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Having a WordPress website is great for establishing your business’s online presence, but people still need to find it. That’s where SEO comes in. Optimizing your pages for this digital process is the key to getting more traffic and securing more potential customers. Here’s a closer look at how to optimize your WordPress website for SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy that every Michigan small business owner must implement into their WordPress website. It helps you rank your pages high on a search engine results page (SERP).
When a potential customer from your target audience looks for your products or services online, you would want them to find your website first. With a Michigan SEO solution, you can code and format your pages to help search engines bring them to the top of the SERPs.
SEO strategies offer several benefits for business owners, including:
Better SERP Ranking: Optimizing your pages for SEO lets search engines know how to rank them.
Improved Visibility: More people are likely to see what you have to offer when you have high SERP rankings.
More Traffic: You can maximize the number of visitors your website gets, considering how approximately 93% of all website traffic comes from search engines.
You have multiple options to improve your WordPress website’s performance. Here are some of the best SEO strategies to look into.
Visibility is your overall goal in SEO. WordPress has a built-in visibility option in your settings. Log into your site’s admin area and go to the reading tab of the settings page. At the bottom, you will find a section on Search Engine Visibility.
Uncheck the box saying “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” You may have accidentally left it checked during the last time you worked on your pages. Save your changes, and your website should appear on search engines.
Your WordPress website likely has multiple pages. Each page has a unique URL that should clearly state what its content offers. It’s important to have permalinks that you can easily read. This way, you know that other people will also know what to expect just by reading the URL.
An SEO-friendly permalink structure also helps search engines determine whether a page is relevant to a person’s search query. For example, a good structure would look like this:
https://www.mywordpresswebsite.com/how-to-optimize-for-seo/
Its address immediately explains what the content is about. This page wouldn’t perform well if its URL was something like this:
https://www.mywordpresswebsite.com/page/
You can check all the permalink structures of your website’s pages by visiting your WordPress permalink settings. Simply select the option saying “Post name” to change it. Be sure to save any changes to apply them.
When your URL tells visitors and search engines what your webpage is about, it should deliver exactly what it says it does. Whether a page is a blog post, a service page, or a product page, it must contain information relevant to a person’s search query. That way, search engines that index your page will know that it offers valuable information that may answer their questions.
Optimizing web content involves several practices, such as keyword research and placement, using header tags, writing meta descriptions and titles, and including backlinks. All of these SEO strategies help improve the relevance of a page to its target audience but may take away from your primary operations. Consider investing in SEO blog writing services to get optimized posts while you focus on running your business.
Depending on the kind of page on your website that you are optimizing for SEO, you might benefit by including a comment section. Search engines use comments as a measurement for engagement on your posts. More comments mean more engagement. Thus, you improve your SEO.
However, comments need to be genuine, so you can enjoy high rankings. Even if your posts get a lot of attention, fake comments or spam would defeat the purpose and are bad signs of engagement. Search engines would then give you low ranks. Protect your posts against spam by installing WordPress plugins that target and block fake comments.
Search engines bump websites that they know are secure and encrypted to protect their users’ privacy. WordPress websites are especially common targets for hackers. Be sure to take all the necessary measures to protect your website and ensure that potential visitors can trust that their data and privacy are secure when browsing your posts.
One method to consider is Secure Sockets Layer encryption (SSL). This solution encrypts the connection between browsers and connecting servers, giving your WordPress website an extra layer of security. You can tell that a website has SSL if it has a padlock symbol next to its URL on the address bar.
Website visitors expect pages to load quickly. If they can’t access them fast enough, they might leave to look for another site. Search engines function similarly. They cannot index websites that lag, so they will rank them lower on searches.
Several factors go into a site’s speed, including age and design. If your pages are old, and you last updated them some time ago, then search engines will think they are irrelevant. Meanwhile, inefficient designs can take a long time to load. Consider getting a web design specialist to ensure that your WordPress website design meets all the necessary speed requirements.
SEO is critical for improving your WordPress website’s visibility. You can use different strategies to improve your rankings, including fixing the built-in options in WordPress and installing plugins. Although you can easily implement these practices, they require constant attention and monitoring.
Hierographx offers WordPress web development services to help you optimize your WordPress website for SEO while you focus on running your business. Discuss your goals with our Michigan SEO solution experts.
Boost your online visibility and drive organic traffic with our expert SEO services, making your business the top choice for customers.
Boost your online visibility and drive organic traffic with our expert SEO services, making your business the top choice for customers.
