You think your WordPress site is ready for the great beyond? Well, let’s take a step back and check that you have completely optimised the SEO. Let’s break it down; when someone types a request into a search engine, the platform looks into the character and personality of your website rather than the wonderful aesthetic you’ve pieced together. Imagine a search engine holding a magnifying glass against your website. It reads each chunk of text and scans each piece of content; so take note, nailing your SEO is what really gets you noticed.
1. Sitemaps
For those who are unaware, a sitemap is an entire overview of your website, and it is absolutely pivotal when it comes to Google indexing every page that you have on your site. The beauty of WordPress is that you can add plugins that will create your sitemap for you, removing all the legwork from your end. Our recommendation is the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
2. Permalinks
Depending on the style of your website, every page or post will have it’s own permalink. A permalink is the URL attached to each page; the thing that you copy and paste into the address bar that takes you straight to a specific place on a website. SEO is just as dependant on your permalinks as it is on the content within your website. Therefore, ensuring they’re not automatically jibberish every time your create a new post or page improves your SEO, for example:
yourgreatsite.com/prffho4u-01
Should be:
yourgreatsite.com/permalinks-are-easy
3. Optimise your content!
When we say content, we mean every ingredient in the soup that is your website. So firstly, name your images! Uploading them as the ridiculous combination of letters and numbers that your phone saves them as is not only lazy, but it also means you aren’t working on your SEO within every element of your website. Your images will be relevant to your sector; their names should be too.
With written content, knowing how competitive your search terms are and which ones are the most important in your sector is pivotal. Using Google to find your keywords allows you to tailor the content you produce toward your audience. Hiring a content writer to do all the hard work is also a great idea!
4. Link to everything and anything!
The beauty of SEO is that the more content you have running through your site, the more the search engines appreciate your website. This is a brilliant reason for all of your social media feeds to be connected to your website in one way or another. For social media, creating content that’s sharable allows people to see your posts across all social media platforms. Therefore driving more traffic to your website and social media feeds.
For more information regarding creating that powerful content, head over to this blog post.
When creating written content, using links is also a brilliant way to improve your google ranking. Make the most of your past content by linking your current content to older posts, re-sharing your unique content and boosting your SEO efforts. Interlinking is often overlooked by content writers and should certainly be utilised.
There are plenty of brilliant ways to fine-tune your SEO efforts and these are just some of our favourite suggestions. For more information feel free to contact us.
