WordPress is probably the most popular website building platform today. With its straightforward and easy-to-use interface, it’s not difficult to see why!

However, this is only one of the countless reasons why WordPress is preferred by many. Most experts would agree that this platform works well for SEO, and thus, is a highly recommended choice – both for beginners and professionals.

Although this is the case, it doesn’t mean that using WordPress can magically lead your website to SEO success. You still have to put in the work!

To kick-start your journey to Google’s top results, here are the most effective ways to improve your ranking.

Install an SEO plugin

With over 50,000 WordPress plugins to choose from, it can be quite overwhelming to evaluate which of these your website really needs.

Of course, it’s for you to decide what to install based on what features you’d want your website to have.

But one thing’s for sure – you need a plugin to help boost SEO. After all, having a website is no use if you can’t reach your audience.

Wondering which one is the best SEO plugin for WordPress?

Although there are lots of great options available, you should probably look into Yoast SEO. It’s trusted by more than five million users worldwide!

Yoast SEO is a comprehensive plugin that covers pretty much all the essentials. But what really sets it apart from the others is its focus on analysis.

With its readability check, snippet preview and keyword optimisation features, you can create better content that’s optimised for search engines and users alike.

Want to know the ins and outs of this plugin? Check out our guide to Yoast SEO for WordPress!

Set up Google Search Console

If you’re trying to bring your website to page 1, it would be a total mistake not to use Google Search Console. For such a powerful tool, you’d be surprised that its free!

Search Console is important to every SEO campaign because it shows your website’s overall performance – from monitoring traffic to detecting errors. It provides valuable information that can help you come up with the most effective strategies and resolve site issues.

Another thing is that you can easily submit a sitemap with this tool, allowing search engine robots to crawl and index your website.

If you have Yoast SEO installed on your WordPress site, then that would be even better! You can choose to connect Search Console with this plugin to integrate all essential data.

Sign up for Google Analytics

Analytics is another one of Google’s free tools. Like Search Console, it provides important data about your website. However, this focuses more on traffic and user behaviour.

With Google Analytics, you can evaluate how much traffic you get, see which pages give you the most traffic, track down traffic sources and view plenty more statistical figures.

Analysing this information is crucial to help you assess the strong and weak areas of your website. This will allow you to discover which elements you should improve upon to engage more users.

For a seamless transfer of data, you can connect Google Analytics with Google Search Console. This way, you can access all available information in one place.

Remember to use keywords

Keywords are an essential part of SEO. These help signal to Google what your content is all about, giving you a greater chance to rank for that search phrase.

With this in mind, it explains why keyword research should be given more focus as these phrases will serve as the foundation of your campaign.

When writing for your website, be sure to determine your focus keyword and use this on certain areas of your content.

For each page and post, it’s best to include your keyword on the title tag, permalink, headings and the first paragraph of the copy. These are important sections, so see to it that your keyword is strategically placed.

It would also help to add related keywords throughout the body of your copy. This can further cement the scope of your content.

Build links

Linking is a way to relate your web page to another. Doing this can positively impact your SEO. But before we discuss how, it’s crucial to note that there are two types of links on a website: external and internal.

External links are those that redirect to pages on other domains while internal ones lead to other pages in the same domain.

So, how can these affect SEO?

Let’s start with external links. Linking to high authority pages outside your website can signify that your content is reliable and well-referenced.

Doing this practically tells Google that your post might be helpful to users and deserves to rank higher.

But just a word of caution – in time, some pages and posts from other websites may get deleted. These then become broken links, which is bad for SEO. Be sure to regularly monitor external links to avoid this.

As for internal links, they make navigation easier and show how your pages and posts are related. Because search engines give value to structure, this will definitely help if you’re looking to boost your ranking.

Internal linking is one of the best techniques to optimise your WordPress site for Google as this allows users to stay on your page for longer.

You can further take advantage of this by linking to your older posts, so they stay relevant.

Have a responsive and mobile friendly website

Does your website function well and look great on every device? If not, it’s time to make it responsive!

At present, handheld devices are taking over desktop computers as the preferred way of accessing the web. Google recognises this and now gives priority to websites that adjust to any screen size.

In fact, just recently, mobile-first indexing was enabled by default for all new websites. This means that Google will crawl the mobile version instead of the desktop version when indexing.

With this said, it only goes to show how important it is to have a website that works well across all devices, especially mobile phones.

Improve site speed

A slow-loading page does not only leave a bad impression to users – it is a big no for search engines, too!

Site speed is a ranking factor. Hence, it is one of the most effective techniques to significantly improve SEO in WordPress.

If your page takes more than three seconds to load completely, then it’s high time to evaluate the areas that can be optimised.

From reducing the size of images to removing unnecessary plugins, you’d find that there are lots of elements you can improve upon to boost site speed.

Optimise meta tags

Meta tags help describe to Google what your page is all about. These serve as the first point of contact of search engines (or even users for some types) to your content.

Though there are lot of meta tags you can add to your pages and posts, not all of these are essential and can only slow down your website.

Considering this, it’s best to just focus on the title tag, the meta description and the alternative text for images.

To make it easier to optimise meta tags in WordPress, installing the Yoast SEO plugin is ideal.

Your journey to page 1 may not be a walk in the park, but the only way to reach your goal is to start. Follow these techniques to take a step closer to the top results!

Is SEO too complicated for you? Let the experts handle it!

At FX Web Studio, we know what works best for your website – from the technical side to the creative aspect of SEO.

To discover how we can assist you, give us a call on 1300 090 401 today.