WordPress SEO Guide: Must-Follow Tips for Rankings

Online landscape bustling is evolving every day, where attention spans are fleeting and digital landscapes are ever-evolving, the need for a website to be swift, seamless, and user-friendly cannot be overstated. At the core of this digital transformation stands WordPress, a powerhouse content management system that fuels a significant portion of the internet. 

Yet, even with its myriad capabilities, the speed at which your WordPress website loads can be the defining factor between a captivated audience and a lost opportunity. One of the strategic entries can be opting for WordPress Speed Optimization Services – crucially in the pursuit of a lightning-fast, engaging, and responsive web presence. 

As we undertake this journey, let’s unravel the pivotal role played by speed optimization in not just elevating user experiences but also in securing a coveted spot at the forefront of search engine rankings. Join us as we explore the intricacies of enhancing your WordPress website’s speed, seamlessly blending performance with user satisfaction.

What is WordPress SEO?

Let’s take an example: you have written a blog about interior design ideas. When someone will search for interior design ideas, what do you think about how many pages they have to go through to visit your link?

So, now let’s say you have a WordPress website, so I guess you have a general idea of SEO. WordPress SEO services are one step ahead of everyone else because WordPress itself is SEO-friendly, and that’s one of the reasons why people prefer WordPress over any other site.

“Today It’s Not About ‘Get the Traffic’ — It’s About ‘Get the Targeted and Relevant Traffic.” – Adam Audette, Chief Knowledge Officer, Rkg

Google keeps changing its algorithms. In the past, if you wanted to be on the top of the Google SERPs, you just had to stuff the whole blog with keywords, but now Google, with its new algorithm, has thrashed this method out of the way.

But there is still a ray of hope to come to the top of the Google search list, and I will show you how. So, sit back and enjoy reading and gaining some valuable knowledge. Considering the importance of organizing information effectively, implementing knowledge base software can significantly enhance your website’s searchability and user experience.

1. Install SEO Friendly Plugins and Themes

Use SEO Plugins

Building a WordPress site nowadays is as easy as making cup noodles. You can make it instantly without any difficulty. Plugins are extensions of the site to make it rank higher in Google searches, so I recommend you should use SEO-friendly plugins. As I have said, WordPress is already SEO-friendly, but you can under some of the best SEO practices to a whole new level by using SEO plugins.

WordPress is swarming with so many different types of SEO plugins, but there are few which are overpower others.

• Yoast SEO

In this recent times, Yoast has gained a lot of popularity. It helps you in many ways, like focusing on the best SEO keywords, and writing the meta description, titles, and tags. It also analyzes every page based on the updated algorithm.

• Rank Math

Rank math has gained so much popularity that it has millions of downloads. This shows us how much value this plugin contains. Rank math focuses on on On-page SEO. When you start writing for your page/blog, it will tell you the keywords that need to be inserted. Once you do that, it will be checked by Rank Math, and it will underline the things that need to be changed. It is also used to create an XML sitemap, and Google Analytics integration, and tracks the ranking of keywords.

• All-in-One SEO

There are millions of websites prefer All in One SEO Plugin. It can easily optimize the website, add meta description, and title tag, and easily implement Google AMP SEO and it will automatically generate a sitemap and generate it to popular search engines. But make sure you don’t go crazy about adding plugins because it will slow down your website speed.

Use Light Themes

Like plugins, it is necessary to choose a WordPress theme wisely, and you have to keep in mind that the theme is SEO-friendly because themes also play an important role in SEO. The code has to be clean and not complicated to give the best performance for your site.

Make sure to use a theme that is light weighted. This is necessary as it helps your website load quickly and in turn, helps your website rank higher.

Doing research is the most important thing when you are here to compete in the market. Choose the best theme and also test its performance by following the method.

1. Find the theme demo site from its official website
2. Paste the URL into Google PageSpeed Insights and run the tool

I prefer you to use responsive themes where you can do specific changes. Responsive themes help you to interact with users, and this will increase your user experience. And when I can do specific changes like changing the head tag, it will help me improve SEO.

• Divi

It’s a theme that you can employ for multipurpose. You can do anything with the help of this SEO-friendly theme there’s no limitation. You can even customize it with the Divi Builder tool, which is integrated into the theme. There are many layouts available in Divi that you can fine-tune without changing the codes.

Benefits of using Divi:

1. Fully Responsive
2. 20+ Premade layouts
3. Fully Customizable
4. 6 different demos
5. 40+ Content elements
6. Video background

• SEO Crawler

One of the best SEO-friendly themes. It is easily customizable and comes with 3 featured website demos, and not only that it is well suited with Yoast SEO leading search engine optimization plugin.

Benefits of using SEO Crawler:

1. Three Demos
2. Multiple pre-built inner pages
3. 19 header style
4. Drag and Drop Page Builder
5. Various layouts of Every Section
6. One-page function
   

But today, people always go for customized SEO-friendly themes, because these days everybody is fighting for first place. They always want unique styled themes for their website as per their demand which you won’t get from pre-built themes, so you can reach out to a WordPress theme design and development company that can make a customized theme for you as per your requirements.

2. Keyword Research

The SEO game is all about keywords. The right keyword helps you with better rankings. And for that, you may need to hire SEO experts in case if you are new to online business.

There are also many tools for advanced keyword research. Some of the best tools are SEMRush, Ubersuggest, keywordtool.io, Google Trends, and even Google keyword planner; they do SEO keyword research for you; which will give you a basic idea of what people are searching for and what is trending. Keyword research helps you to determine the user intent while the user is searching for any services and products.

While Choosing keywords Make sure you do proper research. Using High volume keywords is the main funda as we all want a bunch of audiences to visit our site, but is that easy? 

For that, you also need to focus on Keyword difficulty. Higher difficulty means hard to rank on the first page of Google(Mark my words: Hard but not Impossible)

Take an idea from the keyword research tool for volume and its keyword difficulty. Don’t forget to select the location of your target audience.

3. Use an Optimized Title Tag

As per Google,

“Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.”

Title tags are important because it says a lot about your pages or posts. Try to keep the keyword in your title tag, so you can get the targeted audience you are aiming for, but avoid keyword stuffing. And keep it under 60 to 65 words around 580px. More than that Google won’t display your full title tag.

4. Write a Proper Meta Description

In any way, your Meta description will not have a direct effect on your SEO, but it sure has on your CTR (click-through rates.)

A good meta description is where you tell what is there in your blog or what service you are providing in just 150 to 160 characters around 990px. This will help the readers to understand the overall nuance of your blog and they will click on your blog/ page instead of clicking on any other search results. To optimize your website pages, using SEO tools like the Attrock Meta Tag Analyzer can be highly effective. Such tools can help analyze your existing meta title and description tags, ensuring they’re well-crafted to align with SEO best practices.

Let’s see what Google has to say about this:

“A meta description tag should generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convinces the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for.”

Few points which you should keep in mind before writing a Meta description to make the best SEO Meta Description:

1. Accurate Summary: That can be easily drafted through a summarizer
2. Use Keywords
3. Close to Search Intent
4. What best you are providing than others!
5. Make Sure you Write the Description Within 150 to 160 Characters

5. Use Optimized Headings

When heading tags are utilized appropriately in WordPress websites, they provide a logical structure for your text and aid in the natural flow of information across the text. They are also employed by search engines to determine the most important aspects of a topic. Heading tags are incredibly advantageous in terms of the accessibility of the website.

A total of 6 headers are there starting from H1 to H6. H1 is the most important header and should often be used only once. It is used as the title so make sure you use the main or focus keyword in H1. In the remaining article, you can use the H2 and H3 tags to separate sections.

H2 and H3 have equal importance when it comes to optimizing your content. Use your other related or LSI Keywords in H2 and H3 for better rankings.

H4 to H6 headers are used very rarely however if needed you can certainly use them.

6. Check your Site’s Visibility Settings

Before optimizing your page or post all the way first check if your website is crawlable! WordPress incorporates a feature that stops websites from being indexed by search engines, known as the “noindex” attribute. While this approach may be useful during the development of your website; mostly when the website is under construction mode, developers enable this mode to keep it away from Google crawlers.

Make certain that you enable search engine exposure so that you can benefit from expert assistance as efficiently as possible.

Follow these simple instructions to double-check your web visibility in WordPress settings.

1. Navigate your site to “Settings”.
2. Click on “Reading” on the WordPress admin dashboard.
3. Go to the section titled “Search Engine Visibility”.

If the box for search engine visibility is enabled, uncheck it right away. This will help in WordPress SEO and will showcase your website on Google.

7. Rich in Content

Good, unique, shareable, and relevant content is still the king of SEO. Keeping every point aside, quality rich content is the life of your website.

Now you’ll be thinking about what Good, unique, shareable, and relevant content is still the king of SEO. Keeping every point aside, quality rich content is the life of your website. If you reach out to a Digital Marketing Agency offering Experienced Content Marketing, then they will provide Content Writing and Marketing services, and you don’t have to think about all this. They will do all your work for you.

But if you like to work alone, you need to do a lot of research. Google doesn’t entertain anyone who copies others and plagiarizes others’ content; because of this, you’ll have a low engagement rate, and you will lose your SEO ranking. Also, if your content is rich in quality and relevant, more people will be engaged and share it with their friends and followers.

Content that is highly informative, educative, and helps the users will be considered higher quality.

8. Make Sure Your Website has SSL

Securing your website is important. When your website is secured, google and the user will trust you and will have a sigh of relief that their information is safe and without any worry, they can engage with your website.

To make your website secure you need to follow these steps.

1. Your current host should support HTTPS and SSL
2. Purchase an SSL certificate or get it from let’s encrypt
3. Install the SSL certificate on WordPress site.
4. Check if it’s working.
5. Redirect all your files from HTTP to HTTPS.

Many websites will claim to be HTTPS secured, but if they are not, Google will give you a warning before you enter. Securing your WordPress website from hackers is a must so that it keeps on performing well without any problems.

9. Optimizing Image

Is there an increase in bounce rate on your website, and you are wondering why? Check your page speed, and if it’s slow, check the size of your PNG image because if the size of your image is big, it will take time to load your page. And people tend to lose interest and get frustrated if your website is loading slowly, and they will move on to another page, and this will affect your page ranking SEO.

You can use different plugins or websites to optimize images or we suggest you use tinypng.com to optimize them. But still, if you want to go for plugins, below I am suggesting a few of them that you can take into consideration while optimizing your images:

1. Imagify
2. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
3. Optimus – WordPress Image Optimizer
4. Smush

Adding Image Title Text

For WordPress SEO ranking you don’t need to add image title text, you do it so that when a user is on your website/ page and hovers over the image, your image title text appears. So, that user understands without any difficulty.

Now to change your image title text

1. Go where you have placed the image
2. Click on the pencil icon, you will be able to see the edit option on the Image
3. Click on the advance option and change your Image Title

Adding ALT Text to Your Image

ALT text, also called alternative text, is used by the search engine to understand what your page is about, so if you want, you can also target keywords while adding ALT text or variations of targeted keywords to describe what your image is about.

Steps to add ALT text to your image:

1. Hover over the image you have added
2. Click on the pencil icon
3. A pop-up box will appear with your image details
4. You will see a field called Alternative Text

Now You can enter your targeted keyword there. There is one more way to optimize your image size which is used by a lot of companies/people nowadays.

Name your Image File Wisely

File names, similar to alt text, can assist search engines in understanding images. As a result, instead of using an ID-based label such as IMG 0001.jpg, be descriptive when naming your images.

It is not necessary for file names to be as accurate or extensive as alt text, but they must always contain a keyword. Additional recommendations include writing file names in lowercase and replacing blank spaces with hyphens in accordance with Google’s guidelines. As a result, the URL for the file will be tidy and readable.

Start Using Image CDN

Images are one of the primary problems regarding file size and slow websites. A huge JavaScript file may take up 4kb of space uncompressed, but even if you compress it by 75%, you save just 3kb. On the other hand, an image could effortlessly exceed 500kb; if you can lessen it by 25%, you will save 125kb. Thus, compressing the image is 40 significantly more efficient than compressing the Javascript; when it comes to speeding up your site, your photos should be your primary priority.

An image CDN, a specific sort of Content Delivery Network that distributes optimized images, is among the top preferred alternatives for images on the web. A content delivery network for images consists of three components: device detection, automatic image optimization, and a global content delivery network.

WebP Image Format

Everybody is using Webp image format to optimize their site/ page images as it provides superior lossy compression for images. It has the capability of reducing 32% the image size compared to PNG and JPEG.

Webp uses predictive coding to encode an image, this method is the same as the method used by the VP8 codec to compress the video while maintaining the quality. WebP image format checks the value in the neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the value in the block, and then it only encodes the difference between them.

10. Add Proper Internal Links and External Links

Internal Link

When you link one blog/ page to the other blog/ page of your website, it’s called internal linking.
Still, you are not getting the idea of internal linking.

Let me give you an, eg: Pretend that you are writing a blog on “10 best cars to buy”, now you have previously written blogs on the best engines, suspensions, and mufflers, so in your current blog, you can add your links of best engines for people to understand that why is that car best, and they don’t have to leave your site, cause all the necessary thing they need to know, is available on your website only. And this will reduce the bounce rate of your site. People will stay longer on your site, and because of this, your site will come in good light.

Because internal links can aid Google in deeper recognizing and evaluating your website, it is critical to have internal links on your website. It is possible to notify Google about which pages on your site are important and about what they are all about by providing Google with links to follow along with descriptive anchor text. Connections within a company improve the user experience and may even aid to increase engagement.

When developing your internal linking strategy, there are a number of considerations to keep in mind. Although the specifics of your approach will vary based on the nature of your site and your aims, the steps outlined below serve as a good starting point.

1. Choose the most appropriate structure for your site
2. Determine the Critical material for your website
3. Add contextual links
4. Link hierarchical pages
5. Consider adding a Related post section
6. Try adding a navigational link
7. Add a link to your taxonomies
8. Consider including links to Recent or Popular Posts

External link

All SEO experts will agree upon the fact that external Linking is a very important ranking factor. And I would prefer that you should make external linking a habit. External links are considered a third-party vote of confidence by search engines.

You should add external links to authoritative pages in your blog or web pages so that you can help your readers with an accurate source of information. But giving them a link will pass on “Link Juice” to that particular website. I.e you are increasing their authority.

So, Whenever you are using an external link make sure to use the” NO Follow” Tag.

How to add a “ No Follow” link in WordPress?

1. You can add it Manually
2. In the “Link Relationship,” You can specify it to be “ NO Follow”

One more thing I would say is if you are adding external links make sure when they tap on the link it will open in a new tab. So that they can come back to your page when needed. To do it follow this step.

Step:1 Highlight the text you want to link and then click on the hyperlink

Step: 2 You will see a text box; check the text that says open in a new tab, click on it, and you are good to go

11. Create SEO-Friendly Permalinks

WordPress gives you a default URL structure for your site’s posts and pages, and generally this URL is not at all SEO friendly, and even the user won’t understand anything from the URL that what the page is about so, to make your URL SEO-friendly you have to change your permalink, and luckily it’s easy to change you need to go to setting → permalink.

The ideal permalink will be when you add the title of your page/post, the year, or even you can add a keyword in the URL because of which your page/post will soar high.

Let us Understand the Technical SEO and key elements to take care of!

12. Core Web Vitals

Core web vitals are key elements that evaluate the overall user experience on your website. There are three ways to measure.

Loading / Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

It measures how long it took to load the largest content paint on your website; it’s important to load it fast for a better user experience. An ideal LCP measurement is 2.5 seconds; anything lower than that will be considered poor or needs improvement.

1. Your server responding Slowly: If your server is responding slowly, you can do all these things so that it works properly, optimize your server, route your users to the nearby CDN if you are connected to any unnecessary third party, remove it, and shouldn’t unnecessarily create a cache.
2. Your resources are loading slowly: Compress your images, or you can compress your text file so that this problem doesn’t occur. Using an AI photo editor can also help optimize image sizes while maintaining quality, ensuring faster load times for your website.
3. Client-side rendering: If this problem occurs, try to use minimal client-side rendering. if you don’t want to do that, do server-side rendering or use pre-rendering. Also, Google Page Speed Insights will show what is slowing down your page’s LCP.

Interactivity/ First Input Delay (FID)

It measures how long your website took to interact with users. If it takes less than 100 milliseconds, your website is ideal. If not, you need to improve it, or it will result in a poor user experience. FID is very important for the website/page, where user interaction is high, like logging in, signing in, or where the user has to click or write something.

To optimize FID, make sure you have optimized your page for interactive readiness, break the long tasks of JAVA so that the execution period of a task is less, or use a web worker.

Visual Stability/ Cumulative Layout shift (CLS)

It measures the number of unusual layout shifts on your website. The ideal time for a layout shift should be less than 1 second; anything more than that is poor or needs improvement.

Here are something you can do if you want to minimize CLS:

1. Set image dimension: You need to do that, so your browsers know exactly how much space an element will take to load.
2. Reserving space for Ads: otherwise, the ads will suddenly appear, pushing down your content and relocating.

There are some tools to check Core Web Vitals, and I have listed a few of them below:

1. Google Lighthouse
2. Google Pagespeed Insights
3. Web Vitals Extension

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) encompasses the seamless transition between user interactions and subsequent visual updates on the page. Optimizing INP involves minimizing the delay between user interactions, such as clicks or taps, and the corresponding updates or changes in the page’s visual elements. This optimization ensures a smooth and responsive user experience, contributing to improved overall Core Web Vitals scores.

To enhance Interaction to Next Paint, you can focus on reducing unnecessary delays in rendering changes, optimizing event handling, and prioritizing critical tasks that directly impact the user interface. By fine-tuning these aspects, websites can create a more responsive and engaging user experience, positively influencing Core Web Vitals and, consequently, search engine rankings.

13. Boosting Page Load Speed

The average human attention span is very low, so if your website is taking too much time to load, you are losing your audience left, right, and center. And because your page is loading slowly, the customer bounce rate will also increase as well as there will be a loss in traffic. So to check insight on your website, you can use insight tools like GTMetrix, and Pingdom Tools, or an SEO expert for WordPress speed optimization can be hired which will help you to speed up your WordPress website performance.

• Pingdom Tools: Pingdom tool uses Onload time. Onload time is the time a page takes to completely load all the resources, however, javascript is not included in it. The benefit of using Pingdom is when you request a waterfall for you it shows a deeper look at every single HTTP link to your site. This is done to gain a visual understanding of how your site loads and where the bottlenecks are. Currently, its server is in 7 different locations for free speed tests.

• GTMetrix: It uses Google page speed and Yahoo! To show how good your site is performing, like Uptrends, GTMetrix also requests waterfall so you can read it and can make necessary changes that are required to boost the performance of your website. But it will run the test from Canada by default. If you do the free registration, It will let you run the test from Dallas, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, and Sydney.

14. Mobile Friendly

Your WordPress website should be mobile-friendly because nowadays, most of the searches are done through mobile, so make sure your website is made for mobile as well as a desktop so that it doesn’t affect your ranking.

You can also see how well your website is doing with mobile users, for that, you have to take Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. And enter your site URL; this will give you an idea of how good your mobile version site is performing. A few years ago it was necessary that your website should be desktop friendly, but now everything is changed as most of the users browses on google through mobiles.

So from starting July 2019 Google considers mobile-first indexing all your new websites should be Mobile friendly because Google-bot primarily crawls and indexes pages with a Smartphone agent.

15. Broken Link Optimization

Whenever the user clicks on the link you provided and it takes them to a 404 error page, the user loses interest in your page and it will increase the bounce rate from your website, and because of that your ranking will be affected. The search engine will think that your site is not properly maintained and this creates a negative impression.

We suggest you check your links through Google Search Console or Screaming Frog because it’s the easiest way. It will show you where the broken link is so that you can fix it, or else you can use tools like Screaming Frog to check your broken links. Another tool for detecting broken links is Broken Link Checker by Sitechecker.

16. Adding XML and HTML Sitemap

XML Sitemap

If a search engine wants to find your content, how will you make it easy for them? By adding an XML sitemap. Adding it won’t help you in ranking higher in the search list, but it will make it easy for search engine crawlers to find your pages, and then it will start ranking them. So, because of that, your chances to score more on google site links will increase.

HTML Sitemap

You all will be thinking that you have already added an XML sitemap then why should we use an HTML sitemap?

The answer is XML sitemap is specifically for the crawlers but for the user to find a specific page on your site, you need to have an HTML sitemap. It doesn’t matter if your site is big if you have an HTML sitemap, they can direct themself to the page they want to visit through an HTML sitemap as HTML helps to structure the site and make it user-friendly because google also considers user experience to rank your page/ site.

17. Use Multilingual WordPress Plugins

If your website is developed and targets international audiences then the content of your website should be available in a different language as per the locations. It helps you to increase website visits. Neil Patel-SEO expert experienced a 47% boost in website traffic as a result of targeting 82 different languages for respective locations. Kinsta saw a 107% increase in organic traffic over the previous year when they added nine other languages.

If you improve your online appearance to a multilingual WordPress website, Google will not penalize you for duplicating material. However, it is crucial that you use the correct hreflang and canonical tags to avoid penalties. I recommend you to use WordPress plugins like WPML-The WordPress Multilingual Plugin, which helps you to develop a multilingual site.

18. Social Media Signals

A technique you used, and because of that, your page started ranking higher, so you use it again and again, and you will start thinking that you found that hack to rank higher. But let me tell you one algorithm change, and your website will be lost like a needle in a haystack.

So, I recommend you find a stable source that safeguards your site for long-term success, and that’s social media because it is not affected by SEO at all, but it can affect SEO not directly but indirectly. Having a good number of followers and making shareable content will help you reach out to more audiences.

From the world of Orkut, and Myspace we have now landed upon Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, arguably the 4 largest social media platforms. Now how can you increase your site ranking with the help of these platforms? So, for that, first, create a business account, stay active, and try to engage with the followers. Secondary make shareable, unique, and relatable content. Third, make it easy for them to share your content. Fourth, share your content as well as other influencers who are relevant to your site.
Use our Social Auto Poster Plugin so that you can schedule the post. Not because it’s our plugin, but also because it’s one of the best plugins which are available in the market with more than 4700+ downloads, from scheduling posts to Google Analytics campaign tracking and everything in between Social Auto Poster Plugin offers.

Open Graph Tags

Developed by Facebook to standardize the usage of data to represent the contents of a webpage, Open Graph is an internet protocol that allows users to share information with one another.

You can focus on providing information as simple as a page’s title or as specific as the start and end time of a video in this section. Each of these elements works in concert to create a representation of a single web page on the computer screen.

In an attempt to reach as many customers as possible, the great majority of online information is created with the goal of being shared widely. This may not be important if you’re sending it to a single friend, but if you are planning to post it or have it posted on any social network or program that allows rich previews, you’ll want the preview to be as good as possible to maximize its effectiveness. As a result, more people will take the time to go through your stuff and, eventually, click through to it.

Basic of Open Graph

Each page must include the four fundamental open graph tags (og: title, og: type, og: image, and og: URL). It is important that these tags are separate for each page that you serve, which implies that the tags on your homepage should be different from the tags on your blog post article page.
Even though it should be obvious, here is an explanation of what each tag stands for:
og: title: This is your page’s title. Unless you wish to express it differently, this is normally the same as your web page’s “title” tag.
og:type: The og: type shows what type of category your website falls in.
og:image: This will be a URL to an image that symbolizes your material. It should be a high-resolution photograph that social media platforms may incorporate into their feeds.
og:url: This should be the current page’s URL

Use Cache Plugin

Another popular strategy for improving the performance of a website is to cache its content. This method allows site users to view temporary versions of site files stored in their browsers. When a user reloads a page, the browser can make use of the cached files rather than having to recreate the page from scratch.
It is possible to enable caching on WordPress websites with the use of a plugin It is possible to enable caching on WordPress websites with the use of a cache plugin such as W3 Total Cache or WP Fastest Cache.

19. www vs Non-www in URLs

Choose the web address format you want to use! Here I mean – Do you want your URL to be

1. https://www.mysite.com? Or you prefer it to be,
2. mysite.com (without WWW) format?

Here are a few notes on this topic:

1. Mostly, all URLs have www. Today, many websites drop it. Ultimately, it’s up to you.
2. The www version of a URL is considered to be a separate URL by Google. To avoid duplicate content issues, you must choose one.
   
   Go to Settings > General and type in your preferred format in both the “WordPress Address” and “Site Address” fields:

20. Proper use of Tags and Categories

WordPress has built-in categories and tags that help you organize your content in a way that is already set up. A lot of your information can be better organized and classified with the help of categories.

Categories and Tags can help to improvise user experience by allowing users to find what exactly they are searching for! As well, let google understand what your post is about!

• Tags: Tags are basically keywords! Let’s say your post is about “How to make Noodles” your tags could probably be “Schezwan”, “Chinese” and similar.

• Categories: Categories means the distribution or grouping of a specific post. Let’s say you are having multiple niche blogging websites. You explain everything about food, fashion, Tech, and more.

Creating Categories like Food, Fashion, and Tech news will improvise your user experience. Also, It will let the user visit the right page that he/she is interested in.

Steps to create a category for your WordPress site. Visit WordPress “Settings” and click “Writing”.You’ll be able to see your Current Categories here as well there will be an option to add new categories.

21. Adding your Site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is a very important tool for the best WordPress SEO practice, because of GSC you can keep a check on your website from anywhere you just need a stable internet connection. If you want to see how your site looks in search engines, GSC will help you do that. You can see other reports, and crawl errors of your website using Google Search Console.

1. You can see how many times your page was clicked.
2. What keywords do most people use to find what they are looking for.
3. You will be alerted if something wrong is happening on your site.
4. Troubleshoot issues for AMP, Mobile Experience, Core Web Vitals, and a few other features.

22. Do Follow, No Follow, UGC, and Sponsored External links

Earlier search engines like Google only follow Dofollow and Nofollow links attribute. In September 2019, Google announced two new attributes called “UGC” and “sponsored” to identify the quality of links. Here I’ll describe in more detail each link attribute.

Do-Follow

In WordPress by default, each link created is marked as a do-follow link. Dofollow is a link attribute that implies that search engines will crawl the link and consider it as a vote of confidence. This helps build the authority of a website and it affects your website rankings too. Since link juice is passed from the linking page. So SEOs and webmasters are always hungry for building do-follow links for their websites. But experienced SEOs always balance between no-follow and do-follow links in order to look at more natural link building.

No-Follow

As mentioned above, experienced SEO experts always build both types of links do-follow and no-follow. So no-follow links are as important as do-follow. No-follow links help you to generate more website traffic and create brand awareness, even if they don’t pass your authority and link juice.

Nofollow links contain the ‘rel’ attribute of ‘nofollow’, as mentioned below:
Eg.<a rel=”nofollow” href=”https://cheese.example.com/Appenzeller_cheese” >Appenzeller </a>

UGC

This attribute should be used to markup any links uploaded in any website section designated for user-generated content (i.e., links that are posted in the comment section).

UGC links contain the ‘rel’ attribute of ‘UGC’, as mentioned below:

Eg.<a rel=”ugc” href=”https://cheese.example.com/Appenzeller_cheese” >Appenzeller </a>

Sponsored

If you get profit from an advertisement or link, or if you get money in any other way like affiliate marketing tools, you should use the ‘sponsored’ tag. This is because Google sees links to a page as an endorsement. When you get money for putting a link to another website, your goal is very different. Perhaps it’s something you wouldn’t be interested in unless you were paid for it.

Sponsored links contain the ‘rel’ attribute of ‘sponsored’, as mentioned below:

Eg.<a rel=”sponsored” href=”https://cheese.example.com/Appenzeller_cheese” >Appenzeller </a>

23. Do SEO Audits

After doing all the steps, you are not getting the attention you want for your page! Do an SEO audit then. The main reason to do an SEO audit is to check why you are not getting satisfactory results after doing everything you can for a better organic search ranking.

A few things are covered in the SEO audit:

1. Fixes your HTML code
2. JavaScript Errors
3. Speed test
4. Fix indexing problem
5. URL redirection
6. Analyze all the backlinks
7. Fix broken links
8. Meta tags

SEO site checkup, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, WooRank, and many other tools are used for SEO audits. They run several tests on your website and give you proper SEO tips for improvement.

Regular Audits

We recommend you do an SEO audit of your WordPress website on a regular basis. There are multiple benefits you will get because of Regular audits of your website like,

1. Improving website performance
2. Content optimization
3. The increased user experience of the website
4. Better position of the website in the search engine
5. High traffic on the Website

24. Hosting Provider

Choosing the best WordPress hosting provider is very critical. Many people overlook this point, but choosing the best hosting provider will boost your SEO. Also, we can’t neglect the security a hosting provider offers because they just have one single software. Considering all these points in mind, I suggest you read the detailed Cloudways review to understand the exceptional qualities of cloud servers.

From my experience I will advise you to choose WPEngine because we are also using it, and don’t worry, it’s affordable. But if you want to go for other hosting providers, here are a few hosting providers which I think you can choose from.

1. Bluehost
2. Hostinger
3. Siteground
4. Cloudflare

25. What is Local SEO and is it Important?

Google My Business indirectly helps your website rank, getting verified by GMB helps in ranking your business in the top 3 locally. GMB considers relevance, distance, and prominence to rank your profile. It is likely important for everyone however if you are into an online business you may not need Local SEO as there is nothing that you are serving near people searching.

• Relevance: Make sure you are clear about everything you are adding to your GMB profile because it determines how well your business fits in the user’s search intent. Being vague about it will lower your ranking, whereas If your content is to the point, it will help Google understand your business, which will help you rank high.
• Distance: Consider your business is in New Jersey, and it’s about nursery now; if someone from Manhattan will search for a nursery, they won’t be able to locate you but will see the location of the nursery situated in Manhattan and verified under GMB. Similarly, if someone from New Jersey will try to search for a Nursery, they will see your profile. Google uses the location of the search party to display the local business around them.
• Prominence: Prominence is based on a lot of things like reviews and positive ratings given by the client this will help you in ranking higher locally. So, try to stay active by adding events, managing reviews, and posting good content on your site because nobody likes a dead place.

26. Avoid Comment Spamming

Preventing comment spamming is becoming vital practices nowadays because bots automatically come to your site and add spam links, and because of this, your site will look tidy and unprofessional. Also, the ones who genuinely follow you, their valuable comment will be lost in those bots spammed comments. So, people will start losing interest in your page, and they will slowly stop visiting your page, which will affect your SEO ranking.

Therefore I suggest you keep a check on your site/ blog comment section.

Some simple steps to avoid comment spamming:

1. Reduce no. of links per post
2. Only people who have registered on your site can comment
3. Comments must be manually approved
4. Use anti-spam plugins
5. Set up a captcha code to avoid bot spamming

27. Create Evergreen Content

Creating evergreen content is essential for improving WordPress SEO and generating higher organic traffic. In this context, it refers to content that is relevant at all times, regardless of how long has passed after it was originally published.

As a general rule, authors who create evergreen content must update their blogs and articles on a regular basis in order to remain relevant.

When it comes to sharing, evergreen content has the added advantage of being shareable eternally, which enhances the number of backlinks and social signals it receives. Because breaking news is more recent than evergreen material, posting evergreen content is preferred over publishing breaking news.

It is recommended that you use the terms ‘last changed’ or ‘updated on’ to show when your content was most recently updated. This will help to build confidence with users and search engines by demonstrating that the information is current and relevant. You can also use such WordPress plugins to use this functionality in WordPress.

28. Build Some Backlinks

Contrary to what some people believe, link building is a critical component of good WordPress SEO practices. This is how the process of link building works. When you create high-quality content, site A will link to you, passing along the link juice to your site. For those seeking a professional backlinking service, it’s essential to ensure that these links come from reputable sources. It is more likely that if it is an authority site, Google will associate you with a more solid link profile, which will assist you in rising in the ranks. Because of this, it is advisable to offer a hyperlink to another website. The opposite is true if the material on site B is irrelevant to your topic or of poor quality. As a result of this, you will almost surely be penalized, and your ranking will almost certainly suffer as a result.

Don’t accept links from websites that aren’t related to your field of expertise. Only high-quality websites should be linked to your website (content). with relation to your website.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I install SEO-friendly plugins and themes for my WordPress site?

To install SEO-friendly plugins and themes, navigate to your WordPress dashboard, click on “Plugins” or “Themes,” then choose “Add New.” Search for reputable SEO plugins like Yoast or All in One SEO Pack, and themes designed for SEO optimization. Install and activate them to enhance your site’s SEO capabilities.

How can I optimize images on my WordPress site for improved SEO?

Optimizing images for SEO involves using descriptive file names, adding relevant alt text, and compressing images without compromising quality. Ensure images are appropriately sized, and consider using a plugin for automatic optimization. This improves page load times, and user experience, and enhances SEO by providing relevant information to search engines.

What is the significance of local SEO for WordPress websites, and how can I implement it effectively?

Local SEO is vital for businesses targeting a specific geographic audience. Implement it by optimizing Google My Business, including location-specific keywords in content, obtaining positive local reviews, and ensuring consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information across online platforms. This enhances local visibility and attracts relevant local traffic to your WordPress site.

Follow These WordPress SEO Tips for Better Ranking in SERP

In conclusion, mastering WordPress SEO is a gradual and enduring process, requiring patience and trust in the methodical implementation of the outlined strategies. Just like waiting for the ripening of fruit, the results of your SEO efforts may not be instantaneous, but persistence is key. This comprehensive guide, enriched with invaluable tips from an experienced SEO freelancer and SEO marketing firm, serves as a robust resource to elevate your website’s rankings.

If, however, you find that patience doesn’t yield the desired results and you’re eager for accelerated growth, consider hiring SEO experts. Their expertise can provide tailored solutions, ensuring your website achieves the optimal results you envision. Remember, with the right strategies and expert guidance, your WordPress site can thrive in the competitive landscape of search engine rankings.