Have you ever considered SEO for your WordPress website? This method can significantly increase the visibility of your website on Google and other search engines. Don’t worry if you haven’t, we’ll walk you through some key starting points.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is an essential component of any website that wishes to attract more visitors. When your website is optimized, search engines find it easier to locate it and understand the content on your site. This can boost your website’s ranking on search engine result pages, especially if your SEO is strong enough to get you on the first page of Google search results, where the majority of web users start and end their searches.
While some SEO strategies cover simple website maintenance, others require careful consideration of all your website’s pages, titles, and articles. The WordPress SEO process may appear daunting, but if you’re willing to put in a little effort, it will pay off.
Here are three ways you can optimize your WordPress site:
Choose a Reliable Web Host
It is important for both you and Google that your website attracts visitors who enjoy their experience and can easily access and share your content. That is why it is recommended that you choose a hosting service like HostArmada that has high uptime and fast loading speed. Google gives higher rankings to websites that meet these criteria.
Speed
Firstly, the speed or loading time of your website is an important factor to consider when choosing a hosting service because it plays an important role in providing a satisfactory user experience. Internet users nowadays can become irritated with even a second of delay in loading time.
Uptime
It is critical to ensure that your website has near 100% uptime, which is a measure of the hosting company’s operational time and, as a result, the availability of your website. If your site is frequently inaccessible or unavailable, Google may penalize it. As a result, it is advised to select a hosting service with a high uptime meaning a hosting service that keeps its system up and running without delays.
Examine the Performance of the Website
A website’s performance is not solely dependent on its web host. The web host is just one piece of a larger puzzle. The theme, plugins, and image sizes used on the site all have an impact on its performance.
To evaluate your website’s performance, open the WordPress console and navigate to Tools > Site Health, which is a quick way to assess the functionality and security of your website. This page contains suggestions for improvements, but it is critical to understand each suggestion before agreeing or disagreeing with it.
Use Google Pagespeed Insight
You can also use Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool to test each page on your website. Most of the time it is one page that is causing the problem and not the whole website. That is why this tool analyzes each page separately. Following the completion of the analysis, review the Opportunities section to identify areas where you can improve the performance of your site.
Use SSL to secure your website
While doing online banking or shopping in the past, a small SSL lock symbol in your browser indicated a secure connection. This was an exception to the rule that concerned only websites where money transactions occurred.
Nowadays, however, due to the increased awareness regarding online security – most websites have SSL certificates. That is why Google, the world’s most popular search engine, now prefers SSL-enabled websites in its rankings and may even penalize non-SSL websites.
While SSL may appear to be unnecessary for websites that publish cake recipes, blog posts, or provide car maintenance advice, in the end, it improves the security of all internet users.
Furthermore, we now have Let’s Encrypt, a certificate authority that freely distributes certificates, which means that SSL is now free. Many web hosting services provide automated SSL installation, including Let’s Encrypt integration.
Conclusion
These fundamental principles only scratch the surface of WordPress search engine optimization. There are also more subtle SEO techniques that you will learn as you gain more experience. They involve your writing skills for titles, taglines, and meta descriptions which is an art of its own. However, you must first cover the basics that are mentioned in this article.