WordPress Website SEO Guide 2022
A WordPress website SEO guide is suitable for you if you intend to market your website through search engines. After reading this step by step WordPress website SEO guide, you can optimize your website’s design, content and code to work better with search engines. There are a variety of plugins you can use to create better SEO results, including Page titles, Meta descriptions and keyword density. These plugins are easy to implement and can help bring more organic traffic to your website. We have covered everything you need for your WordPress website from WordPress plugins to SEO tools. This useful website SEO guide will help you from begging to advance SEO techniques to rank your WordPress website in all popular search engines.
Choosing a Domain Name for your Website:
A domain name is a key element in the search engine ranking of a website, and can also be used as a “brand” of sorts. Choosing a good domain name is like choosing a good business name. It should be memorable, unique and easily typed. A good place to start is to ask yourself what you want your website to be about. Then think of words that describe your website. These words can then be used as your domain name. For example, if you are starting a website about dogs, then the domain names may include: DogTips.com, DogFun.com, DogTips.net, DogNews.com etc.
Choosing the right domain name is the first step to building a powerful brand online. Choosing a domain name that is related to your niche is a great way to position your business as an expert in your field. Additionally, choosing a good domain name is important for SEO. The ideal length for a domain is about 11 characters, because it is easy to type, memorable, and easy to spread on social media.
Install An SSL Certificate:
An SSL certificate is a cheap way to protect your website, business and customers from hackers and it improves your website ranking. It is recommended to install an SSL certificate on your website. As your customers are going to spend their hard earned money in your business, it is very important to keep your website secure and make sure that no one is able to access it without a valid and verified SSL certificate. It is difficult to find a hosting service that allows you to install an SSL certificate for free. However, there are some hosting services that offer SSL certificate for free. So you should check whether your hosting service allows you to install an SSL certificate for free.
Choose a Good WordPress Theme:
Choosing a good theme for your website is very important when it comes to the success of your website. Visitors to your website will judge your business by the design and quality of your website. There are many different themes available for WordPress now, so it can be a time consuming process to compare all of them.
First of all, you need to choose a theme that matches your business. For example if you are selling items, you need a theme with a shopping cart. You also want to choose a theme that is mobile friendly so that people can see it on their phones and tablets.
Second, you need to choose a good theme that is well maintained. If you choose a theme that is no longer supported, then you may not be able to update it when WordPress releases a new update.
Third, you need choose a theme that is well supported. If you have a problem, you want to be able to get help quickly when you need it. A good theme support forum is a must!
Install Yoast SEO Plugin:
With more than 20 million downloads, Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin. Yoast SEO helps you to optimize your website’s content, effectively reach the search engines, and improve your search results.
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular and powerful plugin that helps you optimize your site by improving the readability of your content and by adding relevant keywords to your page. You can also add a sitemap to your website using Yoast WordPress plugin. This will help search engines find your content. If you are using WordPress, you can use Yoast SEO to improve the ranking of your posts.
Install an XML Sitemap:
A sitemap is an electronic file which can be submitted to search engines so that it may make crawling and indexing process easier for them. All search engines make use of XML Sitemap for crawling and indexing site pages. XML Sitemap is an online resource meant to guide the search engines through your website’s structure. XML Sitemap is an effective way to let search engines to index every page of your website. This is the best way to make the search engine to detect your website’s content and improve the chances that your website ranks high in the search engine result pages. Here are some simple steps to follow for installing XML Sitemap.
- Create an XML Sitemap. ( You can also use a WordPress Plugin like Yoast SEO )
- Now visit Google Search Console Tools
- In the left panel of your screen, select Sitemaps, then Add/Test Sitemap.
- Enter the location of your Sitemap file and click Submit.
- Click on the link in the confirmation email to verify the Sitemap.
- You can also add the sitemap to your site with a simple HTML tag.
Add A Robots.Txt File In The Root Directory Of Your Website:
The Robots.txt file contains instructions for the search engine crawlers that visit your site. For example, you can use the file to prevent search engines like Google from accessing specific or all pages of your website. Search engines only honor the directives in the robots.txt file. They don’t even consider the other rules that you may have in place such as the meta robots tags. If you have a WordPress website, you can use the SEO by Yoast WordPress plugin for adding robots.txt to your website. If you don’t have a WordPress website, then you can use the Robots.txt Tester plugin. The latter plugin will let you test your robots.txt file and make sure that it’s set up correctly.
Verify your Website in Google Search Console (Connect you site with GSC)
One of the best ways to optimize a WordPress site is to connect it to Google Search Console (GSC). GSC is a powerful tool that can help you monitor your site’s traffic, link building, and indexing status. It is a free service that you can use to view your site statistics as well as monitor any errors on your website. You can easily index all your recent posts and pages with the help of Google Search Console. This amazing search engine optimization tool also help you to remove crawling and indexing errors from you WordPress website. Check each and every post and page whether it is mobile friendly or not. The most important feature of GSC is you can check the loading speed of your whole website as well as individual post of your WordPress website.
Connect with Google Analytics :
The first thing you need to do is to install Google Analytics on your WordPress website . This is a free service from Google that tracks all the activities of your site. Once you have created your Google Analytics account your next step is to create a Google Analytics property for your website. To do this go to Google Analytics, click on _ Property _ and add the tracking ID for your website. You can get your tracking ID from the Google Analytics dashboard.
People use Google Analytics to get information about the source of their traffic, keywords they are ranking well for, number of visitors coming to their site, bounce rates, and if the traffic is growing or dropping.
Bing Webmaster Tools:
Bing Webmaster Tools is a tool of Microsoft to improve search engine ranking in Bing. It gives information on the website on how the search engine works. Search engine algorithms like the Bing Webmaster Tools gives your website the boost it needs so that it can be included in the search results. It is important for any website, especially for WordPress website to be aware of the changes in the search engine algorithms as it can cause the website to rank lower than before.
WordPress Website Visibility Settings
In the past, there used to a be a problem with the Google search rankings and meta-keywords. It is not that way anymore. The most important thing is to remember that Google is not a search engine, it is a search PREDICTOR . What this means is that Google is not a search engine that scours the entire Internet to see which websites are the best.
Google is a search engine that scours the Internet to see which websites are the BEST according to their search user’s preferences. So, if you want your website to be visible to Google, then make sure you make your website as attractive as possible to your visitor. Copywriters often use the 80/20 rule. This means that somewhere between 80% and 20% of your website’s overall traffic comes from only 20% of your website’s pages.
Common sense tells us that these are the pages which are most attractive to the visitor. Now, if you have a website with 500 pages, and if only 20% of your site’s traffic comes from 20% of your pages, then this means that you have more than 400 pages that are not converting very well. So, make sure that you get the best of your web pages and make sure that they convert visitors into visitors into traffic.
Avoid Duplicate Content Issues:
The unique content is the foundation of your blog, and the basis for your search engine ranking and social media presence. However, the duplicate content is a problem for the search engine, which wants only the content that is relevant to users. If your post is too much similar to the content on other websites, search engines will curse you and consider your website as a spammer. Google Webmaster Tools has a very useful Duplicate Content Checker to help you find the duplicate content on your website. You should scan your website and find out the duplicate content issue and you can avoid it.
Image Optimization :
Image optimization is a crucial aspect of your wordpress website .Image optimization requires you to use your image alt tag and image title tag to your advantage. An image’s alt tag and image title tag is your access to the Google image search. The more descriptive you are in your alt tag the more likely you’ll be to rank in the Google image search. Image optimization is a tricky thing, because if you over optimize your image you’ll be flagged as spammy by Google image search. So you have to be a little nimble with your image optimization. In order to optimize your image, you will need a keyword targeted title tag, an image description tag, and of course an image alt tag.
OPTIMIZE Your Description:
If you want your website to appear on Google and other search engines, you should optimize your descriptions. In our wordpress website seo guide have a bonus tip for our reader to optimize your description.
In WordPress, you can add meta tags to your HTML descriptions. These tags should be the keywords that you’d like to appear when someone searches for your website. To do this, you need to go to the WordPress dashboard. In the left hand side, you need to click on ” Settings,” and then on “General.” On the right hand side, you should then click on “Writing.” Expand it, where you should then click on “Page Attributes.” In the description box, you should then type the meta tags you’d like to appear for your website. You should then click “save changes.” Once you’ve done that, check the Google search engine. You should see your website’s SEO in action!
Mobile Friendly:
Desktop is no longer the most important platform. Mobile is growing rapidly and many famous websites are mobile-exclusive. This poses a big problem to websites that were not mobile-friendly. If a website requires a mobile device, it means that websites need to adapt to mobile devices. A mobile-friendly website will make for a better user experience and will keep customers coming in droves to your site. It’s important to keep in mind that mobile users tend to browse with a certain intent and no one wants to be left behind.
Use video and images :
Attaching videos and images to your posts increases the amount of time people spend on your page, and that can dramatically improve your search engine ranking (SEO). In fact, according to a study by HubSpot, posts which include images receive 67% more views than those that do not. That’s a huge boost to your search engine ranking.
Video is an excellent way to increase traffic to your site. Google loves video content, and you can make videos easily with a webcam, so this is a great option for saving time and money. The best way to use video for your business is to make short and compelling videos that demonstrate the features of your product. Show the product being used or give a link to a website where the customer can buy it. People prefer watching videos to reading, so this is a great way to engage your audience and increase your web traffic.
Block Spam comments:
We have included some extra tips in our WordPress website SEO guide to block spam comments on your WP Website.
You can use Akismet WordPress free plugin to block spam comments. It is a plugin which secures your site from spam comments. The only downside of this is site can become a little slow.
You can also use Captcha. It adds a word verification over a box. Legitimate users won’t mind the extra work and spam bots will avoid the site.
You can buy a spam protection service. This is probably the best way to go. But it will be a little more expensive.
Always Create Internal Links:
Internal links are very important for a website. You can easily create them by placing links in your content. You should try to link your internal pages together as much as possible. The more internal links your page has, the more linked pages it will have. This will help search engine rankings. It is very important to have a lot of internal links on your website because they are the only way to make your website popular. It’s very important to have the right type of internal links in your website because if you have a bad type of internal links it can harm your website.
External Linking:
External links are links which point to other sites. External links bring the website a lot of traffic, but they also need to be placed strategically so that the top of the website is not clogged with them. On the other hand, search engines do not give as much importance to them as they do to internal links. They can be used to link to key words in your web page. This will help with SEO ranking.
WordPress post permalink setting from WordPress website :
Setting up the “pretty permalinks” from the admin panel seems easy enough.
You go to Settings->Permalinks, fill out the form, and click Save Changes . But what about the setting for posts, pages, and media? Does it automatically change when you update pretty permalinks? No. There are a few extra steps that you need to do to set up your website to use pretty permalinks. And this isn’t something that you can set up in the WordPress app. You need to do it on the WordPress website.
Use Social Sharing Button Plugins :
Social sharing buttons are the best way to let your readers share your content with their friends and followers. These plugins are a great way to get more traffic and simultaneously they can increase your business. Social media sites are essential part of the digital marketing now, so including social media sharing buttons in your site’s content is a must
There are a lot of plugins which can add social sharing buttons to your wordpress blog. Social media is the best way to get your blog to rank higher on search engines. Users also tend to share your blog if they find it useful thus there are more eyeballs that your blog gets, the higher the chances of it going viral.
Conclusion:
I hope this complete WordPress website SEO guide will help you to rank your WordPress Website in famous search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo etc. If you have still any confusion in your mind about the search engine optimization of your WordPress website. Feel free to ask your question in the comment section below.