How To Do WordPress SEO in 10 Steps

SEO is very important for your WordPress website because you need more traffic and higher rankings in search results. According to experts, WordPress is SEO friendly. This is why users choose WordPress to start a website. If website owners optimize speed and image, they rank higher on Google. To ensure that your site appears on the front pages in search results, you must build SEO for your WordPress website. So in this article, we will discuss how to do WordPress SEO in 10 steps. 

1. Choose a Hosting Provider

You must make sure you are hosting a reliable provider. To choose your host, you must keep site speed, security, and uptime in mind. This will help with the choice of host. Firstly, site speed has a direct impact on your WordPress SEO performance. Also, poor security and uptime can result in site quality problems. So it is risky to get cheap ones since you may have some issues in the future. WordPress recommends three hosting providers. 

2. SEO-Friendly Theme 

First, you need to install SEO-friendly themes. You can find thousands of free themes. But you have to be careful when choosing SEO-friendly themes. Because some themes come with scripts and plugins that you won’t use, it will decrease the site’s performance. Before installing the theme, running its demo with Google’s web.dev is necessary. It will provide insights on performance and SEO issues.  

3. SEO-friendly URLs

This tip is considered one of the most important steps in WordPress SEO tips. SEO-friendly URLs are designed to meet the needs of searchers and users. URLs that are optimized for SEO are usually keyword-rich and short. Just like your title tag, link anchor text, and content, search engines like Google use URLs of webpages to understand what your website and content are all about. It is very important as an SEO starter guide. 

You need to use a keyword for your URL that you want to rank. Because URLs with words related to your content and structure are friendlier for customers and visitors navigating your site, it is essential to make them short and sweet. Because short ones help the individual page rank better, if you use short pages across your site will help Google find and crawl all your pages. So your URLs must know where they will take the visitors. 

4. Optimize Site Speed and Performance

Optimization of site speed is essential in WordPress SEO steps. The speed of a website makes the first impression about your product or business. Because when it comes to user experience, there is no second chance. Low website speed will turn visitors off about your content and business. Page load time is a web performance metric showing the time required for a page. As a website owner, you need to optimize the speed and performance of your website to provide quick results. Because optimization of website speed influences visibility, usability, and conversion. 

To speed up your site, first, you need to determine what slows it down. These are tips to speed up your website:

· Using content delivery network

· Finding the better host

· Optimization of image sizes

· Reducing plugins

· Reducing the number of JavaScript

· Database optimization

· Detection of 404 errors

· Reducing redirects

5. Optimized Page Headings

The headings of pages are the ways of giving information about your webpage and content. H1 is considered a title, but H2 is considered a chapter. To help search engines find your webpage, you must build keyword-based headings and optimize them. The meta title and description must be short and informative because they must match a webpage’s original content. 

6. Choose and Set Up SEO Plugin

WordPress plugins enhance the functionality of the website by adding new features. Many plugins will help to improve SEO. Those plugins such as Yoast SEO and Rank Math offer features to help implement tags and categories, build sitemaps, optimize titles and content with the help of keywords and take advantage of Google Analytics. You can download and set up a plugin immediately. This will help search engines like Google know what the page is about. 

7. Optimize Keywords

Keyword optimization, also known as keyword research, is the process of researching, analyzing, and selecting the best keywords to target search engines and build webpage content. It is a critical step in the WordPress SEO checklist since search engines can find your website and webpage with the help of keywords. A bad selection of keywords will result Failing in SEO. It is one of the hardest tasks in search engine marketing. So many site owners don’t spend enough time on keyword optimization. But this is the most important part of WordPress SEO. The right selection of keywords will bring more traffic. Keyword optimization is very effective and important in:

· Title tags

· Links

· Content Strategy

· Images

· Headings

· URLs

· Mete descriptions

· Site structure

8. Image Optimization

Just like your keywords, you can optimize your images on WordPress. Search engines like Google read Image-Alt-Text, which are descriptions of your images to rank them on search results. When site visitors search for specific images, they appear on front pages according to keywords and alt-text. The easiest way to add Image-Alt-Text is through an SEO plugin. You can follow a detailed guide about how to write alt text for images. 

Large images will slow down your website speed and performance. That is why it is important to optimize images by reducing image size. So after the compression, a site will perform faster. 

9. Using Tags and Categories

Tags and categories will allow you to separate the website’s blog posts and pages into specific groups. It will improve your SEO by allowing search engines to understand the website’s content and structure. Also, it makes the user experience easier, allowing site visitors to quickly find what they are searching for. 

Tags are just like keywords that describe what a specific webpage is all about. For example, in a workout website, tag examples would be ‘dumbbell’ or ‘chin ups’. You can add tags on your WordPress dashboard. 

You group your post and pages with the help of categories. In the case of the same example, categories may include ‘bodybuilding’ and ‘cardio’. You can build categories on WordPress as well. This is very important for WordPress SEO. 

10. Use SSL for Security

SSL, also known as Security Sockets Layer, is a security technology that manages encrypted links between the browser and server. This is how the information shared between you, and the site visitor is secure. For example, if your visitor orders some products and fills out forms such as credit card information, SSL ensures that hackers do not intercept the information. 

SSL also improves SEO because search engines like Google look for ‘secure and encrypted connections. If there are two identical sites, one has SSL, and the other one doesn’t, Google will rank the site with SSL. 

WordPress.org automatically adds SSL to your site. 

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed how to do WordPress SEO in 10 steps by explaining 10 tips to boost your WordPress SEO and improve your website’s performance, which can attract more visitors. Practices such as image optimization, plugins, SSL, site speed, keyword optimization, and others will help your webpage to appear on the front page of search results. Otherwise, it will cause in SEO mistakes and hurt your business. Make sure to use the given tips for better WordPress SEO. 

You can als? take a look at our Chrome SEO Extensions and SEO Consultant articles.

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