12 WordPress SEO Tricks to Increase Your Business Website Traffic
We all want websites that are search engine friendly. But sometimes when you’re busy, it’s easy to post a new blog post and move on to the next task on your to-do list.
Over time, this can really hurt your SEO efforts. That is why I have created this short list of things you can do to improve your WordPress SEO.
Schedule these tasks on your calendar to skyrocket your blog traffic!
1) Post new things regularly
Google has a bias towards new content. Part of Google’s algorithm analyzes how new the content is and gives preference to the most recent results. Therefore, it is important to post original content on a regular basis.
Also size matters when it comes to content. Generally, longer content ranks higher than shorter content. So strive to make your post at least 500 words long.
2) Create a keyword list
If SEO is a priority, you’ll want to develop a keyword list. This is basically a list of keywords and phrases that describe your products and services. These keywords should include words from the search terms that are most likely to be used to find your offers online.
Google has some amazing tools to make searching for keywords easy, like Google Search, Google Suggest, Google Instant, and the Google Wonder Wheel.
Tip: If you want a really targeted keyword list, hire an SEO expert!
3) Install an SEO plugin
This will allow you to set custom keyword-rich titles and Meta descriptions for your posts for search engines.
A couple of popular SEO plugins to consider are All in One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Again, this is something that your web designer or SEO professional can easily install for you.
4) Manual Submission to Search Engines
What good is a site if no one can find it? That’s why getting listed on Google and other popular search engines and directories is one of the most effective ways to get free targeted traffic to your website.
You’ve probably seen many autosubmission services where you pay a small fee to get your site submitted to hundreds of search engines. These services not only won’t help you, they may hurt you.
Almost all of these free directories never send a real visitor to your website and getting links from them can affect your ability to rank on real search engines like Google and Bing.
The best practice is to manually submit your site to search engines yourself. WordPress makes it easy once you set up an account with Google, Bing, and Yandex Webmaster Tools.
If you’re not sure, ask your webmaster or SEO specialist to set up these accounts.
5) Add tags to your posts
WordPress, straight out of the box, comes search engine ready. The tag features are one such SEO friendly feature that you should take advantage of.
Be sure to add relevant keyword-rich tags to every post you publish.
6) Leave comments on other blogs
Start linking more to other people’s posts on their blogs and encourage them to link back to you.
One search engine factor that Google considers is backlinking. A website that has more backlinks is considered more of an authority site and gets higher rankings.
7) Block spam comments
When people leave comments on your blog, it counts as content for Google. So if you have a crafting website and someone leaves 5 comments about “cheap enhancement pills” ruining your keyword relevancy and hurting your rankings.
So, blocking spam comments from posting on your blog will improve your SEO, as well as make your actual blog readers happy.
8) Internal link
An easy way to get more traffic is to add internal links to your blog posts.
For example, if you have an article on how to overcome your resistance to blogging, at the bottom of that article you could post links to “Other Related Articles You May Enjoy”: 4 Content Marketing Trends for Business Owners in 2017 and other related items. WordPress SEO by Yoast does this automatically for you, as you can see at the bottom of this post.
9) Use Alt Image Tags
For each image you use in your post, be sure to add the Alt tag to help them rank better in image searches. This is another great place to put relevant keywords.
Google has an image search feature that works pretty much the same way as searching for web pages with keywords and relevance. So adding Alt tags helps Google find and include your images when someone does an image search.
10) Modify Blog Post Titles
If you’ve quickly written titles for your blog posts before, take the time to review them before posting.
Your blog post titles are vitally important to your SEO rankings, so check the keywords used against your keyword list and make your blog titles more keyword-rich.
11) Add Social Sharing Buttons
When Google sees a blog post get a lot of posts and shares on social media, it increases the rank of that blog post.
So making it easy for readers to share your posts helps others tweet and share your great content.
12) Update your theme
Not all WordPress themes are SEO friendly and free WordPress themes may be hurting your search engine rankings because of this.
Having a premium WordPress theme ensures that search engines will index your content as the developers have taken special time to optimize all aspects in terms of security and SEO.
It’s smart to make sure your theme programming isn’t overloaded with inefficient code that slows down page load times. We encounter this a lot with purchased themes and this is why we only provide custom designed and built WordPress themes for our clients.