4 Best WordPress SEO Tips & Techniques to Boost Rankings

Nowadays, many webmasters use WordPress (WP) as their hosting platform. Aside from providing hosting services for websites, WordPress is also one of the best CMS (Content Management System) on the market today. As a matter of fact, WP dominates the market with 60% of market share. Not only that but 33% of all websites today are hosted by WP.

Having a WP-powered website is quite beneficial. However, that alone won’t make your website stand out from the others. That’s why you’ll need to implement the right SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy to boost your website’s visibility, credibility and exposure online, among other things.

Fortunately, WP provides you with many options regarding SEO. You can tweak and optimize almost everything you need. That includes activities, such as technical, on-site and off-site SEO. In other words, you can implement various techniques to improve your rankings. That being said, here are a few best SEO tips and techniques to boost rankings for your WP website.

Structuring your permalinks

Permalinks on your WP website are addresses or links to every page, individual blog posts, content pieces and so on. In other words, these are the URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that are permanent, hence the name permalinks. However, permalinks in the WP are SEO unfriendly by default. That’s why you need to restructure them, in order to make them both user and search engine friendly. As an example:

• An unfriendly URL is: https://www.yourwpwebsite.com/?p=879. As you can see, you cannot determine where this link will lead you.
• A friendly URL looks like this: https://www.yourwebsite.com/category/blog/post name. This link describes where it goes and it’s friendly towards users and search engines alike.

The important thing is that you won’t need to bother too much with restructuring your permalinks. WP allows you to do this easily by accessing Settings > Permalinks and moving on from there. You’ll need to restructure every permalink for every page though, so that website crawlers can properly index your pages.

Add new content regularly

Content is king in the marketing world. Moreover, content is one of the most important ranking factors for search engines, such as Google. With that in mind, adding new and relevant content to your website or blog is of the utmost importance. WP allows you to add or remove content seamlessly. However, if you have a proper hosting solution, the entire process becomes even more seamless.

For instance, cPanel hosting in Australia is reliable and efficient. Your control panel alongside WP integrated options, allows you to take full control over the content on your website. Still, the content you add must be optimized properly so that it can boost your rankings effectively.

That includes activities, such as optimizing images, adding title tags to post, writing proper meta descriptions for pages and so on. Relevant content is vital for user experience but proper optimization is crucial for search engines to recognize the content and the context of your pages so that they can match it with the user intent.

Enable automatic indexing

Every time you add new content to your website you have to notify the website crawlers to index your pages. This manual task can be daunting as it’s quite mundane, as well as time-consuming. What’s more, you may easily forget to do it and you won’t get any SEO benefits from new content.

Luckily, WP has a feature that allows you to automatically inform crawlers about new things so they can properly index everything. This feature is called automatic ping and it notifies web crawlers every time there’s a new post or fresh content on your website.

That way you can ensure that your pages are always properly indexed and visible on search results. However, it’s advised that you create an .xml sitemap for your website and allow search engines to properly examine every page on your website. You can achieve this manually or by using a WP plug-in for sitemaps.

Leverage internal linking

When rankings are considered, search engines oftentimes evaluate each page on your website. This evaluation is also called page authority. The main factor in this evaluation is the quality of links on your pages. That’s why internal linking is quite beneficial for your rankings. In other words, you must link to your other, relevant content in your posts or pages.

This will help improve other ranking factors, such as time spent on page and page views. However, not every link needs to be a dofollow link. Links to irrelevant pages or advertisements do not need to be followed by web crawlers.

Also, when linking externally, you have to make sure you’re not getting more page score than you’re giving away. The main reason is that you’re basically giving a piece of your SEO score to the website you’re linking to and vice versa. That’s why you need both dofollow and nofollow internal and external links on your website. As an example:

• A dofollow link looks like this: Random Website
• A nofollow link looks like this: Random Website

As you can see, by adding a nofollow attribute to external links you’re telling website crawlers not to follow a specific link, which means it won’t contribute towards your overall ranking score. The same rules apply for internal links.

 

WP has a lot of features and options that allow you to optimize your website and gain a significant boost to your rankings. However, WP alone won’t make your website SEO friendly enough. That’s why you must do your part to improve your SEO and optimize your website properly.