10 Hotshot Ways for Boosting Your WordPress SEO

WordPress websites are created based on a primary objective, which is reaching out to many people as much as possible, through entertainment, awareness and product promotion. With your business goal is building up an audience base to be converted into visitors and potential customers, website optimization through SEO is to be given full focus to improve the site's visibility in various search engines. So, your WordPress website needs to be secured with an SSL certificate from SLLS, and even have a trusted WordPress web hosting provider like Hostinger to keep minimal downtime and optimize servers for WordPress. Once all the basics are met, start building PageRank and domain reputation for improving your SEO rankings.

The stellar steps to boost your WordPress SEO have been covered in the remaining discussion.

1. Speeding Up WordPress Website

Website speed is the ranking factor in the Search Engine Results Pages. Google prioritizes the websites having faster loading time as the audiences refrain from waiting for the page to load. To speed your website, these are the actions you ought to take up –

a. Choosing A Good Web Hosting Service

b. Using a WordPress Caching Plugin like WP Rocket or WP Super Cache for Improving Web Server Performance and Reducing?Page Load Time.

c. Using Content Delivery Network (CDN) for enabling rapid assets transfer for uploading your website’s contents.

d. Adding Custom Excerpts – WordPress displays the full articles by default on the home page and blog pages. By using excerpts, only a small part of the articles can be loaded, for the web pages to load faster. Even you can avoid displaying the duplicated contents to the search engines.

e. Optimizing Images for Quick Loading – To get it done, use the Plugins like Smush Image Compression and Optimization for reducing the image file size.

By implementing these suggestions, your website will be made faster, which will please the users and search engines.

2. Installation of XML Sitemaps

When you have added an XML Sitemap to your website, then it will have a significant impact on your SEO performance. Provide all URLs of your website on one page, and Google will find it easy while indexing your content. The indexation process is excellently sped up by using the Sitemaps. The Search Engines can find all of your website pages in no time and understand your website structure owing to the Sitemap.

Crawling your website with the help of professionals will allow in creating an XML easily. Once your website has been crawled, with one instant click you can export your Sitemap.

By using a plugin like Google XML Sitemaps, you can create a sitemap in WordPress.

3. Checking Search Engine Visibility

The built-in option of WordPress hides your website from the Search Engine. This very option provides the needed time for working on your website contents before it is made public. When working on your site's SEO, it becomes a useful feature.??

So, when your website is ready to go live, ensure to un-check this box for the search engines to crawl and index your pages without any errors. For checking the Search Engine Visibility option, you have to go to your WordPress website's admin area – Settings → Reading Page.

4. Zero Crawling Errors

Your website should be visible for Googlebot to smoothly crawl your website with no crawling errors. When you allow the bots to access your website completely with ease, then it will force Google to index all the relevant content.?

A Note – URL errors, said to be the crawl errors occurring when a search engine bot tries crawling a website’s specific web page include –?

??? 404, 410 – Pages Not Found

??? 301, 202, 307 – Redirects

??? 500, 503 – Server Errors

5. Using the Optimal URL Structure for SEO

Creating an SEO–friendly URL structure, will enable your website to achieve a higher rank on SERPs. From a well-designed URL, the users and search engines will get all the needed information about the contents available on the page.

For creating the perfect URL structure, you need to include the relevant keywords and get rid of the additional words likely to restrict understanding of the main matter.

Meticulously build the Permalinks or the permanent links for strengthening your SEO performance. In WordPress, you can create a custom URL structure for your permanent links. Reach your WordPress website's admin area. Click on Settings → Permalinks. Select the Post Name option at Common Settings for SEO purposes.

Keep In Mind – Modifying the Permalinks in case your website is new is normal. But if you change your Permalinks structure in your already published website, then you will be experiencing a ranking drop in the SERP if Google is not informed about the new Permalink structure. The solution is implementing a 301 redirect for the users to access the same webpage with the renewed Permalink. 404 is unfavourable as user experience, so to ensure users have a good experience, the search engine has to be informed about the same webpage with renewed Permalink.?

6. Running A Log File Analysis

By analyzing your log files, you can exactly see how the search engine crawlers are crawling your site. Get more information about GoogleBot's daily hits, that is your web pages visits,?and ensure your crawl budget is being efficiently spent.

Through the log file analysis, you can detect the ignored pages and website errors. Now, visualize all the web pages not returning a 200 status code to GoogleBot.

7. Content Optimization for SEO

Contents should be search engine friendly as well as to the users. Content optimization for Google is much important when the website is to rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages and drawn in a good deal of organic traffic to the website.

Writing high-quality content using the Yoast SEO plugin is a quick way, as this plugin is helpful in optimization of keywords, checking contents, and making it most search engine friendly.

At the same time, through researches, you can improve your content with extra valuable information. For instance, reviewing all your anchor texts, meta tags, header tags and content tags. Through this practice, you can avoid all sorts of duplicate and empty descriptions.

Add Social Cards Plugin to your WordPress website for gaining more organic traffic. When you allow the users to share your content, you can effortlessly promote your website.

8. Being Careful of Your Linking Structure

The internal linking of your website is having a highly significant impact on your web pages' indexation. Based on how your pages are linked to each other, you are informing Google about the pages having lesser or greater relevance. Ensure efficient distribution of your page authority through your site and link the pages to the related contents. Personalize the robots.txt file for indicating the pages that the search engines should crawl. Likewise, your crawl budget will be efficiently used, thereby avoiding the robots from wasting time at crawling the pages of least importance.

9.?Securing Your WordPress Website

Security is the top-tier priority, and your website should be HTTPS enabled, which is also termed as SSL or Secure Socket Layers. HTTPS is much more effective in encrypting the information being transferred to and from your server, along with sensitive data like passwords and emails.

Make sure to install an SSL Certificate and then force the HTTPS for your website redirecting the users automatically to a secured and encrypted website version.

HTTPS Google has some suggestions while implementing it –

??? Enabling HSTS

??? Not blocking HTTPS pages with Robots.txt

??? Server-side 301 redirects

??? Using 2048 bit keys

10. Responsive Website Design

The chief advantage of using WordPress is you will be able to choose from a series of finely designed responsive themes. User experience or UX is considerably improved by responsive websites, and Google takes it into account while ranking your website.

Do not forget to verify your website's being responsive. Or else, consider choosing a theme with a responsive design for the users to have a good experience while browsing on any device.

Now to state the bottom line clear, it is worth mentioning that by creating unique, high-quality, informative and actionable content that you can share, it becomes easier to feed search engines. Along with the tips mentioned here, quality content keeps the users engaged and improves SEO ranking while boosting conversion rates. Other influential factors are website speed, user experience, page load speed, Google Analytics and all other inputs coming from WordPress web hosting providers play a dominant role.