Simple Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Site For SEO

While having a website out there for people to visit it is crucial for any business, its optimization for search engines is just as important as the design itself. After all, there’s little point in having a gorgeous site if there’s no traffic to warrant its existence.

SEO – or Search Engine Optimization – basically involves designing a website so that it is more easily found by search engines like Google, Bing! and Yahoo. The better a site is optimized for SEO, the more likely it is to appear higher up in the rankings for people to more easily find.

WordPress is a popular platform for developing websites, as it is user friendly and offers plenty of options for customization and SEO.

Here are a few simple tips to optimize your WordPress site for the search engines.

Make Sure Your Content is Unique

This goes without saying, but a website with duplicate content is not viewed as very useful in the eyes of Google. If other websites are providing the exact same information worded precisely the same way, what’s the point of your content? Make sure your content is entirely unique so the search engines view your website favourably.

Exchange Backlinks With Other Sites

Backlinks are crucial for websites, and are one of the more important components that Google uses to decide how it will rank a website. Whenever possible, exchange backlinks with other relevant sites that relate to your specific topics, as well as with authority sites that have a high page ranking.

Name Your Image Files Carefully

Not only does text come up in search engines, so do images. That’s why you want to be sure to include your keyword in the description or title of your images to ensure that they are also being ranked in Google. For example, name your image of a staged home in Toronto something like home-staging-Toronto instead of DSC73148.jpg in order to boost the odds of the image getting picked up by search engines.

Use Short Permalinks

A permalink that is understandable and descriptive of the content featured on your webpages will help to get them ranked more easily. For instance, instead of https://www.yourdomainname.com/page-id?917/, consider using https://yourwebsite.com/home-staging-Toronto/. It’s worth noting that only the first 4 words in a permalink are relevant, with succeeding words in the permalink not cared about by Google.

Use SEO Themes

There are hundreds of themes in WordPress to choose from. But from an SEO standpoint, you’d be well-advised to go with a theme that’s already search engine optimized. The code that is used to layout the design will be searched through by Google in order to identify any relevant content. The more code there is, the less keyword density you’ll have. Go with a theme that performs quickly in order to boost your site’s ranking.

This list is by no means exhaustive. There are literally more than 200 criteria that Google uses to determine a website’s ranking. Get yourself a reputable and experienced web designer and developer to help tweak your WordPress site to get it ranked highly in Google!