We all want websites that are search engine friendly. But sometimes when you’re busy, it’s easy to post a new blog post and move on to the next thing on your to-do list.
Over time, this can really hurt your SEO efforts. That is why I have put together this short list of things you can do to boost your WordPress SEO.
Schedule these tasks on your calendar to increase your blog traffic.
1) Post new things regularly
Google has a bias towards fresh content. Part of Google’s algorithm looks at how new the content is and gives preference to the most recent results. That’s why posting original content on a regular basis is important.
Also size matters when it comes to content. Longer content generally ranks higher than shorter content. So strive to make your post at least 500 words long.
2) Create a keyword list
If SEO is a priority, then you will want to develop a keyword list. This is basically a list of keywords and phrases that describes your products and services. These keywords should include words from the search terms that are most likely to be used to find your offers online.
Google has some amazing tools to make keyword searching easy, like Google Search, Google Suggestion, Google Instant, and Google’s Wonder Wheel.
Tip: If you want a really specific keyword list, hire an SEO expert!
3) Install an SEO plugin
This will allow you to set keyword-rich custom titles and meta descriptions for your search engine posts.
A couple of popular SEO plugins to consider are All in One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Again, this is something that your web designer or SEO professional can easily install for you.
4) Manually submit to search engines
What good is a site if no one can find it? That’s why showing up on Google and other popular search engines and directories is one of the most effective ways to get free targeted traffic to your website.
You’ve probably seen many autoship services where you pay a small fee to have your site submitted to hundreds of search engines. Not only will these services not help, they may actually hurt you.
Almost all of these free directories never send a real visitor to your website and getting links from them can hurt your ability to rank on real search engines like Google and Bing.
The best practice is to manually submit your site to the search engines yourself. WordPress makes it easy once you set up an account on Google, Bing, and Yandex Webmaster Tools.
If you are not sure, ask your webmaster or SEO specialist to set up these accounts.
5) Add tags to your posts
Out of the box WordPress comes ready to adopt search engines. Tag features are one of those SEO friendly features that you should take advantage of.
Make sure to add relevant keyword-rich tags to every post you publish.
6) Leave comments on other blogs
Start linking more to other people’s posts on their blogs and encourage them to link to you.
One search engine factor that Google considers is backlinking. A website that has more backlinks is considered more of an authority site and gets higher rankings.
7) Block spam comments
When people leave comments on your blog, it counts as content for Google. So if you have a website on DIY crafts and someone leaves 5 comments about “cheap enhancement pills” that ruins the relevance of your keywords and hurts your ranking.
Therefore, blocking spam comments from being posted on your blog will improve your SEO as well as make real readers of your blog happy.
8) Internal bonding
An easy way to get more traffic is to add internal links to your blog posts.
For example, if you have an article on Overcoming Your Resistance to Blog Writing, at the end of that article you can post links to “Other Related Articles You May Enjoy”: 4 Content Marketing Trends for Business Owners in 2017 and Other Articles related. WordPress SEO by Yoast does this automatically for you, as you can see at the end of this post.
9) Use alternative image tags
For each image you use in your post, be sure to add the Alt tag to help them rank better in image searches. This is another great place to put relevant keywords.
Google has an image search feature that works in much the same way as searching for web pages with keywords and relevancy. So adding Alt tags helps Google find and include your images when someone does an image search.
10) Adjust blog post titles
If you quickly wrote titles for your blog posts before, take the time to review them before posting.
Your blog post titles are vitally important to your SEO ranking, so compare the keywords used with your keyword list and make your blog titles more keyword-rich.
11) Add buttons to share on social networks
When Google sees that a blog post receives many posts and is shared on social media, it increases the ranking of that blog post.
So making it easy for readers to share your posts helps others tweet and share your great content.
12) Update your theme
Not all WordPress themes are SEO friendly and free WordPress themes may be hurting your search engine rankings because of this.
Having a premium WordPress theme ensures that your content will be indexed by search engines, as the developers have taken special time to optimize all aspects in terms of security and SEO.
It’s smart to make sure your theme’s schedule isn’t bloated with inefficient code that slows down page load times. We find this a lot with purchased themes and that is why we only provide custom designed and built WordPress themes for our clients.
