To improve your WordPress site’s search engine rankings, here are ten tips with recommended plugins.<\/p>\n
Plugins are a huge plus to using WordPress. You can access many useful SEO plugins which offer tons of features like content and page analysis, meta tags, Google accelerated mobile pages (AMP) support, XML sitemap, Google analytics integration and many more.<\/p>\n
A sitemap provides a hierarchical listing of all the pages, posts and other content on your website. You may have essential pages with no internal links, making it tough for indexing. If you create an XML sitemap, you can tell bots about your website’s entire structure, ensuring complete, reliable indexing.<\/p>\n
If you have similar or duplicate content, it can hurt your SEO. You’ll have to prevent duplicate pages from being indexed by using the code in the <head> section of your website, or a plugin like Yoast<\/a>.<\/p>\n When you’re setting your slug, keep it short, include keywords, and make it enticing. You can customize your permalink from wp-admin> Settings> Permalinks. We recommend using the ‘Post name’\u009d permalink setting.<\/p>\n Image search makes up a considerable portion of Google’s traffic, so make sure to pay attention to your website\u2019s images. It\u2019s recommended to use image title, description, alt attributes, and to specify image dimensions. All this information helps search engine bots determine what your page is about, helping to boost rankings. Also, try to combine images into CSS sprites and avoid using URL redirects.<\/p>\n To improve the visibility of your website\u2019s pages in search engine result pages, you can also add structured data or rich snippets to your site. Use the plugins below to implement schema tags on your WordPress site to more explicitly tell search engines what your content is about.<\/p>\n Page loading time and clean code are critical to page rankings. Some themes have bloated coding and load slower, which can lead to a slow loading website and can increase your bounce rate. An SEO optimized theme is based on clean code and followed all the latest SEO best practices<\/a>. Some of the best and most popular SEO-friendly WordPress themes you can use are:<\/p>\n Some other plugins you can use to speed up your WordPress site are:<\/p>\n Anchor text is the text that you hyperlink away from your page. It helps bots determine what your page is about. Means, when you have ‘click here’\u009d, it won’t improve your SEO. So make sure that you have \u2018original text\u2019 that you hyperlink.<\/p>\n Responsive themes scale to any resolution or mobile device. Google is mobile first, and they reward websites that work flawlessly on mobile devices.<\/p>\n Google tool to test whether a page on your site is mobile-friendly: https:\/\/search.google.com\/test\/mobile-friendly<\/a><\/p>\n Social Media is the key to driving traffic to your site, which eventually helps in improving page rankings. Content sharing can drive massive traffic to your website from different sources. WordPress comes with options for social media buttons, or you can use plugins to add social media buttons to your content.<\/p>\n If you have outbound links on your page like advertisements, sponsored links, affiliate or paid links, less trustworthy links, set them to ‘nofollow.’\u009d That way, bots won’t get confused about your page’s topic. You can use plugins to do this, or throw in the code rel=’\u009dnofollow’\u009d in the HTML editor. The rel=” nofollow” tag tells the search engine bots not to count the link.<\/p>\n To determine how your SEO strategy is performing, you should perform an SEO audit on your WordPress site from time to time. Listed below are some of the best and most popular tools to audit your WordPress site\u2019s SEO:<\/p>\n SEMrush<\/a> is one of the most popular SEO tools used by over 5M users worldwide to streamline everything from technical SEO to competitor analysis.<\/p>\n Screaming Frog SEO Spider<\/a> is the industry-leading website crawler that allows you to crawl websites\u2019 URLs to perform technical and onsite SEO audits.<\/p>\n Ahrefs<\/a> offers you a comprehensive set of SEO tools to grow your organic traffic, research your competitors, audit your website, analyze keywords & backlinks – all in one place.<\/p>\n SEOquake<\/a> is a powerful SEO toolbox for your browser that provides you with key SEO metrics for a specific page at the click of a button.<\/p>\n Moz Pro<\/a> is an all-in-one suite of SEO tools to give you the insights you need to rank higher, convert more quality traffic, and find link opportunities.<\/p>\n LinkPatrol<\/a> is a WordPress plugin to help you find, fix, and get control of the links on your site.<\/li>\n#Make SEO-friendly Permalinks<\/h2>\n
Plugins to create Custom Permalinks<\/h3>\n
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#Image Optimization<\/h2>\n
Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins<\/h3>\n
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#Add Schema Markup to Your WordPress Site<\/h2>\n
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#Use SEO Friendly Themes<\/h2>\n
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Some tools to test your website’s speed:<\/h3>\n
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Best WordPress Performance Plugins<\/h3>\n
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#Use Natural Anchor Text<\/h2>\n
Plugin to add anchor links in WordPress<\/h3>\n
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#Make Sure You Have Responsive Design<\/h2>\n
Best WordPress Mobile Plugins Options<\/h3>\n
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#Don’t Forget Social Media Buttons<\/h2>\n
Best WordPress Social Media Plugins<\/h3>\n
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#Set Irrelevant Links to ‘Nofollow’<\/h2>\n
Popular plugins to add nofollow links in WordPress<\/h3>\n
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#The Best Tools to Audit Your WordPress Site’s SEO<\/h2>\n