WordPress is without a doubt one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world. Of the top 10 million websites in the world, around 40% of them use WordPress. WordPress is free, easy to use and has limitless customisation. A major benefit of using WordPress is that there are a variety of ways to improve your SEO within the CMS. As a digital marketing agency in Bournemouth, we specialise in providing SEO services for our clients. To give you an insight into some of the ways our SEO agency optimises WordPress sites, we’ve put together 4 easy steps for improving your WordPress SEO.
1. Best SEO Plug-ins for WordPress
If you’re looking to improve the SEO of your WordPress site, there are a few plug-ins you should have installed:
- Make sure you are familiar with the Yoast SEO plug-in. Yoast gives you the option to add a variety of information that is hugely beneficial for SEO. Using the Yoast plug-in you can add a meta title, meta description, slug and XML sitemap.
- We also recommend using the Monster Insights plug-in. Monster Insights is the best Google Analytics plug-in available on WordPress. Without analytics, you won’t be able to see if the changes you are making are benefitting your SEO. Learn more about using Google Analytics and why it is so important by reading our blog on how to track your SEO performance.
2. Image Optimisation
As an SEO agency in Bournemouth, we understand the importance of optimising images on a WordPress site. One easy way you can optimise images within your WordPress CMS is using image alt text. Alt text is like a URL for your images and helps search engines understand what your image is about. Take some time to go through images on your WordPress site and add alt text to each image. If you can include some focus keywords in the image alt text this will be even more beneficial for your SEO.
When using lots of images on a page, make sure to add a gallery. It is also worth considering the size of the images you upload. Uploading very high-resolution images slows down page load speeds, which will hurt your overall SEO. To learn more about how this can affect SEO read our guide for improving website site speed.
3. Redirects
A crucial part of improving WordPress SEO is redirecting broken URLs. After moving or removing a page you should go into the redirection section of the WordPress CMS and fill in the old and new URL addresses.
This is so when a user lands on the original URL, they will automatically redirect to the new target URL. If you let broken pages build–up, Google will penalise you for this and your SEO will suffer. Even if you just update or optimise a URL, the old URL will need redirecting. For more information about redirects and a range of other SEO services, get in touch with us at Upperdog.
4. Metadata
One simple way of improving your WordPress SEO is by adding metadata to all your pages. Our SEO agency considers metadata to be an essential part of any SEO strategy. Using the Yoast SEO plug-in we mentioned earlier you can add a meta title and description.
By adding a title and description to your page it gives Google something to display on their search engine results pages (SERPs). If you haven’t added metadata to a page, Google will likely take the first bit of text from a page or what it thinks is most relevant. This is not always accurate and might not give a full overview of the content. Meta titles should be 60 characters long and descriptions 160 characters. This will make your website look more professional in SERPs.
5. Internal Links
When visiting your WordPress site, a user should be able to easily navigate around. This makes it very beneficial for SEO if you include internal links in your copy. If you mention a product in a blog post, add a link to the product page. If you reference another article on your site, be sure to include a link to the page. When ranking websites Google will assign each page a score or ‘page authority’. Adding internal links to a page is a tried and tested way of improving your SEO.
Are you interested in improving the SEO of your WordPress site? As a digital marketing agency, we specialise in a range of SEO services. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help your business. Give us a call on 01202 798820 or email hello@upperdog.co.uk.