Get your website more organic traffic with this WordPress SEO Guide.

Follow this WordPress SEO Guide to optimize your WordPress website and rank higher in the SERPs.

This WordPress SEO Guide for your WordPress web design is your strategic guide in getting organic traffic and ranking your website to the top of SERPs. SEO, as it is known, stands for Search Engine Optimization, a strategy, a new tool you can use in increasing your chances of ranking your website higher in search engine results pages or SERPs. WorPress SEO allows your website content to boost its visibility to search engine crawlers, and effectively match keyword searches for web users.

Having WordPress alone is no guarantee to rank your website/ blog on Google. Use the wide array of functionalities and CMS features of WordPress to integrate with your website content optimization strategy. Make it work with reliable web hosting resources and online applications to build or optimize an SEO-friendly website.

WordPress is a widely-used CMS for websites.

WordPress evolved from a blogging platform and became a powerful website builder; and an easy to learn content management system (CMS) you can freely install, deploy, and upgrade. Here, we share the top WordPress SEO guide to help you build and improve your website to be highly visible on the internet using a user-friendly CMS software with accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use features for everyone. When you use WordPress, you can become predictable, and can easily adapt to emerging WordPress SEO guide or techniques.

WordPress provides a way to structure, manage, maintain, and publish websites even if you don’t know HTML. Its robust open-source CMS is used by around 60% of all CMS-built sites globally with around 400 million people who continuously visit WordPress websites each month.

Use WordPress SEO when creating and optimizing your website.

Thousands of WordPress themes, plugins, and templates power a flexible and simple user interface. It reduces development costs and deployment time of any website that uses WordPress. Even if you are a beginner to SEO, you can easily optimize your website for higher Google rankings using WordPress SEO techniques from a collection of actionable SEO Tips from the WordPress SEO Experts.

Google and other search engines are the biggest source of traffic for most websites. These search engines use highly dynamic algorithms to understand and rank pages appropriately in search engine results. However, those algorithms are not always perfect and seem to work as they need your help to understand your blog or website content.

WordPress CMS is flexible enough to create or optimize different types of websites. The proof is, it has effectively worked with Google and made it popular over the years. According to recent Google Trends survey data, the use of WordPress has an increasing trend from 53% in July 2018 to 59% in 2020, a 6% positive change for the last two years. WordPress powers 35% of the websites on the internet in 2020, and among these are top brand websites like Facebook, Time Magazine, Sony, Disney, The New York Times, and more.

When you miss the opportunity of optimizing your blog or WordPress website content, it will be difficult for search engines to index and rank your web content. And as people search for the topics you write about, your website may not appear in the search results. Thus, you will miss out on all that organic traffic. As a website or business owner and aspiring SEO professional, you need a guide such as this WordPress SEO Guide to make your search engine or SEO-friendly.  Maximizing search traffic and online visibility all over the internet.

Learn this WordPress SEO Guide, and apply them to your website:

1. Define your website content optimization strategy

A content optimization strategy makes your content relevant and results-driven. This includes using high-value keywords, updating metadata, checking technical health, testing user experience, and identifying audience intent. When you optimize your webpages and content, you can transform it into an attractive, relevant, and actionable search-query that can match the users. Optimized content ensures your brand image to be consistently visible online.

You can also integrate fixes and improvements on the technical performance (like page loading speed) and content copy of your WordPress website to rank high on SERPs. Lay your content optimization strategy for the text, images, videos, and news content with the use of this WordPress SEO Guide and the succeeding SEO best practices for your WordPress website.

2. Optimize your website’s visibility settings

Aside from this WordPress SEO Guide, benchmark on recent web resources for more WordPress SEO best practices for your visibility structure, including your web hosting solutions. And ensure you sign-up your website with Google Analytics. Use Google’s search engines to optimize your website structure and SEO friendliness through the SEO Stater Guide to improve your website performance in SERPs. Google Adsense can also be a great help to improve your website traffic. Also, “Google AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement” can allow you to learn about creating content that’s relevant to your users’ interests. And ensure you sign-up your website with Google Analytics.

As you optimize the visibility settings of your website, integrate to your SEO Plan these Google’s Tips to increase traffic to your site. You can take advantage of these Google TIps vis-a-vis and the WordPress SEO guide to maximize practical SEO techniques and boost the visibility of your website content pages in Google search engine results.

a. Make sure to submit all of your website content pages to Google for indexing, and this is for free. You can use the Google Search Console (GSC) to submit your URLs to indicate to web crawlers to do a more thorough crawling of your website. The GSC enables you to submit all of your website content pages to the Google index, making it understand the dynamics of your generated URLs or pages that may not be adequately linked to your website.

b. Look for ways Google can crawl and have access to your site. You can search for common keywords in use by most users to link to your website content pages and make your content visible to Google search engines. Do this so you can see SERP trends on your site’s content and determine why you may be ranking or not for particular keywords.

c. Also included ways to diagnose potential problems of your website using GSC to allow Google to understand if and why they are having trouble accessing your WordPress website or specific pages. Once search engines fail to crawl a page of your website, they can not index it. Fixing any errors before Google’s indexing or listing can improve your overall online visibility. Note that if some of your website content pages block Google (like the AdSense crawlers), you can use the robots.txt analysis tool of the GSC to test the changes to that file and allow crawler access.

d. You have to find out which queries drive traffic to your site using Google Search Console. Learn which Google search queries that created “click-through” to your website, and where you were positioned in the SERPs for such search queries.

e. Get re-included – when your site has disappeared from the search engines’ results, read through the Google quality guidelines to fix visibility issues for your WordPress website.

3. Choose a reliable WordPress hosting provider

Look for WordPress hosting providers that can optimize their web servers for WordPress CMS website and also easily host static websites and other PHP applications. Allowing website configuration for maximum security with freedom of use, reliability, and compatibility. Note that hosting environments can affect your website runtime, loading speed, and user experience.

ITDwebdesign.com also owns our own hosting company, and to be honest, we understand the pain points of our clients when it comes to WordPress hosting that is vital for your WordPress SEO. Google and other search engines take page-loading speed, for instance, as a primary factor when they index and rank your site. You need to secure a continuously reliable web server environment that is compatible with the latest cloud technologies, for more power and flexibility than standard shared hosting providers.

Invest in a good web hosting service provider as it affects your site performance, your user experiences, and the physical distance and security between servers and site users. All of these contribute to your website’s ranking factors and help you push to the top of the SERPs. When Google search engine crawlers index your website, they boost those HTTPS sites. Better check and ensure that your website hosts the use of the HTTPS website address.

Whether you own a website or through a web host, having a greater website performance should be on top of your WordPress SEO guide or techniques, especially when you opt to switch hosts to meet these criteria and resort with a WordPress-specific hosting plan. Hence, as we own our WordPress and Joomla hosting company, we can provide you reliable and complete control over the higher quality of service that you demand. Aside from this WordPress SEO Guide that is part of our SEO Services, you can surely benefit from our practical web hosting packages that we customize for your personal, business, and corporate or larger websites.

4. Develop an SEO-Friendly Theme for your WordPress Website

Creating your WordPress website comes with the development of its theme, and one primary WordPress SEO guide or Techniques you have to consider for your WordPress website. It defines what is SEO on your WordPress site and how its overall appearance and layout stands out on Google. It provides functionalities on how to rank your WordPress site on Google.

Your WordPress theme can positively affect your site’s speed and how a theme is developed matters significantly. It must come with clean code to give your site the best chance in search engine results pages or SERPs. When you choose a theme for your WordPress website, opt for those themes that are built ‘SEO-friendly.’

Look for WordPress themes packed with versatile website functionality features specifically designed to improve your SEO, such as new heading tags and metadata options. WordPress.org offers commercially supported GPL-licensed themes, which do not imply that all themes must be zero-cost. It just does not restrict your freedom on how to use it upon receipt of the software. Fortunately, there are plenty of best WordPress themes available that can fit your choosings from around 7,500+ styles you can add to your WordPress website.

5. Use an SEO-friendly URL structure

When you are just starting your WordPress website, this is your great WordPress SEO guide or Guide in choosing what you want to use between www (https://www.yoursite.com) or non-www (https://yoursite.com) in your site’s URL. Search engines would index these two different websites separately, which means you have to choose one of them and stick to it when you set-up your website URL. You can do your site address preference by visiting the Settings » General page. Then, add your preferred URL in both the ‘WordPress Address’ and on the ‘Site Address’ options.

Also, permalinks are the permanent URLs that point to your website posts, pages, and other web content. People use permalinks to refer and link back to your site, which is why their appearance matters, so you have to avoid using unnecessary words such as ‘a,’ ‘an,’ and ‘the’ to make your posts easy to read and share. Use clear, descriptive links that describe their content and allows search engine crawlers to understand your website pages and content easily. Once Google and other search engines make sense of your WordPress website content, they will boost your website’s ranking.

6. Optimize Your Website Functionality

Another WordPress SEO Tip that may not be entirely new to your WordPress website, yet you may be less familiar with, is the WordPress plugins that play a vitally essential role on your WordPress website performance. These are small pieces of additional software you can install, which add new features and functionality to your site.

WordPress.org offers over 50,000 Free WordPress plugins to help optimize the performance of websites and can rank your site higher on Google and other search engine result pages. WordPress plugins are designed specifically to improve your site’s SEO. They can provide small, targeted features such as creating a sitemap (next tip) for better results.

You can opt for a comprehensive SEO plugin, such as Yoast SEO, to add a holistic package of optimization-focused features to your WordPress website. These plugins can help you build a WordPress website that is SEO-friendly.  There are various website design, WordPress SEO guide, and SEO resources online for the World’s most popular WordPress Plugins, so just hop-in and make your wise selection for a comprehensive WordPress Plugin.

7. Create a ‘Sitemap’

When you create and use a sitemap for your WordPress website, you can list the web pages, and other content on your website and make this list available by submitting it to Google. Your sitemap that is usually organized into a hierarchy provides a quick, simple way of looking at the structure, configuration, and content of your WordPress website. Your sitemap’s primary purpose is to communicate your website information to Google and other search engine bots or crawlers. It also helps users navigate throughout your website.

As you add a sitemap to your WordPress website, it does not directly boost its search engine rankings. But being an integral component of your website SEO, it’s still a vital element of your WordPress SEO guide or Tool. Enabling search engine crawlers to index your web pages, and understand how your website content relates to one another. Thus, increasing your online visibility and making it easier for SERPs to index your WordPress website by providing a match of relevant content to related user searches. You can do so with a targeted plugin such as Google XML Sitemaps or a comprehensive SEO tool such as Yoast SEO.

8. Write Your Keyword Optimized Website Content

You may have encountered or have used the concept of keywords before but may not have been enough to optimize your WordPress website content. Your keywords are short phrases of key terms that describe your website content topic ideas. Using the right keywords, you are directing a lot of people to search the key phrases or focus keywords into a search engine when looking for the type of blog post or topic within your website as part of your WordPress SEO guide.

Integral to this WordPress SEO Guide or Techniques is to guide you in building your content by choosing a keyword or keywords for each blog post or web page and using it on various places on your website. These places can be the title, headings, and the content itself of your WordPress website. When you do this On-Page SEO tactic, you are integrating a simple and common way of communicating your website content topic to Google and other search engines.

To increase your chances of showing your content in relevant searches, you have to use this as your primary WordPress SEO guide. So it is best to prevent ‘keyword stuffing’ into many places as it will look unnatural or spammy to search engines.

9. Use Long-Form Content

Google favors the length of a website’s content when it decides to rank that content, but it does not mean that a shorter content can not rank high on the search engines. When your web pages have long-form content, they have greater advantages in terms of relevance and usefulness with search engines. The more comprehensive your content gets to the search engines, your website can better communicate its content topics to the crawlers through its long-tailed keywords-enriched content, title & headings, meta descriptions, other long-form content, and WordPress SEO guide.

Longer content is valuable to your website visitors and content readers as it can increase the perceived credibility and encourage visitors to stay longer on your website. Please take note that as you create long-form content, it is SEO in-depth as possible to improve your existing content. Making it more comprehensive is one of the WordPress SEO guide and quality long-form web content resources worth adapting to your website.

10. Use Heading Tags on Your Website Content

While a sitemap and long-form content are useful to allow the search engine crawlers to see and understand how you organize your WordPress website, it may not make sense to the individual content level. Hence, the use of Heading Tags as your formatting options, which you can apply to the section headings of your website, especially within the web pages and blog posts. You can view these settings in your WordPress editor as Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, and so on.

11. Build Strong Links for your WordPress website

Google and other search engines don’t rank a website in a vacuum. Instead, these search engines look at how well your website connects both internally and externally to other sites. Link building connects your blog posts and web pages, which indicate search engine crawlers how to understand your website content.

Building your links allows people to link back to your site, which tells search engines that your content is valuable to bots and human keyword searches! As with keywords, this is your baseline for backlinking, so use it carefully. Avoid stuffing your website content with a lot of links, or using many links that point to irrelevant pages or only exist to promote products so your search engine rankings will not likely suffer.

Instead, use relevant links where they fit – naturally and effectively – pointing readers towards your website and with high-quality and high-authority websites that already rank high in SERPs. Building your strong internal and external links is key to achieve your best SEO results possible.

12. Design a Mobile-friendly WordPress website

These days, more people browse the internet with the use of their mobile devices. It means that your website needs to perform and display any type of browsing device. In short, design your website that is responsive and adaptable to any browser, including mobile devices.

Responsive website design is a vital ranking factor for Google search engines. It has greater chances to display on SERPs and provide WordPress users with great user experience and search interfaces.  Carefully choose your website design that uses mobile-friendly plugins and themes for WordPress, and robust user-interface support for mobile platforms to drive more organic traffic.

13. Optimize Your Images

websites need SEO-enriched images to provide visual appeal and context to their visitors or users. Plus, images can help website text content more visible to both search engines and humans. website images can greatly impact your SEO in terms of quality, size, and relevance.

Your images’ quality and size can affect the loading speed of your web content pages that is a ranking factor of Google. The search engine crawlers can easily look at the text information of your SEO-enriched images – filenames, titles, alt-text, descriptions, and tags – when they index and understand your WordPress website. Thus, making your website content relevant to both search engines and human searches.

As part of your WordPress SEO, ensure that you optimize the images’ quality and size, including other media, videos, and infographics. Doing the WordPress content optimization, such as image resizing, can lessen the impact on your website loading speed and overall performance. Double-check that each image has a simple URL structure, enriched with focus-keyword, has the descriptive filename, and optimized alt-text, headers/ title, and caption or description.

14. Ensure to Frequently Add and Update Your Posts

Google’s algorithms are likely to consider the frequency of your website content when their crawlers index and rank your website content pages. Older but high-quality web content can do well, but search engines can boost newer fresh content, making its likelihood and relevance higher to search engine bots and human searchers.

Consistently ensure that you frequently add and update your blog posts to rank well in SERPs over time. Adapt and implement a writing and posting schedule to regularly keep yourself on track. You need to vary the types of your blog content to engage your searchers or users consistently. Neglecting older posts and pages is not an option. Do the content updating regularly to optimize it and prompt crawlers to revisit your website content and rank higher on SERPs.

15. Ensure a Quality-focused WordPress Content

When search engines decide to index and rank your website, their goal is to help your content become relevant and make your site visible to the first page of the SERPs. The specific ranking factors and their effects may vary, but quality content remains consistent and sustains success when you adapt these SEO Tips on your WordPress website.

Hence, creating quality-focused content rather than cheating the search engines can achieve the sustained success of your website SEO. Consider long-form content, link-building, WordPress themes, WordPress Plugins, and this WordPress SEO Guide to increase the visibility of your posts, pages, and drive organic traffic. Understand the context, expectations, and the answers to the pain points of your readers.

To focus on providing quality SEO content, remember to check and proofread everything – facts, obsolescence, relevance, latent semantics, and duplication-free content aspects of your WordPress SEO settings. Always begin with a purpose in mind – all details matter, including this WordPress SEO Guide.

Conclusion

Start improving the performance of your WordPress website to get more organic traffic while learning the best WordPress SEO guide 2020. Use this simplified and practical WordPress SEO guide to become a highly visible WordPress website relevant to both search-engine and humans under the new normal. Nowadays, everyone looks for a reliable, simple, and predictable website CMS amidst a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment.

Your WordPress platform is ideal for you – SEO beginners, website business owners, and SEO professionals – to realize your website SEO transformation. Adapt this WordPress SEO Guide, and outrank your competitors in the SERPs while providing a practical foundation for your website content. Integrate relevant WordPress tools (like Moz, Yoast, Ahrefs, etc.) and a few but the best WordPress SEO plugins to understand what SEO is and how to make the most of it.

Boost the organic traffic of your WordPress website using this WordPress SEO Guide within a few months. Feel free to leave in the comments section below all your concerns about building or optimizing your WordPress SEO. Contact us for your Web design, and SEO optimized website needs to improve your bottom line.