10 WordPress SEO Tips to Boost Rankings

If you already have a WordPress website that is up and running, the next important thing is to ensure that it is optimized for search engines. Search engines look beyond how great or beautiful your website is in order to give it a good ranking. 

A good ranking in the end will determine how easy it will be for internet users to find you and this determines how good your sales will be. It is therefore important to know what search engines look for in ranking websites in order not to miss out on a good ranking. Here are some tips you should implement to boost your rankings:

1. Develop a sitemap for your website

A sitemap will help search engines understand the structure of your website. This is because one website can have so many pages, and all of them are important when it comes to indexing your website. Creating a sitemap is very easy. WordPress users can for instance use Google XML Sitemaps, a plugin that is very useful. This plugin automatically generates sitemaps for websites.

2. Use of Google analytics

This is an extremely popular tool that is offered by Google for the purpose of analyzing a website. The tool is free to use, and it can help you a lot in tracking your website traffic. It is important to know where your website traffic is emanating from, what is its behavior and anything else that might help you understand your users better. This way, you will know how to influence them to help you reach your targets easily.

3. Make your website content shareable

This makes it easy for your website visitors to share your content easily on their social networking sites. Now that social media is being used more than ever, you need to take advantage of how it can drive massive traffic to your website. This is easy to achieve if your content is shared widely on different social media groups like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, among others. This is achieved so easily by adding social sharing buttons on your website.

4. Set your permalinks

Permalinks are basically the URLs you use on your website pages and posts. Your users will use them in their address bars in order to reach different sections of your website. Other websites and search engines will also use them in order to access your website directly. You will get a default permalink from WordPress, which then can be changed to something easier to use by your users. A customized permalink will also be very easy to index by search engines.

5. Use of links and anchor texts properly

Adding links to posts is very important but there is a proper way to do it in order to boost your SEO rankings. You can add your own links to your own posts, which is called interlinking. This not only improves user experience but also helps you to gain some favor from the search engines. The links have to be relevant to the posts they are linked to though, for this to work in your favor.

6. Always use SEO plugins

There are so many SEO plugins that are offered by WordPress, for instance All in One SEO Plugin and Yoast SEO. These will do so much more for your website than the ordinary plugins, while at the same time boosting your rankings. They come with complete SEO solutions to help enhance your website on page SEO. They can also be used to generate an XML sitemap for your website.

7. Optimize your media as well

For many website owners, media is very important for their website. It can however make or break your website depending on how it is used. That is why you should name your images and them appropriately in order to boost your SEO rankings. Do not for instance upload an image with a very complex name. You should change it to a simple and relevant title, add a small caption, description and also alt text. All these will help a lot in ranking your website.

8. Use of high quality content

Content is king concept in word tag cloud on white background

This is the most used SEO tip for improved rankings. Quality content is applicable everywhere, in any kind of website, whether it is a corporate website or just a blog. The kind of content you use must be free of grammatical errors; it should be well researched, free of spelling errors and also appealing to the readers. It should also be unique, shareable, informative, helpful and also actionable.

9. Use themes that are search engine optimized

Fortunately, WordPress offers a wide range of themes that are search optimized, and these are a great way to get a good foundation in the search engines. WordPress users should therefore stop looking for those great looking themes. Instead, they should go for those that are optimized for search engines. If you use a theme that is well written with SEO best practices, it will be very easy to get a good ranking.

10. Use of the right heading tags

The way you use heading tags will matter so much to search engines, therefore ensure that they are used properly. Fortunately, you can easily get headings from your text editor, from where you can pick the one you prefer, from heading 1 to heading 6. You, however, have to know the ones to pick for a specific heading. The H1 is always meant for the title of a blog post. It should therefore be clean and informative. H2 will be for the other additional headings inside your post. H3 and H4 are use for subheadings.

When it comes to SEO, it is important for website owners to be aware of the many things they can do in order to get a good ranking. Good thing is that there are so many tactics and techniques available, with those mentioned here as the best to use in a WordPress website. If used well, these tips will give you a higher ranking in the search engines.

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