3 Ways to Optimise Your WordPress Website for the Search Engine

In this article, we’re going to take a look at a few ways to optimise and improve your WordPress site for the search engine. It applies to your WooCommerce product pages, blog posts, and other content on your site.

Install a Plugin

Let’s take a look at how you can write content that is SEO optimised. The most popular solution in the WordPress world for that is Yoast SEO (https://yoast.com). They have a free plugin on WordPress.org that helps you write optimised content. 

The Yoast plugin provides tools and advice that help you write optimised product descriptions. It will remind you to use your SEO keyword in your title and text, add alt tags to images, link to other pages in your site, and a lot of other SEO best practices.

Speed Up Your WordPress Site

First and foremost, you want to make sure you use a good host. An excellent host will put you on a fast server. The difference between a bad hosting company and a good hosting company can be a 300% or 400% speed boost. Nothing will speed up your site effectively if you have poor-quality hosting. 

Some hosting companies and WordPress users will advise you to use a caching plugin. The most popular of all is WP Super Cache with over 2 million installs. 

When you visit a WordPress site, your browser actually talks to the site’s database. It does that many times collecting all the information/data/images needed to build (load-in) a single page. The bigger the images and more complicated the page, the longer it takes to assemble. With a caching plugin, WordPress does all the building ahead of time and saves the page as a single static HTML file to serve up to visitors. This is much quicker because the browser only has to collect the one file in order to display the whole page.

Beyond the hosting, my other main recommendation is to make sure you don’t slow down your site with large images. It is worth spending some effort to make sure all of your images are as lightweight as possible.

Create Great Content Both for the Humans and Search Engines

Writing SEO content is mostly about creating quality content that your visitors love. Recent updates to the Google algorithm have revealed that it goes beyond having keywords. In fact, overusing keywords – keyword stuffing – is a blackhat practice that can attract the wrath of the ‘mighty Google’.

When you hook your visitors to your content, you keep them on your website longer, invite them to engage, and inspire them to take actions. All of these factors play a role in boosting your website higher up the search rankings.

What to write about?

• Write unique content: There is no point in writing exactly what someone else has written. Find a unique angle you can approach the subject from. Even if someone else has written on it, give it a unique voice.
  
  
• Find Current Ideas with Google Trends Google Trends is where you can get what is being searched the most at a particular time. It gives a list of trending searches at any particular time.
  
  
• Is it Evergreen? Simply put, evergreen content is a piece of content that is as useful in six months as it is on the day it is published. A piece of content like “Facebook Marketing in 2014: Here’s Everything You Need to Know” will not be useful after 2014. It is not evergreen.

How to optimise your content for the search engines?

Search engine algorithms are smart robots who have been programmed to recognize certain features and rank based on those features. To rank means to give a website a position in relation to a particular search term. So, if your article is about finding the best love partner, your article will be ranked based on certain factors which include how well-optimised is your article for the keyword or focus keyphrase.

Here are things you should know to rank well:

Keyword Research: Before you set out to write, you must do your keyword research. This means you go out to see what people are searching – the intent of people while searching for something relating to what you are writing about.

Subheadings: Posts with lists are best for SEO ranking. Google loves them. This is because people can easily get what they are looking for.

Bucket Bridges: When people spend less time on your page, you will lose ranking. This is because the Google algorithm thinks that when people leave as soon as they land on the page, the page is not good. The code here is to break down your work in short sentences and paragraphs and to keep the reader in anticipation of what you have to say.

Romulus Dynamics is a Human-Centered Web Design Agency

We not only create elegant, responsive and mobile-friendly websites but websites that drive conversions and growth. Our design focuses on the end-user which bridges the gap between you and your visitors.

If you need help with a website or your digital strategy, go ahead and reach out to Romulus Dynamics today!