You have a website – great! But that’s just the beginning. Now you need to create great content that ranks in search engines to build traffic. And that’s what we’ll be covering today. Learn everything you need to know about WordPress SEO so your website ranks in search engines.
Use a Great WordPress Theme
First things first – get yourself a great WordPress theme. For example – the Total theme. Nt only is this theme full of powerful site building features (drag and drop page builder, parallax backgrounds, header styles, bbPress & WooCommerce support, fully responsive design, and more) but it’s also coded for speed. Total uses semantic and vlid code, built-in schema support and offers custom options within the themes panel to easily disable features you’re not using with a click. Just run the demo through your favorite WordPress speed test tool too see for yourself.
Optimize Your Content
When writing posts, keep SEO in mind. This includes:
- Make sure to use proper headings (H1 for your post title, H2 for sub headings in your post, then H3, H4, etc.)
- Use internal links to your own posts and well as external links, outbound to authority third party websites
- Add your keyword naturally throughout your content, in your post title and in image titles
You can take advantage of an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO to help optimize your content.
Speed Up Your Website
Site speed is of the utmost importance, for your real readers and for search engines like Google. There’s a lot involved, but these are 3 quick ways to speed up your site fast.
1. Great Hosting
Your hosting can make or break your site speed. It’s important to take the time to find the best WordPress hosting for your site’s needs. We recommend a managed hosting plan from WP Engine to keep your site blazing fast. Of course, affordable hosting such as Bluehost (which starts at just $2.95/month) are still a good option if that’s what fits your budget – but you just can’t bet the speed that comes with a managed hosting plan.
2. Use a CDN
Cache your site with a CDN to speed things up. A CDN (content delivery network) essentially stores a copy of your website at different data center locations (for example in Los Angeles, New York and London) then displays your website to visitors based on which data center they’re closest to. So if a person in New Jersey visits your site it would be via the CDN located in New York.
Best of all you don’t have to spend a ton of money – using a free CDN works great. In fact, we recommend using Cloudflare to speed up WordPress sites.
3. Optimize Images
Big images can really slow down your website. Instead of uploading a giant 3000px wide 8MB image, edit your image to be the size you need (if your site width is 980px, then a 1000px image is great) and compress it (a lossless compression can reduce a file size by up to 50%). If you don’t want to pay for a service, there are plenty of free services and plugins to compress and optimize images.
Or consider using one of these lazy load plugins to optimize how images are loaded on your WordPress site. With lazy load, images and other resource heavy on page elements will be loaded after your quick loading text.
Use Google Analytics to Track Your Stats
Optimizing your site is great, but it means nothing if you don’t have statistics to keep track of. There are plenty of tools you can use to see your site stats but the most popular (by far) is Google Analytics for WordPress.
The easiest way to integrate Google’s services with your WordPress site is with Google Site Kit. With this plugin you can access all of your Google tools (Analytics, PageSpeed, Adsense, Tag Manager, etc) right from WordPress – to staying on top of your traffic and SEO is quick and easy.