WordPress Tips

Even with technology that changes at lightning speed, SEO is still a top priority. Nothing can replace a content strategy that puts SEO at the top of the list. In today’s electronic marketplace, 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine. The top 3 search results on Google account for 75% of all clicks. You must ensure that your content ranks well.

If you are new to online marketing, SEO is search engine optimization. It is the practice of writing content and code designed to increase your site ranking in search engine results. To rank sites, engines like Google, crawl and index the web to deliver relevant results to queries searching for things across the internet.

SEO is based on understanding the search engine ranking systems as well as knowing what your customers want. There are some evergreen SEO basics that you should always have in your content strategy. In addition, you need to take into account emerging technologies like AI, voice response, and the increasing importance of optimizing sites for mobile devices.

Help your WordPress site outrank the competition with these helpful tips.

Hire a Professional

We believe it’s best to have a professional help you with SEO. Even so, if you are planning to implement it yourself, you can still benefit from hiring a professional to audit your site to help identify areas where there is room for improvement. If that’s not an option, try these helpful tools to get the job done:

• Website Grader: this award-winning free tool from HubSpot gives you a broad overview of what’s working well on your site from a marketing perspective.
• Moz: a paid SEO software and data tool that helps increase traffic, site visibility and ranking in search engine results.
  Monitorbacklinks.com: a tool that rates the websites linking to your site and more.
• Market Goo: a free website report about how your site is doing in pivotal SEO areas like traffic received, mobile, etc.

Once you identify your areas of opportunity, you can invest your time and budget appropriately.

Installing an SEO plugin is also an essential element to better rankings and visibility. There are a plethora of options. However, the one we like is a favorite of many experts: Yoast.

Yoast helps manage meta descriptions, content titles, and can even create XML sitemaps to strengthen your SEO even further. While Yoast takes a little time and effort to set up, you reap many benefits. It is user-friendly for novices and provides excellent performance. If Yoast isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, though, there are nearly 1,000 other SEO plugins you can choose from in the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Tip: When searching for plugins of any kind, make sure and check for things like positive ratings, a high number of active installs, and the last time a plugin was updated.

Lay Your SEO Foundation

While completing an SEO audit and installing a plugin are great places to start, at the end of the day, before even looking at more technical aspects of search engine optimization, good SEO originates from the basics—valuable content, a well-designed website, and security.

Know the Search Engine

Search engines want to present users with the most relevant, accurate results to a query. How do they do that?

Google uses Hummingbird, which is its algorithm that ranks search results. Google keeps this algorithm under tight wraps. Still, SEO experts have estimated it to include more than 200 ranking factors.

Gaining even a basic understanding of the way search engine algorithms are likely finding and ranking content is a good exercise and something you can incorporate back into your own content strategy. If the search engines want accurate, relevant content that’s well-sourced and well-linked, that’s what you should be striving to create.

Make Your Site Easy to Find and Navigate

Your first priority is to make your site easy to crawl and flag for pertinent information to index. If it isn’t, your top-notch content won’t be found. That’s where good sitemaps and using the right keywords is so important.

Search engines must navigate a website. Although search engine results only display web pages, making the navigation of your site logical indicates a higher quality site. What’s more, Google even states that “Google Search uses breadcrumb markup in the body of a web page to categorize the information from the page in search results.”

Google recommends creating a navigation page for your users and an XML sitemap file for search engines. XML sitemaps allow a search engine to discover new and updated pages, however, it’s important to remember to block Google from crawling unnecessary pages so your ratio of crawled to indexed pages is high.

NOYO Web Development has even more helpful tips for optimizing SEO for WordPress sites in 2020. This is the first of a two-part series. Check back next week for even more tips. Or give us a call and let us give you an assessment of your SEO practices and opportunities. We look forward to talking with you.