26 Tips to Improve Your WordPress SEO to Rank Fast in 2024

Creating a website for your business is a huge task. You want to create something that your customer will love and if you are not a professional then you will have a mountain to climb. It will take several months to build your website and this will be so technical that for every single update, you will need help from professionals making your life miserable. 

In this blog, We shall discuss how WordPress can be a lifesaver for you and your business as well as how WordPress SEO can help you climb the first page of the search engine.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source content management system written in PHP paired with MySQL and MariaDB databases. It’s a popular tool for individuals who want to build a website but have no coding experience. It’s easy, free to use and all you need is to just plug and play.

What is WordPress SEO?

WordPress SEO is said to be the process of optimising the WordPress website to rank up in search engines like Google, Bing or Others. WordPress SEO and traditional SEO are the same things. implementing such a practice will not automatically improve your WordPress website ranking. 

You will still need to have the best SEO strategy that will need on-page, off-page and technical SEO. You will still need to give effort to Keyword research, good quality content and ensure your website is well sorted out i.e., indexed and more.

Now, there are a few things you need to keep in mind as you want your website to appear on the first page of Google. How can you improve the rank of your website using smart Search Engine Optimisation tactics? Here in this blog, we will discuss and address the following:

• Best Practices of WordPress SEO 
• Tips and Tricks for WordPress SEO
• Top WordPress SEO Mistakes to Avoid
• Advanced Tactics

Best Practices of WordPress SEO

1. SEO-friendly WordPress Theme:

As soon as you set foot on a WordPress website, you will be introduced to tons of themes. There are paid themes and thousands of free ones’ as well. Those themes are good and might be eye-catching but not all themes are SEO-friendly. Themes come with scripts and plugins that will slow down your website as well as make them look clunky. This will severely affect your SEO performance.

It is recommended that you choose your website theme wisely. You should always be cautious and run your website through Google’s web.dev tool. With the help of this tool, you will be able to analyse how well your website stacks up in terms of performance and SEO.

2. SEO-friendly URLs

Your search engine needs to understand what your webpages are all about and thus it’s important to have SEO-friendly URLs. With WordPress, you will have the ability to customise your Permalinks. It is ideal to have the permalinks generated from a piece of content on your website.

For Example:

https://www.ausasiaonline.com.au/blog/?p=123

https://www.ausasiaonline.com.au/blog/post-name

They both will direct you to the same website but the latter one is more SEO-friendly than the then initial one. Opting for a post name will help you increase the search engine results of your website and will make it easier to get keyword-rich backlinks.

3. Verifying your website with Google Search Console

It is crucial to track website data i.e., seeing the number of pages on your website that have been crawled and indexed, pinpointing issues, enhancing the website and optimising the content. You can easily verify all those issues using the Google search console.

4. Submit your XML sitemap

 

To stay afloat from this situation, you may disable automatic comments which may appear instantly on your website. Every time there is a comment, you may instantly approve or disapprove of those types of comments to better handle the situation.

If you get a flood of genuine, spam-free comments on your webpage then you will always have to be sure to paginate comments into multiple pages. A flood of comments will slow down the overall loading time of your website and thus in turn will affect your website ranking.

A search engine needs to discover the important pages of your website and thus an XML sitemap helps your search engine to do so. There are many times when your webpage ends up without any internal links while making them harder to find. An XML sitemap is a file that lists important Web pages and makes sure that the search engine finds them and crawls through them. This XML sitemap speeds up your website content discovery.

5. Managing reviews and comments on your website

Reviews and comments are a plus point to have on your website. They provide a good boost in terms of SEO as well as provide a solid way to engage with your targeted audience. 

Real comments and reviews are positive for your website but there may be tons of spammers and bots which are ready to flood your comments with unwanted links and all. These can have a severe impact on your SEO. Those comments may be of Low Quality thus dragging down the website ranking. They are detected as a bad user experience and as such Google may view those content as useless or irrelevant. In extreme cases, Google may remove or demote those pages as spam to protect the quality of their search engine.

To stay afloat from this situation, you may disable automatic comments which may appear instantly on your website. Every time there is a comment, you may instantly approve or disapprove of those types of comments to better handle the situation.

If you get a flood of genuine, spam-free comments on your webpage then you will always have to be sure to paginate comments into multiple pages. A flood of comments will slow down the overall loading time of your website and thus in turn will affect your website ranking.

6. Optimise your blog posts for search engines

Content marketing is a great way to increase online visibility and bring more organic traffic to your website. Optimising your content for SEO is a great way to boost your website ranking and thus improve your website ranking.

There are a few things that we can add to each web page to boost your website ranking
Firstly, each post should have a meta title and a meta description appropriately. Secondly, tag specific keywords that describe the content of the post.

 

When elaborately doing so, you may optimise your blog posts for search engines and thus rank up the website.

7. Add internal links

Having internal links helps search engines to crawl and index your website faster, and boost ranking for lower-ranked or lower-volume pages. They also assist in improving user experience as well as increasing time consumption on the website. In such a context, it is very favourable to have as many internal links as possible for better WordPress SEO.

It is important to make it a habit to include the internal links to posts on your website whenever possible to help spread link juice across your site.

8. Use external links wisely

It is proven that external links are a great way to boost the credibility of your content and generate backlinks to your website. As it is said, you should get more than you give and, in this scenario, you should be wise as to who you give the external link to.

You may prevent this by using the no-follow attribute to the external link from the other website’s external link.

WordPress SEO Tips

1. Install a WordPress SEO plugin

As discussed earlier, WordPress SEO plugins are a good beneficial tool that would ensure ticking off every ranking factor that you need to improve your SEO. Most developers usually use Yoast, Rank Maths or the All-in-One SEO Pack which all are free-to-use tools as well as an extensive list of SEO features.

1. Yoast SEO Or Rank Maths SEO

Yoast SEO and Rank Math SEO both come with many Search engine optimisation features which include the ability to add unique meta title tags, and meta descriptions for every signal page. They also help to preview SEO search appearance, automatically create XML Sitemap, and seamlessly connect with Google Analytics as well as Google Search Console. Both the plugins are incredibly user-friendly with their page analysis features giving the simple tweaks that you need to make before publishing to optimise your post and pages for search engines.

• You may also use both the plugin to
• Gauge the readability of the post
• Ensure technical SEO
• Set canonical URLs
• Linking no-follow or sponsored link
• Modifying the page or post’s social media preview
• Checking for duplicate content.

Moreover, the premium version comes with additional functionality.

2. All-in-one SEO Pack (AIOSEO)

An incredibly easy-to-use WordPress plugin is an All-in-one SEO Pack. This tool can be easily used in WooCommerce and comes with plenty of similar features from Yoast like meta title tags, meta descriptions etc.

They also have SEO analysis and content analysis tools to help optimise the website for maximum gain.

You may also avail some extra features with paid plans, such as:

• Local SEO module
• The sitemap for news and video
• Redirection manager
• Schema markup
• Image SEO
• Managing Visibility
  

  3. Other helpful WordPress SEO plugins:

  • SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant
• This SEO Writing Assistant provides instant SEO recommendations to help optimise content for ranking web pages in the search results.
  • Google XML Sitemaps

  Google XML Sitemaps automatically updates and publishes new content.

  • Schema

  This plugin comes in handy if you want to generate schema for reviews, recipes, events and many more.

  • Broken Link Checker

  This is another plugin that notifies you once your site has broken links or images. This is an incredibly handy tool to prevent Google from preventing search engines from following those URLs.

3. Use WordPress’ WYSIWYG block editor

WYSIWYG which stands for What You See is What You Get is an editing tool software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance for an easy format of your page that the search engine understands.

Contents that are easy for readers to digest are usually recommended by Google. WYSIWYG allows the content to be clear enough to read by breaking it into chunks to help users navigate to the part that they are interested in.

4. Add alt-text to your images

Alt Text contributes to the alternative text where it is a short written description of the image which makes sense of that image when it can’t be viewed for any reason. Alt-text is the way to help the search engine to understand what the image is all about.

Adding alt-text is fairly straightforward in WordPress i.e., filling out the ‘’Alt Text’’ section while adding an image onto your page and post.

It is suggested that Alt-Text doesn’t get broader, keeping it simple while not trying to stuff in a keyword. The goal is to stay as accurate as possible about what the image is all about.

5. Speed up WordPress site

Speeding up your WordPress site matters a lot for your website. Google prioritises websites that load faster and allow frictionless user experience in search engines. To rank your website on Google you must boost your website speed.

Here are a few pointers to look into while speeding up your WordPress site.

• Checking page speed using Google Page-Speed Insights.
• performing on mobile using the Mobile-Friendly Test.
• Optimise your images for a faster loading time

6. Reliable hosting provider

Choosing a reliable hosting provider is of utmost importance as site security is a big deal to Google and its users, if the site is hosted by an unreliable provider, you may get exposed to security vulnerabilities as well as a slow loading speed of your website. This will significantly damage your site ranking and all.  WordPress usually recommends Bluehost, Dream Host, Namecheap and Site Ground. It is recommended to research carefully while selecting alternative options.

7. Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis is often unnoticed and yet it’s a useful tactic. SEO Competitor analysis can help to strategies and see what tools other websites are using to rank up their website to understand where you stand. Using such tools helps you to research content and other elements of the content that websites are using.

WordPress SEO Mistakes to Avoid

As you start working on your WordPress website, there are chances that you will make some common mistakes that will affect your WordPress SEO. Below we have outlined some of the common mistakes that you should avoid.

1. Picking the Wrong Theme

Many of us choose a WordPress website theme that looks good without taking any consideration of SEO. We tend to pick the wrong or common website theme. Simultaneously we tend to choose pictures and animation that look great but are often packed with poor code which sends the website grinding to a screeching halt. Picking the wrong ones will cost you a lot of online visibility and it would be incredibly time-consuming to fix those mistakes.

It is a must to make sure to pick up the right theme. You may check to make sure to test the theme before implementing it. It might be a little hectic, but it will save you tons of money in the future.

2. Using too many plugins

There are more than 55,0000+ plugins available for any WordPress website. You would always want as many plugins i.e., features on your website but here is the thing for plugins, each of them needs to be loaded by the user’s interface. If there are too many plugins, the websites will become clunkier to load and as such will make your website slower to load.

Choose those plugins that are essential to the business. This will result in the smooth and seamless running of your website.

3. Do not forget to submit your sitemap in Google Search Console

As you have done a lot of hard work in creating your SEO-friendly website and pages but you have forgotten to submit your sitemap in the Google search console. This will result in a significant number of web pages that will not appear in the search results.

It is essential to submit your sitemap in the Google search console. You may forget but the best practice is to submit your sitemap to the search console as soon as your website goes live as well as any major updates conducted to your website.

4. Ignoring alt tags for images

As there is a Chinese saying ‘’an image is worth a thousand words’’ Alt-tag helps the search engine to understand what the image is all about. Alt tags are one of the best features in WordPress, and there is no reason not to include those in the image files

You must add alt text to your website images. You may add a plugin like SEO Image Toolbox or SEO Image Optimiser to help you with this.

5. Formatting the content correctly.

There are a few common mistakes that content creators make is that of content formatting, such as:

• Using multiple H1 tags.
• Use subheadings in bold rather than putting heading tags i.e., H2 and H3.
• Using heading tags to format paragraphs and many more.

You must make sure to format the posts before publishing them on the website as well as make sure to follow the best practice as suggested by Google. You may use WYSIWYG as a tool to work on your content.

6. Defining your Permalink structure

Permalink structure is substantial for SEO ranking as Google and users both see them. You should define your permalink structure correctly on your website as well as make sure to focus on keywords in the post name.

You may use formatting structures such as:

• Sitename/blog/blog-name or
• Sitename/blog/category/blog-name

7. Using the footer space

Footer space is an important part of the website for any website. It is vital that you have footer links on your website and Google uses those links in the footer to crawl the different pages of the website. This affects your website ranking by not using the footer space of your website.

Almost all WordPress themes come with footer space. So, make sure to use that space on your home page and other pages as well.

Advanced WordPress SEO Tips:

After learning all the dos and don’ts about WordPress SEO, below are some additional advanced WordPress SEO Tips to get you going.

1. Install cache plugin

As you have used all the necessary tools as well as other plugins for your website, you are still finding your WordPress website taking more loading time. You may install a cache plugin on your website as it helps to improve page speed performance in the browser. Caching helps browsers to load the website quickly for your website.

2. Take advantage of no-indexing

Your website may contain as many pages as required by you. There may be some pages with a piece of minimal information or lower value content which could hurt your SEO ranking. It is suggested not to include those pages in the Index of your website.

You may wish not to index those lower-value content pages such as tag pages, media pages as well as archives.

3. Use schema markup

Schema Markup helps your website help search engines deliver more information and tailor your search results for your users. It gives users additional context for the posts and pages and boosts clickthrough in the search engine.

The most common schema markup is as follows:

• Dates and locations of the events
• Details of the recipe, cook time, nutrition, star rating,
• Business information, location, images, contact details
• Stock levels, pricing, review and many more

As such Schema Markup Is a must to use for your website.

4. Including modification dates

No one likes outdated or old content. It is important to routinely refresh your content to make sure it’s up to date as well as resolve those broken links. This helps the website to give another shot at ranking in the search engine as Google crawls your websites again and again.

You may use the last modified info plugin on your website to display the information above or below the page and replace it with the updated published post.

It’s time to set up your WordPress website with Aus Asia Online

Traditional SEO and WordPress SEO aren’t that much different. The benefits of ranking on the top page of Google are many and it is a lot of hard work but it’s worth it. You may take help from professionals like us at  Aus Asia Online who have vast amounts of experience in WordPress SEO with our highly skilled professional team. Now is the time to improve your WordPress Website ranking in the Google search result.

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