SEO has always remained a crucial aspect of digital industry due to ever-evolving dependence of users towards search engines like Google, Bing etc. Almost every individual has easy access to internet and digital device today and tends to look up for something to read, buy or book etc. in the search engine portals. And, most probably they try out the top search results.
In context with WordPress, it is a wonderful CMS platform that comes up with easy to set up and use website to serve your variant needs in regards to SEO. Here, I shall be discussing on some powerful SEO hacks that you can opt for your WordPress blog optimization.
Let’s get started!
- Permalink structure
For WordPress, “Permalink structure” is one of the wonderful SEO hacks. By default, WordPress offers you quite a bad URL structure as it won’t be containing any keywords.
To make your URL more readable for search engines, try to opt for the shortest possible one as it counts as an advantage while optimizing for SEO aspect. For instance, you can choose for “domain/postname” over “domain/category/postname”.
- Updating your WordPress theme
WordPress offers you a variety of themes (Free and Paid) to choose from, but there are many professionals who hire dedicated WordPress development agency and set up tailored solutions for unique outcomes. Many experts recommend the latter method to set up an online WordPress website.
Yet if you are using a pre-made theme for your WordPress blog, it is mandatory to keep it updated periodically to avoid any hurdles of a seamless digital journey.
Also, choosing a premium WordPress theme is highly beneficial as it comes with SEO-friendly features like fast, responsive, cross-browser compatible, secure, up-to-date coding standards, and HTML5 usage.
- Cut down unnecessary plugins
Installing too many plugins on your WordPress blog website can easily slow it down and definitely affect your SEO negatively. So, try to avoid and uninstall inactive or useless plugins that are just acting as a burden on your web performance.
- Adding XML sitemaps
An XML or Extensible Markup Language sitemap is generally a file which incorporates the lists of all the URLs of your website.
It is equally useful for search engine crawlers as it is for web users while intimidating Google that your web pages are ready to crawl. When it comes to ranking Google doesn’t rank web pages individually and not the whole website.
In your ‘WP Dashboard menu’,
click on SEO→ XML Sitemaps→ Enable→ click “XML Sitemap”→ highlight & copy URL in address bar
Then, go to “Google Search Console” and follow;
Under “Crawl Heading” click “Sitemaps”→ click on “Add/Test Sitemap”
- Working on page load speed
The total time that your website takes to load is an essential factor when it comes to search engine optimization. Many studies have successfully proved that if your website takes more than 2-3 seconds while loading, you are falling behind the conversions.
As today’s consumers don’t wish to wait for a long to get your website opened as they have multiple choice available in the web world. Also, Google is perpetually stressing on improving user experience, the faster your WordPress blog loads, the higher it shall rank in the search results.
- Internal linking
Internal linking is commonly used in main navigation of your website and connects the different pages on your domain. And, it can be proved as the biggest powerhouse to strengthen your sales funnels along with SEO enhancements.
Also, it helps you with the following:
– Google crawling of your website
– Increasing visitors’ engagement
– Passing link juice from one web page to another
To know more about building internal linking strategies, you can always take help from experts.
While concluding this article, I would like to state that practicing all these above-mentioned hacks shall definitely help you to optimize your website from SEO aspect. Also, displaying social signals (sharing, feedbacks, posts etc.) can also help you in the same.
At last, I am hopeful that you find this reading useful in context with your future endeavors.
