Most of the bloggers in our community are using WordPress to power their blogs. In fact, did you know that WordPress actually powers 27% of the websites in the world (including this one)?
Today, we’ve teamed up with tech guru John Stirzaker from NetVoucherCodes.co.uk to share six SEO tips for bloggers using WordPress. These tips will help you make posts as search-engine friendly as possible, with (hopefully) not too much effort. Here goes:
Alter the default permalink structure:
By default, WordPress uses ‘?p=[id]’ permalinks for all of its posts. This means the website address for your post will look a bit like www.myblog.com/postid?=432. While that’s snappy, it doesn’t tell search engines anything about the content in your post.
The solution is to switch to a text-based permalink structure and give each post a link that includes the important words about its content. I prefer the ‘yourdomain.com/post-name/’ custom format, as this puts the keywords closer to the left of the URL and also gives you a shorter URL. Bear in mind that the first four words in a URL are the most important to search engines. There’s a great guide to changing your permalink structure here.
Use An SEO Plugin:
Apart from high-quality content, SEO plugins are the best way to improve the optimisation of your WordPress blog. The best of these is a plugin called Yoast which can help you tweak the search engine friendliness of your posts and pages before they’re even published. These types of plugin will let you know if there are any important things you’re missing using a simple traffic guide system – just tweak your post elements until you get all green lights!
An SEO plugin should be checking for things like number of links, keyword density, and comparing them to best practices. Yoast also allows you to turn off the indexing of tag pages, which reduces the number of duplicate pages across your blog. A great guide to setting up Yoast can be found here.
Create an XML Sitemap:
Search engines really love it when you make an XML sitemap, which is a simplified, structured page that lists all the content on your blog. It makes it a lot easier for the search engine to ‘crawl’ and index your site pages, and identify new pages and posts. You can create XML sitemaps automatically with Yoast plugin and it couldn’t be easier – a simple matter of checking a box. Additionally, the plugin can notify both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools of sitemap changes, so they are easily found (you’ll need to register with these services to enable this feature). You’ve also got options for controlling how categories, tags and other taxonomies are handled – adding sitemaps can improve your scores with search engines literally overnight, and is one of the fastest ways to get a one-time search engine boost.
Rename Your Image Files:
If you upload a photo directly from your camera it will be called something like 14332.jpg. Just like the URL of your post, using the default image name misses a big SEO opportunity. When naming your images it is really important to use a good naming system. If for example you have a photo of a bunch of pink flowers you could call them ‘bunch-pink-flowers.jpg’ it’s also important to use the alt text to describe the image so we could use. ‘A bunch of pink flowers’. This helps Google understand your page, and you get the added benefit of showing up in image searches for the chosen keywords.
Optimise The Images On Your Site:
Optimising your images by resizing and compressing them will reduce the sizes of the images by a great extent (sometimes over 50% smaller). This will increase the speed which your site loads at, making your readers very happy. If you’ve ever tried to load a massive picture on a mobile phone, you’ll know how frustrating slow sites can be! But improving image sizes is also a good way to boost your SEO – because Google prioritises sites that load faster, in search results. Make sure that the images you upload in WordPress are already optimised (the correct size), or you can use a plugin like Smush.it to optimise and reduce the sizes of uploaded images automatically.
Switch To A Responsive Design
As more and more people access websites using a mobile device, it’s essential that your site looks good on every device. In fact Google will shortly move over to a mobile first display as mobile traffic is now starting to outweigh desktop search traffic. A responsive site tells Google you are ready for the big switch, and should hopefully result in better search engine rankings. Remember site speed is everything so check out this great guide to speeding up your wordpress site.
Image: DepositPhotos
