WordPress is great for many things SEO, pair it with an SEO plugin to make sure your website performs well in search rankings
There are dozens of popular search engine optimization plugins for WordPress that are available for free. These plugins do a great job analyzing the individual pages of your site, but you still have to make sure you know the basics of on-site SEO to get the maximum bang for your buck (actually they are free). In this post we focus on some basic things you can do to make your website perform better in search engine rankings. There are MANY more things you can do, but it’s always best to start with fundamentals.
Install a WordPress plugin to help you analyze your site
There is a wide variety of plugins available to help you understand and improve upon your website’s SEO efforts. Many of these are free for the purpose of this article, although you can upgrade to pro versions to receive the VIP treatment. For beginner to intermediate WordPress users and search engine optimizers, we would recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin. There are tons of great features in this plugin, and tons of documentation to support you should you need it.
Do your keyword research!
It’s really important to know your audience and what they are searching for so you can create website content to match their needs (and perform well in search engines). Many businesses understand the importance of high-quality website content created regularly, however they don’t spend enough time doing their due-diligence in keyword research. Creating content isn’t the point, but creating keyword rich content is. Therefore you must know what keywords actually have enough traffic to make your content worth-while, but aren’t too highly competitive that it’s hard to get ahead. For those Google AdWords users in the crowd, try using the Google Keyword Tool, it’s a great resource to understand Google keyword traffic and competition.
Make sure your website is cross-device compatible
This almost comes without saying these days, but make sure your website is compatible with all devises and screen sizes. Google punishes websites which are not supported or not optimized for all devices. Furthermore – Google recommends using responsive design as the means of achieving cross-device compatibility. Do you have an old website which doesn’t perform well on mobile? We can help with that!
Create content that is keyword dense (but not too dense)
Here is where the handy SEO plugins come in. One great feature of these SEO plugins is that they can analyze your page content based on the keyword you provide. Again, this is no good unless you have done your keyword research! SEO plugins will tell you if you are using your keywords too little, too much, or somewhere in between. There are right ways to use keywords and wrong ways to use keywords, make sure you are on the right side of the tracks.
Make sure you are utilizing tags properly
There are a bunch of different types of tags, but a few are important to understand for SEO purposes. The SEO plugins we have been referring to can help you understand and utilize these tags properly, making sure each page is unique and optimized. This includes creating and utilizing header tags properly (keyword rich preferably), creating meta page titles and descriptions, and making sure alt tags are used for images.