It was quite easy before to get your website ranked up in Google search results by using some black hat SEO techniques, but with time, the technology has evolved to show users only excellent and worthy content. The new algorithms by Google have helped a lot in keeping only the relevant and good content at the top. You can find a good SEO Agency which will help you get a lot of things done in no time as well. But if you wish to handle your SEO yourself, read on.
The irrelevant content with stuffed keywords are not in the game anymore because of the latest Google algorithms which have de-ranked a lot of keyword-only websites. The major updates in algorithms have enhanced the SEO performance of website which means only the good content will stay up while all the tactics to achieve search results are no longer applicable.
SEO optimized WordPress themes are available for use, but it’s good to have a check on all the necessary SEO features still so your WordPress website can rank up in search results.
Let’s have a look at the SEO checklist for your website so you can integrate all the SEO friendly features on your WordPress website.
1. WordPress SEO plugin
SEO plugins are available for WordPress which help in tracking SEO progress for your website. WordPress websites are good when it comes to SEO, but it is always good to be on the safe side and install an SEO plugin. An SEO plugin can be a great help regarding control over your website SEO. Also, there are some pretty famous SEO plugins available for WordPress which have proven record of enhancing your search results and provide end to end SEO optimization for WordPress.
And there are a few plugins which are not titled as SEO plugins, but greatly improve your SEO. For instance, WordPress Schema Plugins improve how your site appears in search results. This improves your site’s CTR in search results.
2. Check for friendly permalinks
WordPress is a not a good supporter of friendly permalinks which means the structure of URLs in the WordPress website are not very clean. The default structure of WordPress permalinks puts the day and date of the post in the URL.
Usually, the URLs which are good for SEO are the ones which include the title or at least main keywords of the post in the link. Permalink can be made as per the name of the post as well. Permalinks are a great way of enhancing the SEO performance of your website, and cleaner and simpler permalinks can help a great deal in SEO improvement of WordPress website.
Changing the post name is quite easy too, you can simply change the post name by getting into WordPress dashboard and going under permalinks. Select the Post Name, make changes and click on save.
3. Focused keywords still matter a lot
WordPress SEO still supports focused keywords, and you have to put your attention towards it as well because we are focusing on Google results here which is still a computer algorithm, and that is why keywords still matter a lot, and they will continue to. You should be smart enough while generating content for your WordPress website because Google now also caters the well written and well-focused keywords. You can make your content very well optimized and structured so it ranks well in Google listing and it will even get you ranks on some other search engines like Yahoo and Bing.
There should always be a focused keyword when your post a blog or page on your WordPress website. The post should revolve around that subject. Don’t post too much irrelevant stuff because it will just give a bad impression. Every good blogger ensured the carefully subjected and sought out SEO content. Matthew Woodward in his SEO blog states how important right and relevant content is for your website. Keyword density should be between 0.3-05% because unnecessary keyword stuffing is bad for SEO.
4. Check Title Tags
Title tags can be set with the SEO plugin like Yoast SEO. You may already know that Google character viewing limit is 65 characters so you have to be very concise and more characters than this wouldn’t appear. Make sure you deliver the right information within 65 words limit. Use the relevant title tags, and you will appear well in the Google search results. Title tags increase your chances of getting clicked by improving the clickthrough rate as well as having a great effect on your WordPress website SEO. Making your title tags small increases the clicks of the website by improved clickthrough rates.
5. Complete header tags
These are good for your WordPress SEO website as Google crawler bot checks for HTML tags which include H1, H2 and H3 tags which help in determining the content and relevance of your website with the content.
A good SEO optimized post would have one H1 tag and them multiple H2 and H3 tags which explains that there is one focused topic and the relevant points are discussed underneath that. H1 is the most important tag, and it should focus on the main keyword you are targeting and even for long tail versions of your keywords can be used in this heading. However, you should not misuse this tag.
You have to check if your WordPress themes provide these tags because good themes will provide you these tags automatically and you can assign them to relevant headings. The visual dropdown can be used in WordPress for creating headers and assign the HTML tags to the relevant headings because these are very important to Google Crawler and they will improve your SEO dramatically.
Final Words
There are even smaller details of SEO for WordPress, but the above mentioned are mainly the important ones. The WordPress themes have become smarter and developed well to include a lot of SEO features, but it is highly important to check for all the necessary SEO components.Getting high ranks in the search engine will benefit you a lot, and that’s why it should be properly managed. WordPress has even some more essential features which help in ranking your website such as meta tags which have nothing to do with SEO. Make sure you cater the non SEO features of WordPress website ranking as well.