15 ways to Improve and boost WordPress SEO

Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website.
There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to your site, but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective. SEO is a collection of strategies and techniques aimed at helping your pages rank higher in search engines results. This increases your site’s visibility and can help it really take off.

There are many benefits to optimizing your site for search engines, including:

• A site that ranks highly in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) has greater visibility and the best chance at increased traffic.
• A highly-ranked site appears more credible and trustworthy.
• You’ll present visitors with more useful and relevant information since SEO tends to focus on producing quality content.

• Still, there are a number of things you can do to take WordPress SEO to the next level. To make it easy for you, we’ve created this guide. Below you’ll learn 15 of the best tips you can use to improve your website’s traffic.

1. Set your Permalinks

WordPress comes with a default permalink settings to allow you to change them as per your convenience and needs. These settings can be found in settings -> permalinks.

The URLs of your website pages and posts are called Permalinks. In layman’s language, they are what users use in their address bars to reach to your website and view relevant page. They are also used by other websites and search engines to link to your website.

It is always a best practice to change the default setting to post name i.e. /%postname%/ since it is easy to remember by the users and simple to index by search engines.

2. Install a WordPress SEO Plugin

WordPress already has some excellent built-in SEO features. But, you can take your search engine optimization to the next level by using an SEO plugin. The best SEO plugin on the market is Yoast SEO; in fact, it’s what we use here at Hostinger.

With this plugin, you can perfectly optimize each page and post for your chosen keyword(s). It also includes an analysis based on the latest algorithm updates. You can even generate an XML sitemap and add schema markup to your website.

To setup SEO with Yoast, navigate to your WordPress dashboard, and select Plugins › Add New. In the search bar type in Yoast SEO and click Install Now.

3. Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a popular analytic tool developed and offered by Google. It is absolutely free to use and helps you keep track of your website traffic. The tool lets you know about the traffic source, behavior and various other important attributes that will help you better reach your target audience.

Google Analytics helps you perform a number of different chores including locating a 404 error page, examining the behavior of your visitors, source of your traffic, combating referral spam and so much more.

4. Enable breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs give visitors (and search engines) a clear trail to follow around your site. They look like this:

You don’t have to use them. But the benefits of doing so are as follows:

1. They help search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of your site;
2. They create a good internal linking structure;
3. They’re helpful to users;
4. They appear in Google search results.

Here’s what I mean by that last point: Your pages will look like this in Google…

… instead of this:

Whether that’s useful is debatable. I’d argue that they look a bit nicer and provide more context. So they may increase your click-through rate, which is never a bad thing.

Yoast makes it easy to enable breadcrumbs in WordPress. What is Yoast? It’s an SEO plugin that handles a lot of basic WordPress SEO stuff automatically. But it does require some customization—the enabling of breadcrumbs, for one.

So activate the plugin (Plugins > Yoast > Activate) and hit the SEO menu item on the left sidebar. Then go to:

Search appearance > Breadcrumbs > Enable breadcrumbs

That’s it. Done.

It’s worth noting that your WordPress theme must support breadcrumbs for this to work. Not all do. If you want to use breadcrumbs and your theme doesn’t support them, use your loaf and hire a freelancer to fix it for you.

5. Improve your WordPress site speed

Site speed is important for a lot of reasons. People will tend to leave if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, for one.

But it’s also important to Google.

Contrary to popular belief, Google doesn’t reward fast sites – they penalize slow ones. So if your site is slow, speeding it up can remove the penalty and improve your rankings.

You can check your site speed using a tool like Pingdom. However, it’s more accurate to check your speed in Google Analytics, if you have it set up.

(If not, definitely set it up – it’s really easy and gives you a lot of awesome data on your site.)

To find your site speed in Google Analytics go to Behavior → Site Speed → Overview.

You’ll probably see a high number here – don’t freak out. This isn’t the time it takes for the above the fold content to load (which is what most of your visitors care about), but rather how long it takes for everything on the page to load, including backend code.

Now, here are two quick tips to improve your WordPress site speed in less than 10 minutes:

1. Install and set up one of the popular caching plugin.
2. Compress and reupload any huge image files on your site.
3. Get a better hosting provider (we recommend SiteGround).

Now, #2 could take a long time to do if you have a lot of images. But it’s one of the best and easiest ways to speed up your site for better search rankings.

Once you take these steps, check your site speed again on Pingdom – you should see a significant increase! If not, you may need to hire a developer to help with the more complex speed issues (or try these steps).

6. Carry Out Keyword Research

Without keyword research, you are not going to know which search terms you should be optimizing your site’s content for. In fact, keyword research should come at the start of any SEO project and be used to plan your site content and on-page optimization.

You can use our Keyword Overview tool to identify the keywords you should be using and optimizing for.

7. Use Optimized Page Headings

As well as creating your page’s default URL, the page title also defines your H1 heading. Not familiar with what this is?

A page’s H1 heading is intended as a way to give context on what your page is about to both users and search engines. Think of it the same as the title of a book.

Best practices typically call for using one H1 heading (the page’s title), but you should also use H2 – H6 headings; they t give structure to your content, also to break up the text and make it easier to read.

If your H1 is the book’s title, the H2s are chapters, with subsequent tags acting as sub-headings. Page headings are a great place to include your page’s main keyword and variants but don’t over-do this and never force the inclusion of a keyword somewhere that it doesn’t naturally fit. 

8. Use Internal Linking

You need to use internal linking within your content to help establish topical relevancy between different pages on your site, to pass authority earned from external links, and to help users efficiently navigate.

Adding in internal links to other pages in WordPress is really simple. All you need to do is highlight the text which you want to link (this will be your link’s anchor text) and click the ‘link’ button on the toolbar, which will then allow you to either paste a URL or search for pages within your site.

Check out our guide to building an internal linking strategy to learn how to choose the most suitable pages to link to. 

9. Add Alt Text to Images

When using images in your content, make sure you are adding alt text to each of them. Not only are alt tags a principle of web accessibility to aid visually impaired users with screen readers, but they help to give context and a description of images to search engines.

Ensure your alt tags reflect a clear description of what the image shows. You can add alt text to any image within WordPress in the ‘Image Settings’ section of the ‘blocks’ menu

10. Create a sitemap in XML

Make it easy for Bing, Google, Yahoo, and other search engines to crawl your business pages with a sitemap generator. Just drop your complete URL into the text box, select the best-fit answer to three questions, and wait while the generator creates your optimized sitemap.

11. Stop keyword stuffing

Rising to the top of the organic search result pages won’t happen if your keywords don’t fit naturally within the context of your website content. Resist the urge to include phone numbers, geographic information, and awkward keyword strings that don’t add value to your posts. There are many keyword generation tools out there that work well with WordPress — this article from LunaMetrics gives you an overview of a few of the most popular ones. You can also generate highly relevant keywords from your own data, and the article walks you through that process as well.

12. Optimize WordPress Comments

Comments can be a strong indication of user engagement on your website. Engaged users mean more links back to your site, more traffic, and improved SEO.

However, you need to make sure that your comments are real and not spam. Spammers submit comments with bad links which could affect and even ruin your search rankings.

This is why we recommend everyone to start using Akismet. It is one of the two plugins that come pre-installed with every WordPress site, and it helps you combat comment spam.

If Akismet alone is unable to handle comment spam, then see these tips and tools to combat comment spam in WordPress.

If your blog posts attract a lot of genuine, spam-free comments, then you should pat yourself on the shoulder for building such an engaging website!

However, too many comments on a post can make it load slower which also affects your search engine rankings. (Keep reading below to find out more about how speed affects SEO.)

To prepare your website so that it can handle the burden comments put on your server and speed, you can split comments into multiple pages. See our tutorial on how to paginate comments in WordPress.

13. Full Posts vs Summaries or Excerpts

WordPress displays and links to your posts from a number of pages like home page, category archive, tags archive, date archive, author pages, etc.

By default, it shows the full article content on all these pages. This affects your site’s SEO, as search engines may find it to be duplicate content. Full articles also make your archive pages load slower.

Showing full articles everywhere also affects your page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to read the full article in their feed reader without ever visiting your website.

The easiest way to solve this is by showing summaries or excerpts instead of full articles.

You can do this by going to Settings » Reading and select summary.

14. Choose Your Hosting Provider Carefully

We’re not just saying this because we’re a hosting company. We’re saying it because it’s true: The hosting provider you pick is vital for SEO.

Since Google takes speed into account when ranking sites, a good host can help push you to the top of the SERPs. Your host also affects the amount of downtime your site experiences and the physical distance between servers and visitors — both of which are ranking factors. Last but not least, since Google gives HTTPS sites a small boost, you’ll want that too. At DreamHost, it’s free with all our plans.

If you haven’t created your website yet, you’ll want to choose a host that’s reliable and has a reputation for excellent performance. Even for an existing site, you may want to consider switching hosts if your current provider doesn’t meet these criteria.

A smart way to go is with a WordPress-specific hosting plan. Our fully-managed WordPress plans provide impressive speeds and little to no downtime.

15. Incorporate Title Tags

It’s important that you include your main focus keyword in your blog post or page title tag. In the past, SEO experts recommended to even place your keyword at the beginning of the title whenever possible, as this would carry more weight in search engines.

In 2020, this approach is slowly losing advocates and, although having important keywords in early positions in title tags is still important, things are now moving towards more complex scenarios where click-through rate (CTR) optimization should be taken into account on top of keyword relevancy.

Some have reported seeing 20 percent increases in their CTRs simply by making small tweaks to their titles.

For example, we’ve placed our keyword “WordPress SEO” at the very beginning of the title of this blog post not only to get a little SEO boost but mainly to make it clear to readers what the blog post is about, hence improve our click-through rate.

So, how do you add your focus keyword to your title tags?

Titles are limited by pixels now, but Yoast SEO uses character counts, which is a close approximation.

For further information related to increasing the SEO, contact me.