Every one wants their website to be optimized for conversions. Putting it into a more decent phrase, you all want your WordPress websites to be SEO friendly.
First and foremost, the quality of your content is to be stressed upon. Your focus should be on making your content more appealing, accessible and functional.
Here are some basic things your website should aim for:
- Gaining the trust of targeted audience
- Retaining this trust in the people
- Eliciting desired reaction from people after they go through your content
Here is how you can make your WordPress website SEO friendly:
- Working on the WordPress speed
Creation of a child theme is paramount. You must be clear about the purpose of putting up your website.
Once this is clear, you should focus on making your website faster. You need to follow the best performance-oriented practices. This might include addition of a couple of .htaccess speed hacks and a CDN (content distribution network) subscription.
Speed of your website is directly proportional to its usability. Thus, the better the speed of your website, the greater is the retention of the interests of the visitors and the higher is the conversion rate. There is no denying that a high conversion rate is you ultimate goal.
- Making the best use of Site Architecture
Information or site Architecture is needs to be thought through before creation of your first content. You need to decide which categories you want to have. Try keeping the number of categories below 10.
Your main aim should be to make sure that the content is uniformly distributed across your website. This is when the optimization of information architecture is to be worked upon. A systematical categorization makes your website appear well-organized.
You also need to ensure that every page should be accessible through one single URL in the normal scenario. However, this task might be tough for you since WordPress makes use of archives and taxonomies.
Here is when WordPress SEO plug-in comes into play. With the help of this plug-in, you will be able to define canonical pages as well as those pages that you do not intend search engines to index at all. The purpose of the latter is to avoid duplication of content of any kind. You can take help from several video tutorials that appear on youtube.
- Making the best use of Tags
Search engines make use of tags and meta tags to determine the category to which your WordPress website belongs to. These tags present good pointers for search engines as well as people. Thus, tags and meta tags are further used to label websites. You need to keep in mind that your keywords should always be incorporated in the title tag, meta description tag and alt tags.
For title tags, try to include branding beside keywords. You can place it at the end of every title tag. Your title tags should not exceed 70 characters. However, there are exceptions to this rule. You might exceed 70 if it is required to explain what the page is about. Your title tag should contain the main topic of the post in general.
Header tags are no more as important to search engines like before. But these tags play an integral role in making your content hierarchically and semantically correct. Also, these tags assist people to read and retain your content in a convenient way.
Meta description is used by search engines to generate result pages. It is basically linked to the first impression. Your meta description ideally should be well-suited to your title and content. Keeping the count below 154 is considered ideal.
Image attributes are equally important for your site since they effectively make your content enticing and engaging. Search engines come to know about images through alt tags and image filenames. People learn about images by reading your captions or image titles. Your image titles might be the same as your alt tags. Make sure to enter your image filenames and captions while uploading your photos.
- Linking to Suitable Posts
Website relationships are of huge importance on the internet. Website relationships imply links. You need to make sure that your WordPress site is properly linked internally as well as externally. This feature enables people to continue reading a topic of their interest. There are many WordPress plug-ins that assist you in getting proper links. Websites that are internally linked are extremely easy for search engines to follow and index.
- Making use of top-rated WordPress SEO plugins
It is a given that most of your content is contained in your pages and posts. So, optimization of your pages and posts is a must. There are multiple WordPress SEO Plug-ins that take care of these aspects that include Page analysis, Technical SEO, Meta & Link Elements, Sitemaps, RSS optimization, Breadcrumbs, Social integration (Facebook Opengraph and Twitter Cards).
- Enhancing the Design
You can work upon the design of your website once you have covered up the SEO basics. Always keep in mind that your customers should enjoy browsing and exploring your website. They should actually feel interested to read the content of you website.
Decent design certainly helps in creating a soothing and pleasant web environment for your visitors. You need to research a bit on the current trends related to the upcoming web designs. Keep it simple, relevant to your theme and relatable. This makes your website way more SEO friendly. 90% of design is comprised of topography. So, it is required of you to focus on choosing the right font to make it easily readable.
- Effective Social Sharing
Search engines also checks every up vote and share your website receives. So, make your content sharable. Research on the various plug-ins that allow you to add social buttons to your posts.
Thus, making your WordPress website SEO friendly is more than just focusing on the technical aspect. The conversion rate optimization (CRO) forms a major part of SEO. So, you should highly focus on CRO in the end rather than anything else.