Even though we get the general idea of search engine optimization to be used for websites, it never really had an exact definition as a term. For example, page speed is now considered under the domain of SEO rather than being under usability. Accessibility, design, and readability have also become some of the chief conversion rate factors that are crucial for building an SEO-friendly WordPress website. Making your WordPress website SEO-friendly refers to the fact that you are optimizing it for conversions. First of all, your website should have a target audience. Then you can focus on retaining this audience long enough to have a look at the services you talk about on your website. The next step would be getting your desired reaction from these people after they have checked out your content.
Before we move on to how to build an SEO-friendly WordPress website, it is to be mentioned that the quality of your content is of utmost importance. All other methods, tactics, and web design tools are there to make it more appealing to the public eye so that search engines and your audience can easily find and derive information from it. These steps will help you build your own website in an SEO-friendly manner on WordPress.
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How to Make your Site SEO-Friendly
Speeding up WordPress
The first step towards speeding up your WordPress website is creating a child theme. You will find dozens of helpful plugins online that can help you do it in just one click. After you have done this, you can focus on making the website as fast as possible. This can be accomplished by adding in a few speed hacks from .htacccess, getting a CDN subscription, and following some best performance practices. Speed is of vital importance in creating an SEO-friendly WordPress website due to the fact that it directly helps make usability better. This keeps visitors on your site for longer periods of time, contributing to an increased conversion rate.
Information Architecture Optimization
Better known as site architecture, this is a factor you have to think about before you create your own website content. For every post, it is best to assign three to four tags to it rather than cluttering it with tons. This post, for example, can have tags such as CRO, SEO, design, and best practices. The category it can be under is ‘tips’.
When you have optimized site architecture, it will have a symmetrical pyramid-like pattern as the content is going to be distributed evenly across the website. Also, for each page, there should be a single URL that leads to it. WordPress uses taxonomies and archives that can potentially make the task difficult for you. The good news is, WordPress SEO plugins will help you define the canonical pages, plus the ones you would rather not have indexed by the search engines. Avoid duplicate content in this manner by identifying these pages by tags, categories, or other archived content.
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Optimizing the Tags
Meta tags and tags are used for labeling a website further. This enables search engines to use them in order to determine what your website is all about. These also present pointers for people as well as search engines. Therefore, you should always include keywords in the title tag, ALT tags, and meta description tag. The easier your website is to find, the better the chances of people actually taking notice.
For title tags, it is important to try and include branding as well as keywords and putting it at the end of each title tag. The ideal length of a title tag would be seventy characters; however, it does not need to be followed all the time. If required, you might have to exceed that to properly explain what your WordPress website is about.
Header tags are not as important as they once used to be for search engines. Even then, it does have a role in making your content correct both semantically and hierarchically. These might seem insignificant, but they will help you build an SEO-friendly WordPress website.
Related Post Links
Relationships are just as important in real life as on the internet. When you add links they function in relationship to WordPress sites. It is important to have your website linked externally and internally so that people can continue to read the topic that interests them. For linking, there are some WordPress plugins that can help you do this job more efficiently. You can also attach links within posts in the form of hyperlinks. These links can be followed in case readers wanted to know more about the matter. Interlinked websites like these are also easy for search engines to index and follow.
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Pleasant Design
Now that you have taken care of the basics of SEO, you can now focus on custom website design. Design matters a lot because your audience should be able to enjoy browsing your site and you’re your content properly. You might be tempted to go overboard with web design, yet it is to be remembered that one can never go wrong with the minimalistic, clean, and unobtrusive design. Do pay attention to the typography by choosing the correct font, which makes it easier to read the content. Optimization of content also involves using high-quality images and videos, line height, font size, paragraph spacing, contrast, and adequate white space, all of which are crucial for making your WordPress website more SEO-friendly. Read on below for some other SEO-friendly design tips.
Mobile Responsiveness
Nowadays, you will find a higher percentage of mobile eCommerce and that is because more than 50% of your consumers are visiting from their mobile devices. If your site is not optimized for mobiles, your visitors have to deal with unoptimized text, images, and difficult navigation. Google also penalizes sites that are not mobile-responsive.
Add Proper Redirection Links
It is also important to add proper redirection links. While browsing the internet you might have run into a 404 error. This happens when an old page has been deleted but has not been redirected properly. A lot of websites lose traffic because of this mistake. Use a 301 redirect. The 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and search engines can even follow it.
Navigation
Navigation is key when it comes to a good website design, Make sure that your landing page highlights key pages and information that will be helpful for the visitor. Moreover, a keyword-specific navigation system or URL will work way better. You need to design the whole website using technology that search engines can follow.
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Sharing on Social Platforms
When your posts get shared, liked or upvoted, search engines take that into notice. Hence, you should make it easy for people to be able to like and share your content on social media platforms. There are many plugins that help you add social buttons over and under your posts.
Final Words
Hence we can say that creating your own website on WordPress as an SEO-friendly one has a lot more to do with the overall website building than just the basics of SEO. Not only does your website have to perform well on search engines with the help of SEO, but it should also appeal to people who you expect will visit. You should therefore also focus on conversion rate optimization or CRO as you need to bring in traffic and make them stay.
