How To Do SEO For WordPress The Best Ways To Boost Your Blog’s SEO
So you want to improve your organic traffic and wondering How To Do SEO For WordPress, right?
Well you have certainly come to the right place as I am going to show you exactly How To Do SEO For Your WordPress Blog focusing on the aspect of on page SEO with this ultimate guide.
When you freshly install WordPress on your brand spanking new domain, it is kinda, at best "Okish" SEO wise, but that "Okish" state is not going to get you excellent rankings!.
"The best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of google" #SEO joke. #BloggingTips
And that is the problem right there! "Okish" outta the box SEO is not going to draw in the traffic or get you sales, some, sure, tons? - nope!.
Keep reading this article if you want to turn "Ok" into excellent! and get much better results in the search engine rankings pages, and sales as a direct result of that!.
And learn some key WordPress SEO Tips that nobody else is telling you!.
All in all after reading (and implementing) the strategies in this WordPress SEO Tutorial you will have a blog that is as fresh and clean as a whistle SEO wise! Sparkling diamond white hat on page SEO!.
Remember, this information and what you learn means nothing unless you take something and apply what you have learned to your blog.
Keep reading and Happy SEO-ing!.
More...
How To Do SEO For WordPress
Pre WordPress Installation SEO - A Few VIP Things To Consider!
Before you even get started in regards to WordPress SEO one of the absolute solid, rock solid, foundations is to ensure that you have a darn pretty good and fast hosting.
Site Speed is an important factor when it comes to both user experience and how Google will rank your site. So do make make sure that you have good fast reliable hosting such as Blue Host and run a CDN - A Content Delivery Network.
A Content Delivery Network, is something that delivers a copy of your site to a local server for the region or country in which your visitor is from.
“Good #SEO work only gets better over time" Jill Whalen #BloggingTips
It very much means that those in California and Accessing your site from a US based server while you traffic from say China is viewing your site from a server in China or somewhere in Asia.
The speed benefits are evident and obvious.
I won't go too much into detailing site speed as that is whole subject on its own and is covered in another article.
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Site security and SSL - Secure Socket Layer certificate is something else that is a must have as Google and other search engines are giving a priority to.
Thankfully, many hosts include Free SSL and CDN already set up for you, or at most only and extra couple of bucks, and I do mean that just a $1 or $2 extra.
Finally, a Brandable domain name with a .com, .Net Or. Org Suffix Is semething that you should get your hands on. Simple because these are TLD's - Top level domains and do carry a bit more weight than other suffixes.
Plus, being brandable helps you to stand out, be a bit more memorable for your audience and those smarty pants over at Google do have a way of telling if your site is a "run of the mill" kind of site or is a Brand.
This is so that they can give a bit more weight or ranking juice to brands than non brand.
lets now dive right in and get to the meat and bones of this article as I teach you How To Do SEO For WordPress.
The All In One SEO Plugin
An SEO Plugin helps you to optimize certain aspects of your WordPress blog without the need of knowing or doing and kind of programming or coding and makes is more crawlable by search engines.
Such aspects that can be optimized include your page title and the meta description. This is important as this tells both search engines and readers what your page is about.
WordPress SEO - Meta Title And Meta Description
The meta description and page title are something that appears in the coding of your pages and posts (as shown above) and are essential for informing search engines in regards to what the content on the page or post is about.
In the "as is" state of a freshly installed WordPress site these elements are likely to be generated automatically and not at all optimised.
It’s only #SEO tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.” – Jill Whalen #BloggingTips
An SEO plugin like my recommended plugin, the All In One SEO Plugin By Michael Torbert, easily allows you to add and optimise the meta data to all of your sites pages and posts.
An SEO plugin allows you to enter a lot of important data including what keyword you are targeting. A Good one, like the one I mentioned auto-generates a site map for you.
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The Page Meta Title and Meta Description are something that needs to be written uniquely for each and every single article that you create.
When you write your meta title and meta description aim to have your keyword at the beginning or near to the beginning and make sure that it is engaging, interesting or sparks somekind of curiosity - enough to get peoples attention and to get that click.
Rank higher using Modifiers to your Page Title!.
Such modifiers could be:
- The Year! (For Example "How To Do WordPress SEO 2019")
- Georgraphical Location e.g "Local WordPress SEO Tips New York City"
- Best E.g "Best WordPress SEO Tutorial"
- Top E.g "Top 10 WordPress SEO Plugins"
You absolutely must make sure that your Title and meta description matches what your content is about. If not...your visitor is going to "pogo stick" and click back to the search results page.
Do analyse the Top 5 Ranking pages for your keyword and check out their titles and see if you can emulate, optimise and do better than your competitors.
Key Caveat Read This!
one key caveat to meta description and meta title is not actually filling out the details can result in a higher click through rate.
Sure this is a risky SEO strategy, and you are giving over more power and control to search engines like google to autogenerate the meta information from your content.
When you allow google to autogenerate the meta description from your content it takes the required amount of text from your content and puts the search engine users search term in bold.
Resulting in a little piece of search engine eye candy!.
With a "forced" meta description, this bolding of text currently does not occur. Another plus is, for other related search terms, google can "pull" a fresh, new and related meta description related to the given search term and and bold the text in a similar way.
Personally, I am a big fan of not using forced meta descriptions for this very reason!.
I do though, make sure my keyword phase in the first 160 characters to make sure I do get my keyword in there should an internet user type that into the search bar.
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WordPress SEO Tips - Put Your Keyword In The URL!
When it comes WordPress SEO Tips many forget to tell you to put your keyword in the URL. Usually, the WordPress SEO plug in that you are using uses the entire page title as your URL.
And if you have a long page title your URL is going to be long. Like wise, if, as I have suggested above put your keyword in the page title you find that it is included in your articles URL also.
The problem!.
Longer URL's don't rank as well as shorter ones!. Thus the need to adjust your URL To a much simpler and shorter one!.
From the image above the Keyword is "How To DO SEO For WordPress", keep it simple, keep it short. Keyword at the start of the Page Title and Have it In the URL.
Pro Tip: According to research by Ahref's the optimal meta title is 50-70 characters long. Keep your Meta Title 50-70 characters for this very reason.
With all this Keyword talk lets continue this WordPress SEO Tutorial by talking a little about keywords.
How To Do SEO For WordPress - Get The Right Keywords!
Keyword research is something that is, in my opinion a mix of being an art and a science and need not be anything difficult - especially after you check out my detailed article on finding keywords.
Keyword research is a VIP subject and has to be explained in detail, but lets keep it simple!
At its very core, and very simply put, a form of market research. Your audience and readers are out there on the internet searching and seeking solutions to their problems.
And your task is to properly identify what keywords they are searching and calculate if you can rank high in the search engines for them.
Take a head keyword like "SEO" which is very broad and will have absolutely tons of traffic and so much competition that you won't ever be able to rank anywhere for it.
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The problem with broad keywords like "SEO" are that there is very little or no search user intent behind it.
What are they searching for?
"SEO Tools" "SEO Tips" an "SEO Agency?"
This is exactly why such broad or short tail keywords have a very low conversion rate.
Body Keywords containing 2 or 3 words such "SEO For WordPress" and the example above tend have greater clarity and search user intent and thus greater knowledge of what the actual search engine user is looking for.
These are good keywords to go for but do tend to be competitive, but they do convert much better than head keywords.
Longtail Keywords of 4,5 or more words (7+ I'm calling voice search optimised keywords!) obtain much less traffic, typically 100 to 1000 searches per month.
But,
they have far less competition and easier to rank for and they do convert to sales much better.
If your article and blog ranks for dozens of long tail keywords your organic traffic from them will be quite significant as will your income!.
The smart bloggers are the ones that focus on longtail and body keywords.
Finding such Keywords is Easy - Check Out My Guide To Finding Keywords For A Website.
Use Your Target Keyword In Opening 100 Words of Your Article
Having covered the usage of your target Keyword in your Meta Title, Meta Description and the opening 160 characters of your article mention it again, naturally not stuffing, in the first 100 words that you write.
According to Ahrefs having your keyword placed at least one time in your opening 100 words can be beneficial for your attempts to rank higher in the search engines due to it helping to give google a greater understanding in regards to what your article is about.
I'd go a bit further and advise you to get into the habit of getting your keyword in the first sentence or two, naturally, using natural language and not keyword stuffing in way at all.
If you can't squeeze it in a second time in the opening 100 words. Don't worry, you will have placed it in the first 160 characters as advised.
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Pro Tip: Use a semantic variation of your target keyword in the opening 300 words after you have used your target keyword, do it naturally.
For example if your target keyword is "How To Do SEO For WordPress" use that phrase in the first 100 words and then something like "WordPress SEO Tips" Or "WordPress SEO Tutorial" "WordPress SEO" within the next 200 words after that.
I'll talk a little bit later about LSI, Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords, Keep reading for that tip!.
Having your keyword placed early in the article is, in my opinion and strong relevancy factor and not only helps search engines to figure out what your content is about it gives your readers what they want straight away.
Optimizing Your H1 And H2 Tags
This is written into the DNA codons of Bloggers and SEO specialists and you ought to make it absolute standard practice.
make absolutely sure that your page title contains your target keyword as with WordPress this is the H1 tag, and there is no need to have a second H1 tag on your site at all.
Make sure your page title, containing your primary keyword, is wrapped in the H1 tag.
Also, have you keyword in a H2 heading. There is no need to over optimize your content and have it in every H2 heading that you have or to use your keyword in a H3 heading unless it is absolutely neccessary.
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Use Keywords In An Image's Alt Text, Description And File Name
When it comes to beautifying your article and using images, take advantage of that and have SEO enhancing filenames, descriptions and alt text.
Instead of using a random file name for the image use a name that will easily identify for you what article the image relates to by naming it after your keyword. It is more descriptive, both for you are search engines.
Also use descriptive alt text for that image that has your target keyword in it, and mention in the description of the image the keyword also.
Key Takeaway: Never over optimise your alt tag's or descriptions by just using your keyword, formulate it into a relevant sentence relating to the image.
Over use of your keyword in this way can result you in being flagged for spam - according to google webmaster central. Thus use variations and semantic variations of your keyword in the Alt Tag and descriptions.
Use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords in Your Articles
LSI Or Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords are simply keywords that are related to the one that you are targeting.
When you are writing your articles it is important for your to sprinkle in the use of LSI keywords along with the keyword that you are targeting.
Using related keywords helps google to understand what your content is about and to rank you appropriately.
If your Target keyword is "How To Do SEO For WordPress" LSI Keywords could be:
- "WordPress SEO Tips"
- "WordPress SEO Tutorial"
- "SEO Tips For WordPress"
- "SEO For WordPress Blogs"
There are tools out there specifically for finding LSI Keywords, the one that I use is LSI Graph.
You can also find LSI keywords at the bottom of the search results page in google under related searches. Consider some of the longtail ones.
What is important to consider here is that those keywords listed by google are what they consider to be related and relevant to your target keyword phrase. Thus if you use them and have them sprinkled into your content in a natural manner you will rank for more keywords.
Create Top Quality Content To Boost Your WordPress SEO
Google's business is content. It's goal is to deliver to the searcher the best possible content related to the search term they entered into their search bar.
Thus,
It is a no brainer that producing high quality in depth and detailed content will help you to rank better and aid you to sustain that rank.
Blogs, in a study by Quicksprout, get 97% more incoming links and 4.34x more pages indexed that other simple sites.
It has been indicated by Hubspot that 3 out of 4 consumers have a preference of researching brands by means of blog posts and articles than paid adverts.
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One of the very best and top ways to rank for many keywords and to give your on Page SEO is to, on an ongoing basis, create top quality content.
To more precise, Google will consider an article to be of high or top quality if:
- It is focused on solutions
- Optimized for related and relevant keywords
- Actionable
- Written for human readers and not search engines
- Easy To Share.
From an SEO driven perspective and indeed your own quality control keep in mind the following when creating your blog posts:
- Avoid Short Or Thin Content of less than 1,500 words. Be as detailed as you can and aim to be writing articles in the 2,000 - 2,500+ words range. Personally I won't publish anything under 3,000 words. Just my choice!.
- Use Actionable, Well-Researched, Data Driven Content That is Useful – The benchmark of Top quality content is how useful it is to the end reader and of course its credibility. Readers online have the tendency to share articles on social media that is backed up by research. The best way to do that is to properly reference your content by referencing studies performed by research institutes, government agencies and private companies like Statista, Pew and YouGov.
- Avoid Duplicate Content!. Nothing is going to kill your site or blog faster than a duplicate content penalty!. This is for both copying someone else's content on your site and having several pages with similar content.
- Content Engagement. Google takes content engagement very seriously, it is part of how they measure and understand user experience. Having your website visitors on page longer and visiting a larger number of pages viewed and a low bounce rate tick all the boxes for ranking boost. Some simple things like beautiful and well presented articles and audio, and/or video help to keep users engaged longer.
- Keep Your Content Fresh!. Simply put keep updating and adding new fresh content to older posts on a regular basis - say 6 months to a year to keep up their freshness factor. Do this regardless of what niche you are in.
Get Featured!
Getting featured in in the featured snippet and the very top in position zero is MASSIVE for traffic.
If you manage to appear there, in the holy grail of all SERP's position zero you can fully expect a traffic avalanche!.
Hitting position zero like this is great from getting your site recognised and yourself gain credibility as an authoritative figure in your niche as well as traffic.
Articles that get featured in those positions where available are usually very well optimised for the particular keyword and have been ranking already on page 1.
Having a sub heading with the target search term as well as a very detailed and helpful answer helps to get in to position zero.
Aim to give the very best answer to any question based keywords as I have noticed that a lot of questions seem to be featured like this.
Boost Social Signals By Adding Social Sharing Buttons
This is something that in the SEO world is debatable, some say that social signals have no effect on your ability to rank higher in search engines, while others say hell yeah!
My take on this is that by having social share buttons you are making it easier for your audience to share your content, and in turn you get more people seeing your articles.
This within itself is a way of gaining more readers and getting more traffic and perhaps even getting more backlinks.
This is exactly why you ought to be using some kind of social sharing plugin or widget.
I'll let Matt Cutts have the final word on this one.
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Add Video To Your Articles
Adding a video to your article has been proven to increase you rankings significantly. The video can either be your own or someone else's.
Having video on your article increases user engagement and on site time. Do make sure that the video is highly relevant to what you are talking about in your article.
Internal Links
It is no secret to anyone slightly knowledgeable about WordPress SEO that good internal linking can help to give a rankings boost to your pages.
Per 2,000 words I tend to link internally to 8-10 other articles. Don't just link from new to old in a backwards direction.
Every so often, like every 6 months or so when you are freshening up older content add in some links to "future" articles, articles that were created after that older one was published.
Which post should you target for internal linking strategy and rankings boost?.
There are a few schools of thought here and it does depend on what your goal is. You check google analytics for your top 10 most (organically) trafficked posts and seek to maintain them as they are.
Or you can seek to give other worth posts just outside that list of top 10 a give them a boost.
Personally I aim for articles that are outside the top 5 in the serps and give those ones a boost and look at what articles I have on page 2 that, with a little bit of a boost can make page 1. I will have a tendency to do this for money pages as a priority than a non money page.
External Links
Linking externally to authority sites in your articles is very beneficial for your efforts to rank highly in search engines.
It really ought to be something that you do for every single article - and make it a Do follow link.
Personally I like to link out 2 or 3 of the highest ranking pages on google for my target keyword with the target keyword as the anchor text, giving a direct signal to google "This is what the article is about, rank me for it".
It has been said by experts in the field of SEO like Robbie Richards that you ought to seeking to link out to sites of DA (Domain Authority) 70+.
Improve Your Site Speed
I touched on this earlier when i mentioned getting a fast host is key to ranking well in search engines. There is only so much that a host can do.
Like SEO site speed is the same, on page and off page. You and tweek as much as you like the off page site speed but if your actual site is not fully optimised and well maintained on page then your web host will be effectively speaking working with one hand tied behind their backs.
Limited in what they can do to speed up your site.
With out going into a full on tutorial on site speed, here are a few thing that you can do to improve your blogs loading time, user experience and rankings:
- Install and use a Caching plugin like W3 Total Cache.
- Optimize Your Images using EWWW Image Optimiser or similar plugin
- Use BJ Lazy load to make sure your images are loading when seen.
- Use Autoptimize plugin to optimise the code of your WordPress blog
Do make sure that you follow a tutorial and use those plugin to the best of their abilities for maximum effect. Do have a back up of your site before you start!.
Site speed can be improved dramatically with proper onpage optimisation. It is something I love doing. It is very testing, adjust, tweek test, adjust tweek test.
Test your site speed and performance after every adjustment. Is it faster? yes. Keep that change!. faster? no..undo it and try something else. Test, test, test!.
No Follow Affiliate Links
Something that is of debate and often debated by many, and probably will continue to be debated is "does google like or frown upon affiliate links?"
Let me put that to bed for you!
Google, according to the quality raters handbook expects sites to have some kind of monetization be they from ads, eCommerce, or affiliate links.
The reason stated was the fact that hosting costs money.
What was mentioned was "excessive use" in which they distract from the content.
That said, google does not hate affiliate links, (or adverts) they actually expect them, but have too many and distract from the user experience and you will run into issues.
As a means of safety I recommend that you "nofollow" all affiliate links, or better still use Pretty Links Plugin to perform a 301 permanent redirect of your affiliate to something that looks like you are linking internally to your site.
Check And Fix Broken Links
Broken links can murder your SEO efforts. Personally I never accept comments that have links attached either to the bio or in the comment (spam), often the link attached to the bio/gravatar with time becomes broken as a once enthusiastic webmaster give up on their pet project.
There are a number of websites that can scan your site for you, including BrokenLinkCheck Ahref's and many other. I use the Broken Link checker plugin which rather conveniently alerts me when a broken link occurs.
Rather than keep it my mind to schedule regular broken link checks of my blog, I let that plugin to manage this aspect. It helps to keep me on top of my on page SEO game site wide!.
Broken links should be fixed immediately - they detract from user experience and thus SEO.
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Setup Google Friendly Permalinks
The default standard WordPress settings creates weird and rather ugly permalinks that contain the date.
Yoursite .com/YYYY/MM/DD/Your-Article-Title
Human users have a preference for something more humanly readable and memorable. There is no need for the date to be in the URL.
Also, Google has a preference for shorter URL's that consist of your page title and your keywords.
Personally, I have a strong preference of using only the keyword and making a shorter and cleaner URL like:
Yoursite .com/Keyword-Phrase
Fixing this is pretty easy to do, just go to settings and "permalinks" as shown below.
Changing the permalink structure is so easy peasy lemon squeezy!
Total kids play!.
When you are in the permalinks area you can select any of the two options I have shown. Either select post name or custom structure.
If you chose custom structure just click the "%postname%" button and the code will automagically appear in the box.
Note: The sharp eyed amongst you will have noticed that this makes the "custom structure" the same as the "post name"above it on the list.
(I have shown this method as a means of demonstration a to keep abreast of WordPress changes)
Use A Sitemap!
A sitemap is and XML file that maps out your sites hierarchy to ensure better and more efficient crawling of the search engines bots.
Sitemaps are not an absolute must have as the search engines can still crawl your site without you having one but by using one you will be able to obtain more data and information about your site in Google search console.
The All in One SEO Plugin can automatically generate a sitemap for you and keep it updated every single time you add an image, create an article and so on.
All In One SEO Plugin, to use a sitemap just click Activate and that's it really!.
Note: This image, is from a live site, I was not going to deactivate the plugin for demonstration purposes, you get the idea..just envision the the "deactivate" says "Activate".
Then in the XML sitemap setting select schedule updates to what ever frequency suits you and your blog. I have selected daily as this best suits me.
Submit Your Sitemap To The Google Search Console
Now you have got your site map all sorted out I highly recommend that you submit it.
By Submitting your sitemap to google search console you get the ability to access more data in regards to your WordPress Blog.
Simply click on "Sitemaps" on the left hand side of Google Search Console and then in the appropriate area just type in your your sitemap file name, which will be sitemap.xml if you are using the all in one seo plugin.
Then simply click submit.
Google will then crawl your site and tell you the number of URL's that are indexed. They will automatically crawl and check your site on a frequent basis without your do anything.
Pro Tip: Once you publish an article, submit your sitemap to google every time.
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Force Google To Fetch Your Articles
Inside google search console there is the facility to force google to go fetch and crawl your site.
This can have the effect of indexing your site straight away as you are sending their bot to go check out your WordPress blog.
Just click "crawl" and then "fetch as google" followed by entering your URL in the box, select desktop/mobile and then click "fetch".
Personally I do this of every single blog post that I publish, fetching both desktop and mobile.
The next step once this has been completed is to click "request indexing" an viola, google sends its bot to evaluate your article for indexing.
A pop up will occur, that will ask you to choose your submit method. Select Crawl This URL and its direct links. This will send the google bot to crawl your internal links on the page also, and assist in the ranking a tiny bit!
Performing the same task in the new search console is far simpler. Just enter your URL as shown in the URL inspection area as indicated an dthen click request indexing!.
There is nothing else to do!.
Easy!.
WordPress SEO Tutorial - Schema Markup
Sure you have heard of the term "Schema Markup" and "structured data" quite a few times in the online blogging world.
Basically, it is a little bit of extra code that assists google and other search engines to provide better and more data on the search engine results page.
For sure you have seen of and heard the term "review stars". Those review stars are due to schema markup.
When it comes to review stars and other schema markup info use it as they are a very nice bit of eye candy in the search results and enjoy a higher click through rate!.
Then get schema markup on your WordPress blog it is pretty easy! In fact, you might already have it as many themes, particularly premium themes have it as standard - good selling point!.
Just contact the company that made your WordPress theme they will be able to tell you if it has schema markup included in its coding.
If not, not to worry, there is a lovely free plugin Schema plugin that you can install.
Social Markup
Not too different form the above mentioned schema markup, social markup is exactly as it sounds - markup for social media usage.
You know when you share your articles on social media and then as if by magic images appear that you used on your blog?
Yep!
That's social markup in action.
Thankfully good WordPress SEO plugins like the All In One SEO Plugin adds in this for you.
Just go to the All in On SEO Plugin Feature manager and click activate for the social meta markup facility to function for you.
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It is not actually known just how much social meta / social markup effects search engine optimization but there is absolutely no harm in you letting big G know exactly what social media profiles are associated to your blog and brand.
In fact, I would consider that as a good thing as
As google does have a way of being able to tell if your site is a brand or a regular non-brand site. I would hazard a guess that branded social media profiles would be one way.
Your next step is to check out the social settings in the All In One WordPress SEO Plugin and fill out all the required details and change the default thumbnail to your featured image when you socially share your posts.
WordPress SEO - Create Evergreen Content
Creating evergreen content is something that is highly beneficial for your WordPress SEO efforts as is you can use this kind of content as a solid base for long term organic search engine traffic.
Evergreen content is content that never goes out of date and is always relevant now just as much as it was 5 years ago or in 5 years time.
You can, and ought to update your evergreen and add extra content at least on a yearly basis to keep the aforementioned freshness factor up.
The really good thing about evergreen content is that you can set up a social media campaign many times, not just this year, but for many years gaining social traction, signals, traffic and that is something that enhances your WordPress SEO efforts.
Also, by staying relevant over time you will build up a lot of backlinks to the article.
Evergreen content..An SEO winner!
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WordPress SEO Tutorial Tips - Claim Your Social Profiles!
As I mentioned branding and Social Media earlier it is good practice to stake your claim on all of the social media site by setting up branded Profiles as soon as possible.
In fact, this is something that you should do as soon as you have decided on your site name and registered it.
This is NOT for a backlinks purpose as pretty much all social sites are "nofollow". The advantage is getting your own brand on the social sites and aiding google to recognise you as a brand due to the name and the link to your homepage in the profile.
It is an instant and quick win for your blog and brand.
Nice! and a huge time saver!.
Do It Yourself WordPress SEO Tips - Remove The Date Of Your Posts And Pages
Although this is a little polemic and has no actual direct effect on your search engine optimisation efforts the benefit is indirect and involves a little human psychology.
If and when the date of your article is shown in the serps and it is a bit dated say 6 months or a year or more older and there are other articles showing a more recent date a user is more likely to click on the other article.
regardless if it is evergreen content or not!.
Thus we can conclude that by not having the date shown you can gain a slightly better edge when it comes to getting the click or a slightly better CTR long term.
Removing the date is super easy!. In fact, more often than not there is nothing to it! absolutely nothing! Zero!.
Most premium themes will have the function for you to "hide the date" for both the articles and the comments.
Removing the comments date has the effect of encouraging more comments as if and when comments are dated from a long time ago, readers become discouraged from leaving a comment.
Comments on site are social signals that aid your SEO efforts.
Removing the date Tutorial - Check out this training
Do Not Index Your Image Attachment Pages
Every single time you upload an image or any other kind of attachment to the media library it creates its own individual page.
I'm pretty sure you have clicked an image on a WordPress blog before and seen it take you to that very page.
This is actually unnecessary, not needed and causes google bot inefficiencies, which will count against you SEO wise as on those pages is nothing but your image and nothing else, no content!.
The easiest way to do this so to set the "Link To" option to "none" when you upload images and other media files.
Sure you can create an automatic redirect to the parent page using the All In One SEO Plugin, but this, in my opinion is not exactly a good user experience and having a lot of redirects is frowned upon by google.
Thus, making the image unclickable by having it link to nowhere is much better overall.
The only images I would recommend to make clickable are product images with affiliate links - reason those kind of images get a lot of clicks and you are in the blogging business to make money right!
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WordPress SEO - Have A Multi-language Blog
A Certain Neil Patel, conducted an experiment having his site translated into a number of languages - 82 in fact!.
The result?
a massive 47% spike in his traffic!
Thus, we can say that having your blog translated into additional languages can indeed be a bit of a game changer for you traffic wise!. It is definitely food for thought!.
The great news is that Google and other search engines won't penalise you for having duplicate content or content that has been translated from one language to another.
Just make sure that you use the correct canonical and hreflang tags installed on your site so that you are clearly indicating to google which one is the original (i.e English) and that the others are secondary languages of that original English language article.
Code That Tells Google The Original Is English Language And Alternate Is Italian
link rel="canonical" href="https://BloggersHQ.Org" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://BloggersHQ.Org" hreflang="x-default" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://BloggersHQ.Org/it" hreflang="it" />
And The Italian Version
<link rel="canonical" href="https://BloggersHQ.Org" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://BloggersHQ.Org" hreflang="x-default" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://BloggersHQ.Org/it" hreflang="it" />
Thankfully though, there are plugins that you can use for this task, two such plugins are Weglot and WPML.
Do keep it in mind that absolutely no translation tool, no matter how good, is ever going to be as good as an actual human translation. If you are serious about having your site in multiple language do hire a native to translate for you.
And don't forget to use the canonical and hreflang tags!
Optimise For Mobile Usability
Google launched their Mobile First Indexing initiative a while back due to the fact the the majority of internet users are accessing the internet by means of tablets and mobile phones.
This is a massive change in the way in which the search engine giant is indexing sites. In short, it means they will be using the mobile version of your site and its content to rank primarily.
Meaning it is VIP, absolute VIP to make sure that your site is mobile friendly and responsive.
If you are not sure if your site is optimised for mobile devices check it right now using google own tool. If you pass the test! great!.
If not?
Get to work and fix it!. Don't pass go, don't grab your $200 do it now!.
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Perform Regular WordPress SEO Audits
Performing frequent audits of your WordPress SEO will help you to keep on top of your SEO game. One of the top ones I use, and is free! is this one right here.
It has over 50 checks and will tell you exactly how you are doing seo wise. In, fact, I use it for every post and page I have published and then run the check and see if there is anything I can fix or improve.
Another pretty good tool is Varvy and is pretty good for checking for site speed, googlebot accessability, robots .txt file, site security, mobile usability and so on.
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Create Silos Pages To Increase Relevance And Traffic
A while back, centuries ago in internet and SEO years, in 2012 the penguin update affected sites that had their anchor text over optimised.
Although, the penguin update only analyses the anchor text's and ratios from sites linking to your site I would be cautious of over using certain words repetitively when internal linking, mix it up a bit, use semantic variables.
Creating a "Silos page" to boost the relevance by internally linking to pages relevant to what the "Silos page" is about.
For Example,
you have a page that is about "Keyword Research" on this page you link out to all your articles about keyword research.
Wikipedia does this pretty darn well awesomely!.
Due to way in which "link juice" can be passed from page to page internally it is absolutely a good idea SEO wise to link from those high traffic and high ranking pages to your new silos page.
You'd be crazy not to!.
Improve The Readability Of Your Content
You have seen it many times and on many blogs and websites..I'm talking about great content that is hard to read due to that massive wall of text!.
I'm sure you have done it before, we all have!. Myself included!.
Breakdown your content in to smaller easier to read 2-3 lines of text at most. Only on occasions do I stretch to 4. Even then I still think that looks big.
Don't be afraid to use a single line of text. I often do that!
A lot "white space" makes your blog more readable, increases dwell time (time on site) by making your content easier to read.
Other tips is to use benefit driven H2 sub headings when you start to talk about a new relevant topic in your article and H3 headings where necessary as sub headings within the new topic.
This improves the user experience, a metric that is a ranking factor
Make Beautiful Eye Catching Content!
Following straight on from improving readability of your content is making it more visually appealing and eye catching.
We all love beautiful things, be it a particular location in the world like a tropical island, an amazing car, art, or that amazingly beautiful girlfriend/wife or handsome boyfriend/husband or indeed our children.
It is just natural, a part of nature, and your blog post is no different. Beautiful and well presented content will attract more visitors, greater engagement and does improve the readability and onsite time.
As a word, on average all of the top 3 results in google have an average onpage time of greater than 5 minutes.
It is also great for your branding and establishing and a connection and association with your site, high quality content and easy to read and understand. Sure, I'd be happy to return and check out a site like that regularly, if it of interest to me.
And I regularly do!.
These brands/blogs do stand out for that very reason, beautiful well presented easy to read info and I do tend to read to the very end!.
Go figure!
And beautify your articles for greater dwell time!.
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SEO Tip - Track Your Keyword Rankings!
With all this effort being put into your on page SEO it would be crazy and foolish not to track your keyword rankings and performance of your targeted keywords.
The very reason for this is you will know what pages to improve, when to do it and of course you now know how to do it.
What works great for me is to check out the ones that and on page 2 of google hanging around the top 3 on that page.
Do some tweaking, adding and updating content, improving internal links to the page, look specifically for better outbound external links, beautify, add image, video and then before you know it, you will have shifted those articles from page 2 to page 1 of google, just sit back and watch it climb!.
Keyword tracking software you can use Serprobot, which is kinda basic but good for starting out with.
After that, you'd defo want to be checking out a more powerful all in one SEO analysis and competitor research tool like SEM Rush.
Don't Stuff Your Keywords In Your Post!
This is actually an important point as keyword density is no longer something that search engines take into consideration and it has not been something that google has taken any notice of for YEARS!.
Sure, use your keyword, and the semantic variations throughout your article and in the relevant places like title tag, meta description, URL, H2 tag first 160 characters and in your closing paragraph.
After that just write naturally.
Write for people not search engines. Personally, I hate it when I see keyword stuffed articles, they are so hard to read and unnatural I immediately pogo stick back to the search results or just exit the page.
Simply just write naturally as you would as if you having a conversation with your best friend and if the keyword occurs, nice use it! if not write as you are.
WordPress SEO FAQ Frequently Asked Questions
Time now to answer a few commonly asked questions in regards to SEO for WordPress Blogs.
If you have your own question, do ask it in comments area below.
Which WordPress SEO Plugin Is The Best?
There are many different WordPress SEO plugins that, essentially all perform the same tasks and functions but just look a little different visually speaking.
The two most popular are Yoast SEO Plugin and the All In One SEO Plugin, my own opinion and personal preference is for the All In One SEO Plugin - 50 million users can't be wrong!.
Besides, some of the latest updates to Yoast have caused some serious issues which makes me question their usage.
Are WordPress Tag Important For SEO?
A few years ago they has some effect in regards to SEO but not now. In fact only a few months ago a went into all my sites and removed all my Tags.
Are tags still useful?
For the user yes, if it helps them to find the content. But the use of tags do create multiple copies of your original article with each tag that is used. Which of course causes google bot inefficiency.
Something google has been cracking down on, thus we could say Tags now could have a slight negative impact on SEO.
Are WordPress Themes SEO Friendly?
Yes, most of the free themes are SEO friendly but with one draw back they could be better in functionality and better optimised for speed and mobile responsiveness.
This is where it pays off to get a premium theme (and they tend to look better).
Is WordPress SEO Optimised?
Yes, of course, but only to a "Bobby Basic" level. This is why you absolutely do need to use a SEO Plugin for WordPress.
How To Do SEO For WordPress - Conclusion
So, you have read this far - that's great!
Congratulations, you know know exactly what to do and how to do it when it comes to WordPress SEO and get driving more organic to your blog and get more sales as a result of that traffic.
Take Action!
All you need to do is to take action and apply that knowledge and use the very best SEO Analysis suit SEMRush, it is a tool that will pay for itself many times over in terms of free traffic.
Just click the highlighted text above and grab your free trail of the most powerful SEO Tool out there and get improving your search engine rankings dramatically!.
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I hope that you enjoyed reading this article on How To Do SEO For WordPress and that you have taken action to get a head and get more traffic and sales and did grab your FREE trail of SEMRush as well as pop your email mail that that box right above.
If you have any questions about this WordPress SEO Tutorial, or indeed wish to share your own WordPress SEO Tips leave a comment below and I will be happy to reply back a quickly as I can.
To Your Success And Blogging Best.
Derek.