How to Make Your WordPress Blog SEO-Friendly

As an owner of a WordPress website, you want to make your blog search engine optimized (SEO) friendly so that it will rank better on search engines. Your blog will be more visible to readers, and you will receive a rise in organic traffic if you achieve higher ranks on Google and other major search engines.

According to Search Engine Journal, websites that appear on the first page of results returned by Google receive 91.5% of the total traffic that is associated with a certain keyword or phrase. Simply, the first result receives 32.5% of all of that traffic on its alone. Even while there is no secret formula that can be used to game Google’s algorithm, there are measures that can be taken to optimize your blog’s code, formatting, and content so that search engines can easily find and index it. Let’s take a closer look at each of these processes down below.

“WordPress is widely regarded as one of the platforms that is the most search engine optimization (SEO) friendly, and it comes pre-loaded with features that can assist you in optimizing your blog for search engines. In the following paragraphs, we will discuss how you can boost your chances of ranking by using not just these built-in capabilities but also other services and technologies.

The first thing you need to do is select a managed hosting service. Even before you install WordPress, you should choose a hosting solution that can help protect your website and make it load faster. A website that has had its security compromised or loads too slowly will result in negative user experiences and a decrease in traffic, despite the fact that rankings may not be directly affected by these factors. In the end, this has an effect on the SEO of your site. Out of the four different kinds of services, managed hosting is one of the best options for improving the performance of your website. Managed hosting is essentially when you share some of the responsibility of maintaining a blog with the firm that is hosting your website. Your website will be cached on a regular basis, daily malware scans and backups will be performed, security flaws will be patched, and your WordPress plugins and themes will be kept up to date, among other things, by the company. To put it another way, a managed hosting service assists you in operating a website that is dependable, quick, and safe. Managed hosting can help you simplify the process of optimization because factors such as site performance, page load times, and security are all factors that affect SEO. When you have settled on a hosting service, the next step is to select a hosting provider that is dependable and efficient in its operations.

Choose a Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-friendly WordPress Theme.

Did you know that mobile devices accounted for sixty percent of all visitors to organic search engines in 2015? In addition, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly results for the vast majority of search searches, making them the first ones displayed. That being said, in order to optimize your website for both desktop computers and mobile devices, you will need a theme that is responsive. When making your choice, you should also think about the programming that goes into a theme as well as its overall appearance. Your site’s load time can be badly affected by a theme that is either poorly developed or packed with features, both of which can have an adverse effect on the experience that your visitors have and your position in the search results. One example of a theme that has been optimized for search engine visibility is Brando. It is completely responsive, coded using HTML5 and CSS3 and built on the Twitter Bootstrap framework to ensure that it is lightweight and search engine optimization (SEO) friendly.

“Please ensure that your permalink settings are current. On your WordPress website, a permanent URL, also known as a link to a particular post or page, is referred to as a permalink. Plain permalink structures are used by WordPress by default, which means that each of your URLs will be randomly issued a series of numbers and question marks to separate them from one another. This setting is perfectly functional, but it does not assist readers or search engine crawlers in understanding the substance of your posts or the value they hold. You can modify the structure of your permalink to include the keywords that you’re targeting in your post with just one click of the mouse. In this approach, search engines will be able to read the URLs of your website and assess whether or not it has the answers to specific search queries. Simply go to Settings > Permalink and choose the option that is labeled “Post Name.”

“Create Sitemaps Using XML”:

XML sitemaps are files that list each and every page that is hosted on a website in order to make it simpler for search engines to locate, crawl, and index the content hosted on that website. Manually creating a sitemap is possible, but doing so takes some coding knowledge on your part. If that isn’t an option, there are a number of sitemap plugins that you can install that will handle all of the work for you.

After you have finished creating your sitemap, you will upload it to your website’s web server and then send it off to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster. Every time you make a big adjustment to your website, you will be required to manually update and resubmit your sitemap unless you are utilizing Webhostingworld or another platform that automatically updates your sitemap. This will ensure that search engines continue to comprehend how your website is constructed, which will make it easier for them to evaluate and rank your website.

The next step is to optimize the titles of your pages and their meta descriptions. Two of the most significant variables in search engine optimization are page names and meta descriptions. They are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) alongside your URLs and tell visitors what they may expect to discover if they click on one of your posts or pages. In addition to this, they assist search engine crawlers in determining the relevance of your information and matching it with search queries. You need to include the keywords you’re attempting to rank for in your titles and meta descriptions, and you also need to make sure that your descriptions are the required length. The ideal number of characters for titles is 60, and the ideal number of characters for meta descriptions is 160. If your title is lengthier, you should be sure to include your keywords closer to the beginning. In this method, even if the search engine results page (SERP) cuts off part of the title, your content will still be relevant to the users who are conducting the search.

“Optimize Your Photographs:

The process of optimizing your photographs takes place in two stages. To begin, you need to check that they are the appropriate size and have been compressed so that the speed and performance of your website are not affected. You have the option of doing this by hand or making use of an image optimization plugin. The following step is to check if they have included alt text. Both search engines can more accurately rank photos by using the information provided in the alt text, which informs the search engines about the subject matter of the images. Because Google now prioritizes image results above text-based results for certain keywords, this might also enhance your website’s rating on search engine results pages (SERPs). In the following example, the first search engine results page (SERP) that Google provides in response to the query “email newsletter design” includes a significant number of images that can be clicked on before any organic text results. ”

“Make Your Content More Accessible by Using Categories and Tags:

Utilizing categories and tags to organize your material is yet another strategy that can assist site search engines and users in comprehending the structure of your website. You’ll be able to organize your pages and articles according to a variety of broad categories if you use categories. After that, you can go even more particular by using tags. In addition to assisting site users in rapidly locating the information they need, the utilization of these taxonomies will assist search engines in comprehending the organization of your website. In the WordPress dashboard, click on Settings > Writing to create a new category. To create a new tag or manage the ones that are already there, go to Posts > Tags.

Conclusion:

You may make your WordPress blog friendlier to search engine optimization by utilizing the built-in features of WordPress or the plugins that have been covered above. Your chances of ranking highly on search engines and receiving more traffic from natural sources will improve as a result of this.