Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is one of the most important things to consider when building a new WordPress website.
If you do things right from the start then ongoing SEO and following SEO trends will be easy. However, it will still take a bit of time and money, which means that you should think carefully about where to best direct your efforts.
Once you find out the common SEO terms and their meanings, it’s time to look further into SEO. With this in mind, I’ve come up with a few things that you can do to make sure that you get the most out of your ongoing WordPress SEO efforts. These include:
Using an SEO optimized theme:
Using a search engine-optimised theme is one of the best ways to make sure that your ongoing SEO efforts are going to be effective. Having a decent theme – with well-written code and a decent layout – is crucial when it comes to ranking well.
It’s worth spending a bit of time and money to make sure that you get the right theme to start with. Ask others in the industry, try and get theme recommendations from reputable sources, and above all, don’t be afraid to pay for a premium theme.
Maintain your image library:
It’s very important to make sure that you don’t get lazy when it comes to uploading images to your WordPress website. If you do, your SEO efforts will be impacted.
Make sure that you enter as much information as possible about every single image you use on your website. Consider things like titles, descriptions, captions and alt texts.
Encourage social sharing:
Although your social media presence isn’t something that search engines give a lot of weight, it can help improve your rankings indirectly. If you’re creating content that’s shareable and clickable, more people will visit your website.
If more people visit your website, your search engine rank will increase – especially if people hang around and spend a bit of time exploring your site and the content that you have on offer.
Use a decent SEO plugin:
One of the best ways to direct and manage your SEO efforts is to use a specifically designed plugin. One of my favourite WordPress plugins is Yoast SEO, which tells you exactly what you’re doing well and what you need to work on to boost your search engine ranking.
Concentrate on quality, not quantity:
Search engine algorithms are improving all the time. In the past, simply stuffing a lot of keywords onto your website was enough to give you a decent rank. However, Google now sees actions like this as spammy, and you will be penalised for it.
On the other hand, algorithms can now recognise high-quality content that actually brings value to your readers, which is what you should focus on. Try and create written content that people actually want to read, rather than content that’s simply there for the sake of padding out your website.
Remember, less is more in many cases.
Final Word:
There are a lot of things you can do to improve your website’s search engine ranking. Ultimately, some of these things are more efficient than others. Above, I’ve listed a few tricks that will help you get the most out of your SEO efforts. Good luck and enjoy!