WordPress SEO – Best Practices

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising a website’s content and structure to improve its visibility in search engine results. SEO is one of the most effective strategies for driving more organic traffic to your website, as well as for improving your brand’s overall online presence. When web designers build a website, SEO is a major consideration.

Search engines use algorithms to decide which websites should be displayed when a user types in a certain keyword or phrase. SEO works by focusing on factors such as keywords, meta elements, heading tags, internal and external links and other factors that search engines consider when ranking web pages. By working on these components, you can increase your site’s visibility in search results and attract more qualified leads from those looking for what you have to offer.

SEO is often outsourced to an SEO agency like this one here.

Keywords: Research & Selection

Knowing the right keywords to target is a key part of achieving successful SEO results. Researching and selecting the most effective keywords can be a time-consuming task, but it’s important for businesses to get it right as this informs the SEO strategy. Skipping this step or doing it incorrectly can be catastrophic because targeting the wrong keywords, e.g. those with no volume, incorrect user intent or super high competition, can result in poor results.

The research process starts by understanding your business, its products and services, and running related keywords through an automation tool like Ahrefs.This helps with finding out which words are likely to be used when people search for your business or related topics online.

On-Page Optimisation for WordPress

On-page optimisation is an essential component of search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO enables businesses to get more traffic from organic online searches. On-page optimisation helps by making sure that a website’s content is easily accessible and understandable for both users and search engine crawlers.

One of the reasons why WordPress is so great is because it’s super easy to adjust SEO elements. WordPress has many plugins such as Rank Math and Yoast SEO that make adjusting meta, schema and indexing super easy.

Best practices for on-page SEO include using the keyword research done prior to insert keywords into the page. Each page should have a specific focus, and all of the elements on the page should be consistent with that focus.

For example, for a page about the best mountain bikes, it’s important to match the meta title, heading tags, alt text of images and paragraph keywords with this phrase. The use of these keyword should be natural and should match the frequency of top ranking results. The frequency of keywords used is dependent on the specific niche, as this determines what Google expects to be the optimal frequency of the keyword.

Technical SEO in WordPress

Technical SEO is a critical part of any successful search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. It focuses on aspects such as webpage structure, indexing, server response times and crawlability in order to improve website visibility and rankings within the organic search results on major search engines like Google and Bing. Technical SEO helps identify issues that may be preventing your website from being found online and provides recommendations to fix them.

The core aim of technical SEO is to ensure that all content on the website can be crawled, indexed, understood and served up by search engines in the most efficient manner possible.

Technical SEO is also concerned with Web Core Vitals – which is a set of Google guidelines that ensure a good user experience. The biggest aspect of Web Core Vitals is page speed. WordPress has many solutions that enable it to achieve high performance for Web Core Vitals.

These include a multitude of plugins that are designed for caching, lazy loading and other related functionality. By using these plugins, many technical SEO factors related to speed can be quickly resolved in WordPress. The best known of these is WP Rocket.

Off-Page Optimisation for WordPress

Off-Page Optimisation is an important part of any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign. It involves activities outside of your website to help increase the rankings of your webpages in search engine results. Off-page optimisation techniques include link building, social media promotion, and directory submissions, all aimed at helping boost a website’s ranking in SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).

Link building involves obtaining quality links from relevant sources. Developing an effective link building strategy may seem daunting at first. It can be difficult to find websites that agree to link to yours.

The main ways of obtaining links include 1) guest posting and 2) link insertions into existing content. Usually there is some kind of exchange that takes place that makes this worthwhile for the webmaster. A good link is a link that comes from an authoritative website with high trust and that is also in a relevant niche. If the website is based in the country of the target business this is a bonus as well.

BTW, if you are wondering how Divi performs in terms of SEO, you can check out my other article that explains if Divi is an SEO-friendly WordPress theme. I also mention the top SEO plugins for Divi in that article.