How To Optimize Your WordPress Blog For SEO?

WordPress blog optimization and easy site navigation are the core component in the process of WordPress SEO optimization.

Whenever we talk about SEO, WordPress SEO optimization might be the first thing that comes in your mind if you are using WordPress for writing blogs.

To achieve the highest rankings in the search engine, Your blog needs to be well optimized with all their on-page ranking factors.

If you also want to appear your blog on Google SERP, then your blog should be fully optimized with all strong On-page SEO terms.

Want to rank high ?

Then follow these below explained steps to optimize your blog.

#Step 1- Make SEO Friendly Permalinks

SEO friendly URLs are the keyword-optimized URLs that intends to increase content readability for both humans and search engines.

According to Google, URLs are the direct ranking factor for SEO in Google search indexation process. As URLs directly appear on the SERP, you have to optimize it very carefully with your targeted keywords.

If we talk about users perspectives, URLs are the first piece of content that they notice and make a clear vision about your inner content.

WordPress is a great platform where WordPress developers provide you full control over URL Customization for URL optimization as WordPress has unique inbuilt URL structures formats for multiple requirements where you can select your best URL format. 

Let me explain you with an example:

Example of SEO friendly URL-

https://www.techfreakdiva.com/social-media-marketing-tips/

Example of Non-SEO friendly URL-

https://www.techfreakdiva.com/?p=123

In the above examples, you can easily examine which URL is more readable.

Follow these simple to make SEO friendly URL in WordPress

Open WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks.

Here you reach your destination to access multiple links structure.

To better optimize your blog URL’s, always choose Post Name URL’s because this format improves URL readability as it can directly improve wordpress SEO optimization.

Keynotes for Optimized SEO Friendly URLs

• Make keywords integrated URLs.
• Make it short in length using 75-120 characters.
• Separate keywords with dashes( – ) instead of underscores( _ ).

Also Read, 10 On Page SEO Factors You Should Know About.

#Step 2- Content Proofreading

Proofreading the Content 

Proofreading involves improvements in content which is generally full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. So, to remove all these reading mistakes, all content writers use a professional method called Content Proofreading.

Proofreading makes your content error-free.

Proofreading is a professional method used to optimize content to make it error-free as Content Proofreading removes all typography errors, grammatical errors, punctuation errors, spelling errors, typing errors, and preposition errors.

During content proofreading, always try to focus on readability to read your content easily.

Optimized content requires content refinement and parallelly every stage of content writing requires proofreading. 

If you want to grab your visitor’s attention, then make it professional with proofreading.

Best practices of content proofreading provide easy flow and tone to the content.

Check Plagiarism 

Stealing someone else’s written content, thoughts and ideas from already published content are called as Plagiarism.

If you are trying to copy someone else’s work to write in your own blog then Google never ever gonna index and crawl your website and also Google will mark your content as duplicate ( plagiarized content ) and this act is enough to harm your website authority.

But sometimes, Unintentionally it happens, meaning you write some piece of information that matches from already published content, In this case, you need to rewrite your content to remove content duplicity to write unique content for better wordpress SEO optimization.

#Step 3- Turn Off Search Engine Visibility in WordPress via Reading Settings

After performing all on-page and off-page optimization activities correctly, If still Google is not indexing your website, then there is a high possibility that you’re passing wrong indexing signals to Google.  

And chances are very high that you lack in your WordPress dashboard’s reading settings.

If your site’s search engine visibility marked as checked then you are allowing Google to not index your site and after that google will never ever crawl and index your website.

No need to worry now, Just uncheck search engine visibility option under reading settings, and now your site is in a safe zone and now Google crawler will crawl and index your site to improve wordpress SEO optimization.

Just follow one simple step under the WordPress dashboard that is explained below,

Settings > Reading > Uncheck Search Engine Visibility.

In order to optimize your site for search engines, your WordPress website needs search engine accessibility for indexing and crawling. WordPress gives you an easy option for Google to access your site for search engine indexation.

#Step 4- Use Responsive Themes

In the perspective of SEO, Responsive web designs are the driving force to reach more audiences as primarily responsive websites designed with the intent to provide better user experience for smartphone users while browsing the internet through their smartphone devices. 

Responsive web design is mobile-oriented web design development that renders the site’s layout overall devices and their resolutions because of this specialty now Google supports Mobile-first Indexing as an SEO ranking factor.

Responsive website themes improve your site’s navigation and offer your site’s visitors great user experience through the simpler site structure.

Responsive themes provide resizable viewports for all desktops and mobile devices as when a user lands on your site, it automatically scales complete site’s content and their elements to load quickly on a visitor’s device.

Keynotes for Responsive Themes

• More Mobile Traffic
• Easy Site Navigation
• Lower Bounce Rate
• Faster Website Loading
• Higher Sales and Conversion Rates
• Improves Online Browsing Experience
• Benefits to SEO 
• Highly recommended SEO Ranking factor by Google 
• Easy Social Sharing

#Step 5- Optimize with Targeted and Semantic Keywords

In 2020, If you want to rank your site’s content on google search engine pages, then frame your content with relevant images, gifs, videos, and Infographics around your core targeted keyword because the content is a powersuite for any website.

Optimized content is piece of content that is written around targeted keywords and their semantic keywords.

When writing content, just focus on user search intent, what the user wants to know and what he/she is looking for, write content in a way that simply resolves user’s queries or problems and fulfills the reader’s search intent.

In the process of WordPress SEO optimization, your targeted keywords should be relevant, high in search volume and low in competition.

For WordPress SEO optimization, Keywords research should be the first thing that can be done for optimizing your site or blog for search engines in SEO.

Also Read, Best Keyword Research Tools For SEO to Improve Organic Rank.

So what are keywords?

In simple words, keywords are user queries and user’s search phrases.

But, Have you ever noticed while searching for any particular query on a google search engine, Small group of related keywords appeared in the bottom section in google search results pages?

To prevent your blog content from keyword stuffing, all bloggers and professional content writers prefer to use semantic keywords for blog optimization. In this way, you can also target more keywords that drive more traffic to your blog.

You can find these keywords in searches related to the portion of SERP at the bottom area.

Most probably you noticed that they are synonyms keywords to your search term(keyword). And those keywords are not unique ( meaning they are no different from your core keyword) but all keywords are relevant to your search query and these keywords are termed as semantic keywords.

Semantic keywords play an important role in wordpress SEO optimization during content writing as semantic keywords maintain strong relevance between specific targeted keywords.

While optimizing the content, placing semantic keywords in blog content saves your content from keyword stuffing, which directly harms your on-page SEO and overall SEO campaign strategy.

But when you write content including semantic keywords, there is the highest possibility for you to rank as well for other targeted semantic keywords.

These keywords provide search engine bots to strong signals for better crawling and indexing.

#Step 6- Organize Content with relevant Categories and Tags

If you are a blogger or a WordPress developer then surely you know the importance of WordPress categories and tags.

To better optimize with clear and easy navigation, WordPress itself allows you to add a published piece of content to its most relevant categories and tags.

So what are these categories and tags?

In WordPress, Categories are the easiest and convenient way to organize your blogs and articles under specified groups ( called a category) to make navigation easy.

By default, these categories are set to an uncategorized category, So every time you publish a blog post, manual category setting action is required for all blogs.  

Don’t confuse between WordPress tags and social media hashtags. Both are different and both are used for different purposes.

So, WordPress Tags are part of the blog-specific search terms that directly co-relates to the blog categories. 

Categories and tags mutually provide easy web layout and structured interface for better user experience. WordPress already has inbuilt categories to make your stuff easy.

So if you don’t find your relevant category then follow below explained simple steps to add your specific category –

Post > Categories > Add New Category > Save.

After adding your new category, your category will appear in categories list where you can link your blog or article to the particular category.

#Step 7- Optimize Meta Tags and Meta Description

Meta tags are HTML tags that specifically used to describe page content that informs search engines page’s complete information. 

In simple words, Meta Tags gives direct signals to google crawlers to let them know about what your page is all about. These tags are placed under head tags of the HTML page source code.

Meta Tags instructs the search engines for crawling and indexing a whole site and page of a site.

Let us know about robots meta tags,

If you want google crawler to index and follow page then write this code:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />

If you want google crawler to not index a page and not follow any links then use this following code:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,  nofollow” />

If you want to check any web page meta tags then simply right click on the web page and then click on the view page source.

A meta description is a very short precise summary of your individual blog post, primarily used to inform users about internal page content.

Meta description’s optimal length is 160 characters because google only shows 160 characters of meta description in search engine results pages.

To improve WordPress SEO optimization, When it comes to increasing clicks Meta meta description plays the most important role as they grab the visitors attention. This meta description tag encourages users to visit your site.

Keynotes for Meta Description-

• Write keywords Integrated Meta Description
• Make them short, clear and precise with length.
• Add some clicky emotional words

#Step 8- Optimize for Social Sharing

Social media is all about developing trust, building authority and maximizing your social presence. According to current statistics, now all businesses want to grow and popularize their businesses on social media.

We all know, social media marketing is becoming trendy. That’s why optimizing your site for social media platforms is becoming essential for all businesses.

That’s why WordPress provides an easy way to optimize your blog content with easy integration of social media sharing plugins.

Social media sharing plugins give your readers quick and easy sharing through social media buttons. In this way, It can help you drive more traffic from social media sites.

When more people share your content on their favorite social media platforms then Google also pushes your content in their SERP.

Keynotes for Social Sharing-

• Improves User Experience
• Increases Brand Exposure
• Improve Targeted Market Reach
• Builds Natural Social Links
• More Traffic

Also Read, Advantages of Social Media Accounts For Rapid Progress.

#Step 9- Build Strong Internal Linking

In order to increase user retention and to make content more engaging, every site needs strong internal linking between their pages and posts. 

To boost your WordPress SEO optimization and site’s SEO value, strengthen your site with Optimized anchor text for strong internal linking as it gives easy navigation to understand users about content organisation. Content quality and their relevancy are the two most important SEO factors that google’s crawlers relies on to rank your site higher in google search engine.

Keynotes for Strong Internal Linking in WordPress-

• Boosts Crawling and Indexing
• Improves Time on Site
• Improves Page Rank
• Increases Page Views on site
• Improves Usability through Anchor Text
• Improves Site Navigation
• Improves Page Rank
• Gives Traffic to Older Posts

#Step 10- Take Advantages of WordPress SEO Plugins

WordPress is a great platform full of plugins and widgets that are completely designed to increase the functionality and productivity of any WordPress site.

For bloggers, WordPress sites are a boon for them.

Keynotes For WordPress SEO Plugins-

• Easy to install and use
• Helps in writing SEO-friendly Titles
• Provides ease to generate XML sitemaps
• Clean interface to modify robots.txt file

Read More,  Best WordPress SEO Plugins to Optimize Your Website

#Step 11- Optimize Blog Images 

Visuals are the most promising piece of content in any kind of article and they are also essential in describing any information.

Optimized images benefit your content to rank well in search results but that doesn’t mean you can download any random picture from google, There are some guidelines to use these images for free.

There are 2 easy ways to use images to make your content read-worthy. The first method is to use images from Google and the second method is which I mostly prefer is to use free images from those websites that offer you it with free of cost.

To better optimize images, The first activity you should do is find unique and content relevant images, As we all know google always attracts to the uniqueness of content which includes your text, images, screenshots, and videos.

Follow the steps to use free images directly from google which are completely legal to use.

Open Google Search > Images > Select Labeled for Reuse

In this way, you can use free images from google without violating any Google guidelines and you can also use some other filters through navigating to picture’s size, color, and type to improve your search.

There are plenty of sites like Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels likewise some other sites available that offer you free images without having any copyright issue. These 3 platforms are my favorite sites from where I use free images for my blog. 

Now I’m assuming that you have your images and so the image optimization process begins.

Hurrah!!

Image optimization in WordPress is very simple. You just need to place your targeted keywords in the Alternative text, Caption, Title, and Description.

These keywords help to identify image information whenever for any technical reason when your image does not display properly then generally image displays as a broken image,

Now In these conditions, this tag sends a positive response to both search engines and site visitors to inform that what piece of an image is all about. hence user retains and continuing reading and navigating to your blog.

The best way to optimize your image is to compress images for fast page load. The compressed image is an image that is a reduced version of its original file.

Images with large sizes increase your site’s loading time that puts a negative impact on your visitors that’s why compressed images are the best solution to improve and reduce page loading time.

Also Read, How to Optimize Your WordPress Blog Images in 8 Easy Steps.

Keynotes for WordPress Images Optimization-

• Use the right image Format ( JPEG / PNG / JPG ) 
• Rename your Images with Targeted Keyword
• Resize your image’s dimensions according to blog content
• Use Compressed Images
• Include a Keyword in Alt Text
• Include Keyword in Images Title
• Optimize Featured Image

Also Read, 10 Best Places to Find Free HD Images for Your Blog.

Final Thoughts on WordPress Blog Optimization

I hope this article has resolved all your major queries relevant to the blog optimization and helped you to learn about WordPress SEO Optimization which generally involves complete blog optimization around targeted keywords.

WordPress is a classic platform for all types of websites as it provides you an easy manageable interface where you can easily manage all hurdles relevant to your site and their blogs.

So, If you are ready to publish your blog, now its time to well optimize it for search engines.

Follow above explained WordPress SEO optimization steps to rank well in SERP. 

Till then… Happy Learning  and Thanks for Reading .

Also Read:

• 10 Amazing Image Optimization Plugins For Your WordPress Blog Images.
• Best WordPress SEO Plugins to Rank High in Google.

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