable on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. The easiest way to add sharing icons is by using a plugin. plugin. There are plenty of sharing related options options for WordPress in the Plugin Directory. Directory . Choose one that is both right for your needs and displays the type of buttons that would go well with your site design.
This one was also covered at Launch, but it’s worth mentioning again. Compressing your JPG and PNG images will help your site load faster, thus helping your attractiveness to search engines. There are a couple plugins available to do this, such as WP Smush or TinyPNG TinyPNG.. You could also run your images through an online image compression service, such as optimizilla.com
All of your images should have the ALT property filled out with a description of each image. This helps search engines not only index your images, but gives them more information about what your page is about that they can use on their end. The easiest way to add them is to fill out the image information screen that you get every time you upload a new image to your site. Don’t be one of those people that just uploads an image and inserts into a post without properly categorizing and tagging it. Not only is is it good for your SEO to have alt tags and descriptions, it’ll also save you headaches later when you’re searching for a particular image in your media library.
Google has a great tool called PageSpeed Insights Insights which which will analyze your site and not only give you suggestions on what to fix, but will give you helpful information on how to do it. PageSpeed will also check your load time on both desktop and mobile devices. It’s another great tool that is also free. Run your site through both of them for optimal results. You can also use their Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool , which gives you a nice graphical report about how well your site works across mobile and desktop devices.
You can make your site faster and more resilient to downtime by using a Content Delivery Network to help distribute your site around the world by duplicating your content behind the scenes and distributing it to other servers around the world. While not required, it’s a good thing to have – especially if your site grows and you need to keep up with the traffic. The major players are CloudFlare and MaxCDN MaxCDN.. ( Amazon and Rackspace are two others for more advanced users) Lots of hosting companies are integrating with CDNs to make it easier to set up. If you have that option available, it will usually show up in your Control Panel as an add-on service.
Breadcrumbs are navigational links that make it really clear where the visitor is on your site and allows them to get back as they click around. Search engines love these because it helps make their indexing a little easier. There are lots of plugins to create breadcrumbs if your WordPress theme does not have the functionality built in. Yoast SEO has it built right in – ready for you to simply enable it if you need to.
If you’re a local business, you should submit your site to Google Business. Google loves providing localized results.
https://www.google.com/business/
These tips along with great content focused on your niche market will take you far on your SEO journey journey without without having having the the added expense expense of a specialist specialist.. To request a customized customized SEO Report Report specific to your site, please get in touch! touch!
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