SEO Checklist For Your WordPress Blog

1. Install An SEO-Friendly Theme?

You can find thousands of free themes available for creating your WordPress website. All of these might individually claim to be SEO friendly but they might not be as much.

These themes might come as a unit with a lot of unwanted scripts and plugins that you are most likely not going to use. This in turn might have a direct effect on the load times and slow down your whole performance. Always install a theme after running a brief demo on Google’s web.dev tool.

2. Do Your Basic SEO Hygiene Checks

This is the set-up phase where you’ll have to ensure that you do the following

1. Yoast Plugin?

It is a free SEO plugin for WordPress, it’ll help you identify your shortcomings and areas of improvement for you to acknowledge the better practices to follow.

2. Sitemap

This is a basic gist of your website URLs to help the search engines easily glance through the content on your site to help them crawl and index your pages while a relevant query is made. You can do this using the Yoast plugin.

3. Robots.txt

It is a plain text file to pose limitations in place on where the search engines can and cannot go on your website. For example, if you are an eCommerce website you don’t want your cart page listed but rather the rest. Also, learn why is secure e-commerce web development important.

4. Google Analytics And Search Console?

Analytics is basically where you track your audience behavior and understand how many people visit your website on average, how long they stay, and how well they interact with your website. The search console on the other hand will help you understand your site performance and let you know the keywords you rank for.

5. Site Visibility Checks

WordPress has a setting to discourage search engines from indexing, which is to stop it from ranking. It is commonly used while the site is on maintenance or development. Ensure this is turned off.

6. Custom URLs

In the settings option of the dashboard, you’ll find permalink options where you can customize the URL structures to be SEO-friendly with the post name or the page name.

3. Keyword Optimization

Keywords are the basis with which the content of your site and your industrial domain will be regarded by Google. Hence, they are going to be a prime focus as soon as you kickstart the SEO efforts for your site. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEM Rush, or Ahref for your keyword research.

While your content should predominantly revolve around being useful to the readers, it should also have loopholes for keyword insertion to make the algorithms understand what you are talking about. Every time you generate a piece of content, always have a focus keyword around which your efforts are based. In the Yoast SEO plugin, you can set the focus keyword and analyze metrics like the keyword density for the same.

Also, remember that keyword difficulty is something you should take note of. It is best practice to go for moderately competitive keywords to improve your chances of ranking.

4. On-Page SEO

1. Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are not exactly linked to WordPress SEO in a direct context. However, a well-written one can increase your Click Through Rate since it can entice the user to read more of your content.

2. H1 tags

The heading tags give context to algorithms and search spiders on what your page is about. Typically, H1 is used as the page title and your content will be structured with H2 to H6 tags in relevant areas. This will also help break your text at various points for a well-structured UI.

3. Internal Linking

This is a best practice to increase the relevancy between different pages of your site. It will also be easy for the users to navigate and toggle between relevant pages that they are interested in, thus increasing their average session time spent on your website. Although, do note that your anchor text and the page you link it to are in the right order to avoid users from getting confused.

4. Image optimization

Images play an important role and hence they must be compressed in size before you upload them to avoid long load times. In addition, the file names of these images should be appropriate and relevant. Since google spiders can’t read the images, you’d have to present them with an alt description defining what it is about.

5. FAQs

They take a lot of real estate on the search engine results and are easily accessible for your users. Research the common questions that the audience might have when it comes to your industry and furnish them with the right answers for the questions they might be wondering about to increase your chances of ranking.

Summary Of The WordPress SEO Checklist

Above all, keep in mind that providing value to your audience is just as important to SEO success as ranking higher in search results. Concentrate on producing excellent, relevant content that speaks to your readers’ needs and interests.

If you work with a top WordPress development company like iTrobes, you can simplify the process of SEO for WordPress blogs. Contact us today!