digital marketing

3 Quick Ways to Improve Your WordPress SEO

Everyone wants to be in the top search results on Google. A lot of people also consider hiring an SEO expert, because they want fast and effective results. Lucy Davis, author at Top 10 website hosting explains in her article how to easily work on your SEO and get long term results. I will add my comments and share some figures with you throughout the article.

How to work on your SEO
Image by Mia Tawile @miatawile

Time and dedication are key

Many SEO experts will tell you that SEO takes time and dedication – there are not really any ‘quick wins’. Or they will tell you that if you try out the ‘quick win’ type techniques, that it is impossible to get long-term results. However, there are some ways that you can improve your WordPress SEO that won’t involve hiring an expensive SEO expert or dedicating all of your time to doing it.
First of all, if you are unsure how important SEO is for your website, then there are plenty of reasons for you to spend some time to better understand it. To start with, good SEO practices will generate more traffic to your website which should drive more sales/business for your company. SEO is cheaper than paying for ads or other ways where you are paying to get website traffic.

In fact, this is why SEO is a priority for a lot of digital marketers: with the right keywords and the right approach, a website can attract qualified leads that might result in an increase in conversion and sales.

Many aspects of SEO are completely free if you understand how to apply them. If your website is performing badly compared to your competitors then you clearly need to up your SEO game. SEO is an important part of the user experience and if your website visitors have a good experience, they are more likely to do business with you.

Today, there is a very intense competition online. I personally think that the expression “Go big or go home” kind of applies in the online world. Having a website that performs badly, that delivers a negative user experience, has no competitive advantage compared to well developed websites.


Hopefully that will have convinced you that it pays to be SEO savvy! So now you want to know some of those quick ways to improve your WordPress SEO, don’t you? Here are three that you should give a try:

SEO Plugins

Why spend your time learning the ins and outs of search engine optimisation techniques when you can simply install a plugin to do the hard work for you? Yoast and other SEO plugins can provide you with the details you need to improve your SEO. There is a free version of Yoast, as well as a premium version for that extra SEO boost.

SEO elements
Image by Mia Tawile @miatawile

Getting started is easy, you just need to install the plugin and you will soon get to see what it can do for your website. In the dashboard area you will see that a column titled “’SEO’ appears with some coloured dots. This is basically a red/amber/green system where green means your SEO on that page is good, amber means it needs a bit of work and red needs a lot of attention.
When you then open that page, you will see a SEO toolbox. The latter provides you with some guidance on what you need to do to improve the SEO. You can set up your focus keyword to analyse how well it is being used and to check for things you get penalised for like keyword stuffing. There really are loads of great features within Yoast and other SEO plugins that will help your website, so this is the ideal quick solution.

Sitemaps

Another quick SEO booster is creating a sitemap for your website, especially for websites with quite a lot of pages. A sitemap helps search engines to index pages as it lists your pages in a format that is easy for search engine web crawlers to understand. According to Google Support, your sitemap can also provide valuable metadata associated to your pages, which is information about your web page such as when it was updated or how important it is in relation to other pages on your site.
Sitemaps are also good for a user to be able to locate the pages that they want to visit, if they are not sure which page certain content might sit under.

SEO tips

Faster is always better

The search engines like fast pages and the faster they are, the better. Slow loading pages not only result in page abandonment, it can also lead to being penalised by the search engines. There are a number of things that will help to speed up your pages. You need a web host service that provides high levels of performance. Generally, the more you pay, the faster the performance and dedicated hosting plans tend to be fasters. To find out if your website is slow, use a performance testing tool and have a look at the results. Unless you are tied into a contract, you should be able to move your WordPress site onto a faster host service.

Yann Gourvennec
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Yann Gourvennec

Yann Gourvennec created visionarymarketing.com in 1996. He is a speaker and author of 6 books. In 2014 he went from intrapreneur to entrepreneur, when he created his digital marketing agency. ———————————————————— Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique. More »
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