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WordPress powers more than 455 million websites around the world. WordPress is an open-source website builder that also includes plugin architecture and templates. WordPress is used by over half of all websites that require content management. WordPress is used by top brands such as Sony, Samsung and IBM. This shows the versatility and scope of the website builder.

WordPress websites require SEO, just like any other website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is the process of increasing a website’s organic traffic and ranking in search engines such as Google and Bing. This involves publishing quality content, monitoring the technical health of a website, and maintaining a strong local search presence.

70% of marketers believe SEO is more effective than paid advertising in generating sales. SEO will give your WordPress website an edge over other sites and increase its ranking. SEO can be described as a flexible framework that includes rules, processes and marketing strategies.

Here are the top WordPress SEO tips that will increase traffic and sales.

WordPress SEO Basics

WordPress says, "Just as flowers need the right environment for growth, WordPress works best when it is in a rich host environment." A website host refers to a company that rents services and technologies to host websites online. WordPress recommends Bluehost, SiteGround and Dreamhost. However, it is possible to use other hosting providers.

As part of its plan, a robust website host offers speed, support, scaleability, and SSL certificate (security). SSL is shorthand for Secure Socket Layer. It's a standard technology that establishes an encrypted connection between a webserver (host) or a web browser client (client). It ensures that all data between them is kept private.

SSL web pages display a padlock icon in front of the URL and an HTTPS "S" in HTTPS. It is the industry standard for online security. It is essential because online shoppers are 85% more likely to avoid insecure websites. This means that if your website isn't secure, you will lose out on over 80% of potential leads.

Your website's speed can also impact your search engine rank. Google recommends that eCommerce websites load in under two seconds. SEO failures will be due to poor uptime or security vulnerabilities. It may seem tempting to choose the cheapest web hosting provider, but this will cause performance problems.

After your website is live, make sure it is easy to navigate and understand both from the search engine's backend and the user's frontend. SaaS platform SEMrush says: "A good website structure should: Group topically similar content together, highlight the most important pages, [as] well as keep content simple, organized in a logical hierarchy.

Best 2022 Tips for Improving Search Engine Optimization of Your WordPress Website

WordPress is SEO-friendly. However, it's important to use the right SEO techniques to reap the SEO benefits. We recommend that you focus your WordPress SEO efforts in the following areas: improving ranking and organic visibility.

Pick an SEO Plugin for Your WordPress Site

A WordPress plugin is software that plugs into your WordPress website. Yoast SEO plugin, for instance, allows users to add functionality to their site or extend it. It also lets them create any type of website from creative portfolios to eCommerce stores.

SEO plugins can be used as extensions for browsers and content management systems. They provide special functions that improve SEO, web analysis and online marketing.

Here are some plugins that can improve your site's search engine optimization.

• Yoast SEO provides tools for businesses to raise their content to the highest SEO standards and improve readability.
• SEO Press: This WordPress plugin creates customer HTML and XML sitemaps. It also improves social sharing and SEO optimization.
• Redirection: This WordPress SEO plugin is free and helps to manage redirects. It prevents visitors from getting a 404 error message.
• Broken Link Checker: Both internal and external broken links can affect website performance. Broken Link Checker identifies missing images and finds broken links.
• W3 Total Cache: This enhances user experience by increasing server performance, caching all aspects of your site and reducing download time.

Add Your Site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools was a web service that Google offers for free. It helps to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot WordPress sites in Google Search Results.

A Google Search Console account allows you to track how Google views your site and optimize it for organic search. This includes viewing referring domains and mobile site performance. Rich search results are also available. You can also resolve server errors, site loads, and security problems like malware and hacking.

Google Search Console, one of the most powerful and overlooked SEO tools, provides feedback on the following:

• Confirm that your website can be found and crawled using Google
• Analyze search engine traffic
• Popular search engine queries your website shows up for
• How many people visit your website?
• How to troubleshoot issues related to search, including mobile useability
• Are you at risk for bad SEO practices?

Submit an XML Sitemap

The two main ways search engine crawler robots can locate web pages are to visit all links on a page, repeat this process for each page visited, or visit pages listed in sitemaps. An XML sitemap, which is a structured listing of all pages available on a website that can be crawled by search engines, allows for this structure to be used. It is machine-readable and not for humans.

Sitemaps can be used as an additional tool to web crawling. Sitemaps are helpful because search engines won’t be able find or index pages that haven’t been linked to by others. Sitemaps can be helpful in this situation. Sitemaps are beneficial for large websites, poorly linked pages, and new websites that don't have backlinks.

Sitemaps are a great tool for search engines to determine which pages are important for crawling websites. Sitemaps are essential for technical SEO. Sitemaps are essential for technical SEO. They contain information about pages, videos and other files on your site, as well as the relationship between them. This allows Google to intelligently and effectively rank it in search engine results.

Check Your Site on Different Browsers and Platforms

Cross-browser Testing is the process of testing whether your website or web apps are compatible with a variety of browsers and devices. Your website should be accessible to all users regardless of their browser or other assistive tools. This is part of WordPress SEO best practices. These are the things you'll need to consider:

• There are many browsers, including Bing, Firefox and Safari.
• There are many devices with different capabilities. These include smartphones and top-of the-the-line smart TVs. Some may not work on some browsers.
• Screen readers are one example of assistive technology that could be used by people who use the internet.

WordPress site testing should assess the base functionality, design, accessibility, responsiveness, and usability. An extensive test will identify usability problems and how to fix them. It will also help you avoid potential pitfalls. It is important to design your WordPress website in a way that will increase brand awareness, drive leads and sales. However, it is equally important to ensure it functions optimally.

WordPress site testing should assess the base functionality, design, accessibility, responsiveness, and usability. An extensive test will identify usability problems and how to fix them. It will also help you avoid potential pitfalls. It is important to design your WordPress website in a way that will increase brand awareness, drive leads and sales. However, it is equally important to ensure that it functions optimally.

Check Your Loading Speeds

When page loads take too long, visitors will abandon websites. This makes it less appealing and increases the chance that they won’t return. Google says that the ideal website load time should be two seconds. Users will abandon websites if it takes more than three seconds. We live in an age of instant gratification and online competition. Therefore, slow loading web pages is not something that businesses can afford.

Google insights revealed that bounce rates increase by 90% when page load times go from one second to five minutes. Monster Insights categorizes bounce rates as:

• A score of 80% or more is extremely bad
• 70% - 80% of the population is considered poor
• Average is 50-70%
• Excellent: 30 to 50%
• A tracking error of 20% or less is possible

Speeding up load times can be improved by compressing images, combining files and enabling browser cache. The loading speed of WordPress templates can also be affected. Some templates include dynamic elements, sliders and widgets. These are attractive but not always the most SEO-friendly. There are many lightweight themes.

It's easy to choose default WordPress themes. They are specially optimized for speed and load time. Themes shops such as StudioPress, CSSIgniter and Astra have themes that are both well-coded and optimized for WordPress novices and experts.

Tip: Google Analytics can show you the average bounce rate in your industry. To view this metric, go to Behavior -Site Content- Landing Pages and add "bouncerate" to the report.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile

65% of Google's organic traffic comes from mobile devices. WordPress' backend can be adapted to mobile devices. Mobile-optimized sites automatically adapt to mobile devices. This ensures that sites display properly on smaller screens and makes it easier to navigate by using larger navigation buttons.

Your website that isn't mobile-friendly will make visitors five times more likely leave your site. Mobile interfaces must be mobile-friendly. This means that important information should be placed in the safe zone where thumbs interact most with the screen.

Mobile-friendly advertising and pop-ups are also important. These pop-ups work great on desktops but can cause a problem on mobile screens and make it difficult to use. Some pops, such as age verifications or GDPR compliance cookie opt-ins, are permissible under law. However, unless you absolutely need them, we recommend that you give them a miss. Google penalizes intrusive pop-ups by reducing their ranking.

Small screens have limited real estate, so each piece of content must contribute to your brand's message. You should focus on content and not volume. Only communicate the essential information and make compelling calls to action. Navigation is also important. Mobile users can navigate simple menus intuitively with ease.

Enable SEO Friendly Permalinks

A URL is the full URL that you see and use for any post, page or piece of content on your site. Permalinks consist of two parts: the domain (www.businessname.com) and the slug (e.g., /store/). They are an integral part of a website's structure, and can help it rank higher through SEO.

Effective permalinks should be concise and descriptive. Site visitors and search engines can easily understand the content of a webpage by simply looking at it. The best permalinks have two to four keywords that are relevant to the page. For example, the permalink to an article called "How to Bake Bread from Scratch: The Ultimate Recipe" is https://bestbaking.com/bake-bread/.

As Google's maximum display limit for search results, we recommend that permalinks be between 75-80 characters. Permalink SEO best practices include leaving out dates, using underscores instead of hyphens, including keywords and categories.

Search engines won't understand generic words (also known stop words), so they don't waste space in the permalink. For maximum SEO benefits, it is better to reduce the permalink to only three of the most important descriptive keywords.

WordPress automatically creates a URL for each page and post you make. For example, www.bestbaking.com/?p=6647, so just be sure to optimize it accordingly before publishing your content.

Improve Your Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals refers to a set of specific factors Google considers essential in a website's overall user experience. These metrics are used by the search engine to measure UX. These metrics are related to page interactivity and load time.

• LCP (largest contentful): This is the time when all of the webpage's main content has been rendered on the screen. Slow server response times are the most common reason for poor LCP. LCP can be improved by removing large-sized elements and unneeded third-party scripts (especially JavaScript*), which can dramatically slow down page loading times.
• First input delay (FID), this measures the time taken from the moment a user interacts with a website via tapping on a button, clicking a link or other means to the time that the browser responds.
• Website responsiveness can be delayed if images and scripts are downloaded in an unorganized manner. This score can be improved by reducing JavaScript execution time, cleaning up third-party scripts, as well as minimising main thread work.
• Cumulative layout shifting (CLS: This is a measure of a website’s visual stability and determines if it behaves as users expect. Websites that are visually unstable may have their fonts, images and contact forms shift as they load.
• This occurs when visible elements are made to move due to an addition or reduction in size. Layout shifts can be avoided by setting size attributes for on-page elements, making sure there is enough space for embeds and ads, and using transform animations.

Always keep user experience in mind when making changes to your website. This is the basis of most Google's ranking factors. Remember that Google holds 92% of the market for search engines, but you shouldn't neglect other search engines.

*JavaScript: Often abbreviated JS, JavaScript, a programming language, is one of the most important technologies on the internet alongside HTML and CSS. JavaScript is used by more than 97% of websites to control web page behavior.

Integrate Keyword Research into Your Content Creation Process

Keyword research is the study of keywords and phrases that your target audience uses to search for information online. Keywords can be as simple as one or two words or as complex phrases or questions. Keyword research is essential because it allows you to produce relevant content for customers.

If you have a bakery and you find that people search for chocolate cake recipes, you can create content and marketing materials to promote the store.

This could boost your SEO search visibility because it answers users' queries. You might use phrases such as "how to make chocolate cake," best chocolate cake," easy chocolate cake, etc.

Proper keyword research is essential to validate your digital marketing strategy using accurate data. It can also help refine it if necessary. It is essential for WordPress SEO.

• Keyword search volume: Each term's exact monthly search volume.
• Competitiveness: Based on the competitive landscape of your industry, how difficult is it to rank for a keyword.
• Bidding cost: This is the average cost per click for each keyword. You can use this information to budget for PPC campaigns.

A good keyword research tool can give users ideas they might not have thought of and provides localized data by country. SEMrush and All in One SEO for WordPress are excellent SEO plugins that provide keyword research capabilities to increase SEO and organic traffic.

Make Internal Linking a Habit

These hyperlinks point to another page within the same website as internal links. These links are helpful because they enable users to navigate websites, establish information hierarchy and spread link equity (ranking potential) around websites. These are the reasons why SEO-friendly website architecture is full of internal links.

Search engines must be able to identify the content on a page in order to efficiently list it in their huge keyword-based indexes. Search engines can crawl a site's link structure to locate all of its paths and rank them accordingly.

Google can trace the structure of a website easily if it links to pages A and B. If page C isn’t linked to A or B, the search engine can’t reach it or find it. It doesn't matter if you have great content or good keyword targeting.

Locating pages that rank well for related topics on your website and linking them with descriptive anchor texts is one of the best ways you can find internal linking opportunities. You can increase the number and quality of the internal links that direct to a page. This will boost your keyword ranking as well as the target keyword ranking.

Use SEO Assistants like SEMrush or Surfer

SEO plugins are a common tool in digital marketing, and even our top-ranking agency, AHIT Digital Marketing Agency, uses them because of the many benefits they offer:

• Get insights on competitor SEO strategies
• Manual audits can save you time
• High-converting keywords are essential for content marketing and web copy.
• Track SEO progress and KPIs
• It's easy to visualize and conceptualize data
• Stakeholders should be provided with effective communication tools when reporting on the ROI

Software such as SEMrush, Yoast SEO and Surfer SEO will improve your WordPress SEO.

• SEMrush, a popular software suite that enables you to improve your online visibility and uncover marketing insights, is very popular.
• Yoast SEO, an SEO plugin for WordPress, is specifically made.
• Surfer SEO optimizes written material and creates content plans to make sure content is. High quality
• RankMath makes optimizing content easy with pre-built suggestions based upon SEO best practices.

An SEO plugin does not automatically rank your content higher in search engines. SEO is an ongoing and agile process. If you're unsure about how to optimize your content, Yoast SEO plugin, or similar, can be a great guide. It will give you in-depth information about your audience, traffic sources, and help you make informed decisions.

It is important to select a reliable plugin. Pay attention to customer reviews and 5-star ratings. Each plugin will have information as well as support tickets and technical details. Before you commit to a WordPress plugin, make sure you test it first. This will ensure that it meets your needs and doesn't conflict or break your site.

Optimize Your Titles and Headings

SEO titles and headings are crucial because search engines can understand the content of a website page, making it easier for users to use. The perfect SEO title and heading will balance search engines' needs and users. This makes it more appealing to readers and helps with keyword rankings. It can be easily found on search engine results pages and generates leads and traffic.

Headers are used to organize content. Search Engine Journal recommends using website and content headings the following:

• H1 tags denote the most important text.
• Subheadings are often used with H2 or H3 tags.
• To add structure to these subsections, H4, H5, or H6 tags can be used.

Google is very attentive to headers so it is important to use keywords in a judicious way to aid with SEO. You can front-load keywords (i.e., include them in the lead) so Googlebots can quickly read them. Aim for headings between 50 to 70 characters.

Optimize Your Images

Website loading times are reduced by optimizing web images. A site's bounce rate can be increased by as much as 103% by a mere two-second delay. This is why it is important to ensure that images on your WordPress site are in the correct format, dimensions, sizes, and resolution. The following are the essential elements of WordPress SEO for images:

• Use relevant and precise alt-text
• Caption images using the appropriate keywords
• Images that are compressed
• Before uploading files, name them correctly
• Use responsive images
• Backlinks can be made by using images
• Adding images to an XML sitemap

It's best to think about it from the user's point of view. It is not fun to wait for a slow-loading webpage to load. Optimizing your images will reduce the likelihood of your users leaving your site. SEO-friendly practices such as optimizing images are especially important for large eCommerce sites with large product visuals.

Make Your Blog's Length Just Right

HubSpot found that the ideal length for a blog is between 2,100 and 2,400 words. Blogs that are longer offer more value to readers. You can also include calls-to-action and backlink opportunities in your blogs. Google rankings improve when you have more visitors who are engaged with your pages.

Google can better understand the content of a text by having a higher word count. It also allows you to add more keywords without focusing keyword stuffing. You can therefore optimize your copy naturally and provide more relevant, high-quality content. You can increase traffic to posts that you have already written by using intelligent internal backlinking.

Google will also rank a page or post that is too short, meaning it has too many words, lower. It's important to use search engine-friendly techniques to create a solid content marketing strategy. Blog posts must be engaging for search engines and readers. You can develop a content marketing strategy that is appealing to your target market by conducting keyword and target market research.

Conclusion

Optimizing a WordPress website's SEO requires a variety of practical tasks. These include optimizing coding and formatting, as well as best practices for writing content and publishing it online. You can't just focus on one aspect of digital marketing. To make your business stand out, you need both. You can build a WordPress website to give your business the tools it needs to compete online.

AHIT Digital Marketing Agency provides web design and digital marketing services including SEO for WordPress. Our clients see an increase in traffic of 175% and a rise in monthly leads of 150% when they work with us. Our WordPress SEO solutions produce tangible and meaningful results through increased traffic and conversions. Each package is tailored to suit different business goals. We recommend our free SEO audit as a starting point to improve your WordPress website's search engine results.