Today, most of the websites are being developed on WordPress. One of the main reasons behind it is that the site keeps on getting optimized at each development step. This way, the site becomes fully optimized for the search engines once the development gets completed and no extra effort is required post-development. WordPress SEO also has features to enhance the optimization level of the website post development also. It plays a vital role while improving the rank of the website.
WordPress SEO checklist to Improve Ranking
WordPress SEO has many advantages that help to optimize the website. Based on the type of website created, it provides guidance and suggestions to improve the performance and optimize the site as required. Some of the essential points to improve the ranking on different search engines are:
Setup Google Search Console:
It is a very important tool that is used to monitor the performance of the website. The tool is free, and it helps to understand how the website is performing on the search engines. Google search console monitors the URL that is entered while creating the profile in it. It provides a very easy method to verify the site using the HTML tag that is very handy for the creator.
It presents a broad result of the site on multiple factors like region from where it is accessed the most, what products are being viewed and ordered the most, what is the site response rate, drop rate, etc. over the network.
Plugins:
WordPress supports a vast range of plugins that can be used based on the need of the developer or designer. These plugins are WordPress SEO friendly and work efficiently to enhance the website and its content. Plugins come into action at the very first instance of development. They should be configured to get the maximum efficiency of the plugin. They suggest and guide to add the site keywords and page keywords specific to the product, alert for any broken links, help to optimize the high-quality images, and define multiple site objects like categories, tags, descriptions, etc.
Plugins also are very useful to create breadcrumbs, site maps and help to choose optimized themes in accordance with the business. Some of the most used WordPress plugins are Yoast SEO and All in one SEO or AIOSEO. These WordPress SEO plugins are very effective to optimize high-quality images, thus reducing the size and overall weight of the website. They suggest adding more keywords to a page if they detect less usage of keywords. Also, they can highlight the broken links or pages that are not linked anywhere on the website.
Google Analytics:
This is another good product from Google for WordPress. Once Google Analytics and WordPress are in sync, the analysis starts and shows all the details like which browser is most used to access the site, on which device most people access the site, number of hits on the site, from which region most hits on the site came, screen resolution of the viewers. This all data is very essential to determine if the website is well optimized for the audience.
Also, if more users access the site on a specific screen resolution or only accessed it on mobile devices, then the site should be optimized for that screen resolution. By using this application, the developers and businesses can work on the needs of the audience, and launch products based on the region of access and requirements. Apart from all these benefits, Google Analytics also calculates bounce rate and helps to determine what is not suited on the homepage of the website. Google Analytics should be connected with Google Search Console so that data exchange is done.
Sitemap:
It is like a map of the entire pages that the website is composed of. The sitemap shows what page is present under what category or tag. This way it is easy to determine the class of the product or the feature of the item.
A sitemap is a very essential part of a website. It is used by search engines to crawl through all the pages of the site and present the pages in the search result. It also determines when the page was updated last. This helps to determine if the page is old, then it might not be shown in the search results.
Apart from showing the location of the page, it is also used to track back to the homepage. Like suppose a person has landed on a page showing shirts, they can backtrack to the main page via path shirts->cotton->men->apparels->home page. So, if someone searches for a cotton shirt, the search engine should show them the existing page. It will help to improve the SEO ranking.
Site speed:
One of the main criteria to determine the site’s rank is the speed by which the pages of the website load. WordPress SEO determines the factors that affect site speed like the size of the pages, quality of the images present on the website, the theme on which the site is built, etc. Also, the site must be hosted on a good server.
A slow server or a server located in a region of weak strength network may not provide optimum speed to the hosted sites. Thus, the site must be hosted on a good platform. If the website is developed to target a large audience across the globe, then it’s good to host the site on a private host rather than a shared one.
In this way, the site will be faster and more secure for any financial transaction. Private hosts can provide a good network bandwidth and can handle vast numbers of requests across the globe.
Conclusion
It is essential to optimize the website with WordPress SEO to gain a lot of organic traffic. It is a boon for businesses to reach a vast audience and gain popularity among them. By following the tips mentioned above, it will surely help them to reach new heights. These all factors make the WordPress SEO best in its class for website design and development.