Most users find it easy to create a webpage or a blog using the popular content management system of WordPress. But the challenge that stumps more people is how to ensure that the webpage or blog comes up on the search engine rankings with the help of good search engine optimization. Today, SEO does not mean just filling up the webpage or blog with the researched keywords or creating lots of backlinks to pertinent URLs. There are so many things a website or blog owner can do to enhance its SEO capabilities, and a few of those are listed below.
Timing The Crawl
At the time when the webpage is still under construction, any search engine bot crawling on the webpage might return errors. That’s why it is not an idea to allow indexation of an incomplete page. This can be stopped by opting for rel=”noindex” and rel=”nofollow” which would prevent the indexation, as one of our Tayloright experts advised. Only after the website owner enables the search feature again using the WordPress command, will the page be taken for indexation.
Using Easier Formats For Permalinks
Permalinks are the collection of URLs that takes the visitor to the specific part of the website or specific page of the blog, instead of taking the visitor to the main page only. The default format for a permalink is not searched engine friendly. Therefore, WordPress gives several options for the format of the permalink – day and name, month and name, numeric, post name and even a custom structure.
Providing XML Sitemaps
A search engine finds it much easier to crawl over a website if it is provided a hierarchy and layout of the different sections of the site. This is possible when the webpage has an XML sitemap. This can be easily done with the help of some useful plugins that are available.
Utilising Catching Plugins
Viewer patience thresholds are going progressively lower, and any page or blog that takes too much time to load completely would be likely to be ignored or bypassed by the viewer. This problem can be solved by using a caching plugin on a WordPress blog or a website created using WordPress. Not only would it improve the loading speed, but it would also reduce the load on the web browser hosting the site.
Blocking Unwanted Traffic
Many spammers post their links to totally unrelated topics and objects into the comments section of blogs. This would irritate genuine visitors who are contributing to a discussion regarding the blog, but they also get negative points from search engines. The nofollow attribute can be fruitfully used to prevent this from happening.
Making Use Of Anchor Text
Instead of relying on a common link for ‘related posts’ which link a blog to earlier blogs by the same author on related posts, many bloggers use anchor texts in the middle of their blog to direct viewers to relevant blogs posted earlier. This internal linking makes the current blog much more useful and topical to a current visitor.
Connecting To Social Media
One of how SEO assesses how much of response a blog or webpage is generating is by looking at the traffic generated by it on different social media. Therefore, it is a good idea to utilize the WordPress feature which allows a website or blog to be linked to different social media apps. A visitor who likes a particular page of a website or blog can easily use those social media buttons to share it on other social media apps, which increases the reach and also gains a better rating on search engine results.
Correct Choice Of Theme
There are WordPress free themes which can be used by default, and there are paid themes as well. Many of the paid themes give a great look to the blog or website, but they contain several complicated pieces of code to make that happen, and those codes slow down the performance of the page. All sites or blogs might not require the same level of elegance if it comes at the cost of functionality. Therefore, the choice of the theme must be smartly made.
Responsiveness Is Critical
We have moved away from the days of people logging on to web pages from their computer. In fact, the story has now turned on its head, and more people access websites and blogs using their mobile devices. If a website or a blog doesn’t look equally good or loads equally well on all types of devices, then the utility of the effort goes down. The extent of responsiveness also depends to a large extent on the choice of theme.
It is not just enough to create a good website or blog using WordPress, but it is also essential to have excellent optimization capabilities.
Author Bio: Albertha Merryman has is an SEO expert and digital marketer who has long been associated with Tayloright, one of the leading names in the industry. She is an avid reader with a flair for writing as well.
