It doesn’t matter what type of business you run, if you’re serious about it, you need customers. When it comes to the world of digital marketing, your website is the best tool you can have to reach those customers and make an impact. Using WordPress for your company’s website is something quite a lot of people are doing as it has proven to be quite what you need to help your business become successful.
We’ve searched the web, and we’ve made this list of things you can consider if you want to expand the reach of your WordPress site. These tips should help you understand how to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in the best possible way, so, without further ado, let’s jump in and boost your web traffic.
What is SEO?
Contents
- 1 What is SEO?
- 2 10 Ways You Can Improve Your SEO
- 2.1 1. Effective Permalinks
- 2.2 2. Create an XML Sitemap
- 2.3 3. Find the Best Web Host
- 2.4 4. Use a Dedicated Plugin for SEO
- 2.5 5. Use SEO Optimized Themes
- 2.6 6. Engage in Social Media
- 2.7 7. Use Heading Tags
- 2.8 8. Provide High-Quality Content
- 2.9 9. Invest in the Responsive Web Design
- 2.10 10. Stop Overusing Keywords
- 3 Conclusion
First of all, let’s try to understand what SEO really is. It represents the process of upgrading your traffic in both volume and quality from large search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. It helps generate “organic” search results, where your website gets positioned higher in the search results. There are numerous ways of approaching SEO, and there is no golden formula for it. So, here are some of the ways you can improve your SEO and boost your traffic.
10 Ways You Can Improve Your SEO
1. Effective Permalinks
Studies have shown that people really do care about how your permalink looks like. They would much rather click on the link that has some kind of description in it, than just plain numbers. Also, search engines give the priority to the sites with proper permalinks. Make sure you make permalinks that make sense and don’t use more than 5 words. Use hyphens to separate words, as search engines can get confused if underscore is used.
2. Create an XML Sitemap
There are loads of useful plugins available for WordPress websites. Some of those tools can help out with SEO quite significantly. For example, Google XML Sitemaps creates special XML sitemaps which enable automatic crawlers to fully read your site’s structure and retrieve information from it more effectively.
There are other great plugins that you may find useful, but in order to achieve better SEO, your website needs these XML sitemaps.
3. Find the Best Web Host
This one should go without saying, but when you’re looking for a web host for your website, you must do a thorough research. You need to find a reliable host, with enough speed and space, yet it should be affordable. If your website is down – Google won’t be able to find it, and you’ll lose precious visitors and customers. Find a reliable hosting solution before you finish your site, as it may be a bigger problem to change it afterward.
4. Use a Dedicated Plugin for SEO
As we’ve mentioned earlier, there’s a seemingly endless sea of WordPress plugins you can use to achieve almost anything. However, using too much of those plugins can also have a bad effect on your site. One of the plugins you should use actively if you want your SEO to really work, is a dedicated SEO plugin. These plugins have lots of features implemented within, and some, like Yoast SEO, add an extensive variety of optimization-focused features, so you can use it to completely optimize your WordPress website.
5. Use SEO Optimized Themes
Picking out a theme for your WordPress site is a very important step. It determines the appearance of your website, it brings new features to it and it has a major role in the process of SEO. There are countless themes you can choose from, but when you do, make sure you’re thinking about appeal, functionality, loading speed and SEO features.
This is the only way you can truly affect your traffic. Once you know what you want to achieve, it shouldn’t be a problem to pick the right theme for your site.
6. Engage in Social Media
Social media has an enormous influence on the business world. Digital marketing often focuses mainly on social media and how to generate traffic through them. If you really want to make an impact and extend your online reach, you must engage in social media marketing, but you must be smart about it. Post things to your social networks regularly, but don’t focus solely on self-promotion. Try promoting other posts and websites as well. In the online world people show respect for such actions, so you will most likely get a link back to your site. This shows both your interest in the related industry and your respect for the worthy content.
7. Use Heading Tags
The most important part of your website is the content you provide. Without it, you can’t engage in SEO. Knowing that sitemaps help search engines read the structure of your site may make you think they adjust that structure, but that is not the case. In order to make your content well-structured and appealing make sure you use formatting options and features. Use different headings to provide an appealing content which is easy to read. Another great benefit of using headings is that crawlers pay a lot of attention to them, so it affects the SEO aspect as well.
8. Provide High-Quality Content
You have probably heard this one a million times but it’s the fact – content is king. If you really want to make your traffic skyrocket, your content must be fresh, original and done in the proper way. Great content always helps with general positioning on the search engines as it manages to engage your visitors.
Your content needs to be readable, relatable and it should have a number of keywords. You should aim it at your customers rather than focusing solely on the SEO aspects. This way you ensure the “organic” traffic expansion.
9. Invest in the Responsive Web Design
In this day and age, you simply can’t expect to achieve the full potential of your website, if it’s only done as a desktop version. Mobile visits to the internet have surpassed those from desktop computers for quite some time now, and if you really want your website to get that top place in the search results, you must adapt it for all devices. One of the best options you have is to hire a professional help like Webdel website developers from Sydney and really understand the best possible way to achieve maximum reach. Search engines give priorities to those websites with responsive web design, and your visitors and potential leads or customers can enjoy their browsing experience on any device.
10. Stop Overusing Keywords
When it comes to keywords, everyone has their own ideas of how to approach their implementation, but there is one thing that can really have the negative effect on your traffic. Using too many keywords, and using improper keywords can cause some serious damage to your traffic, so – always make sure you’re using keywords correctly.
Try generating keywords from your own data and analyze what your visitors look for. There are some great tools that can help you with this. Try to resist including all the information that comes to mind when you’re implementing keywords, and soon, you’ll notice the difference.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. This list should help you understand some of the ways you can approach your SEO strategies. Having a WordPress site for your business can really help you make a difference, but only if you do it the right way. Hopefully, these tips should point you in the right direction, and soon, your website will generate all the traffic you want.
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