Knowing how to optimize a website’s SEO in WordPress is crucial to generate more traffic to it. Unfortunately, most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users, and even old ones, to learn about the subject. Therefore, the ideal is to hire an SEO consultancy, but before, read our tips.

In this guide, we’ll share the top tips on how to optimize a WordPress site’s SEO to help you get more organic traffic. Read on!

How to Increase Website Traffic?

There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, but search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective. SEO is a collection of strategies and techniques aimed at helping your pages rank higher in search engine results.

This increases your website’s visibility and can help it really take off.

What’s more, there are several simple ways to optimize the SEO of a WordPress site, even if you are a beginner.

10 Ways to Optimize the SEO of a Website on WordPress

When compiling this list of SEO strategies, we started with an assumption: you are a busy and multi-tasking person.

So these techniques are the ones you can quickly implement. Check it out below.

Choose Your Hosting Provider Carefully

Because Google takes site loading speed into account as a ranking factor, a good hosting provider can affect your SEO or help you get to the top of search results faster.

A slow website due to a bad server can be affected in SEO.

Choose a Theme Optimized for Search Engines

Theme is one of the most important choices for your WordPress website. It determines the look and layout of your website, can provide new functionality, and also plays an important role in SEO.

For example, your theme can affect your site’s speed – which (as we’ve already discussed) is vital.

Furthermore, the structuring of bad theme codes can be completely “dirty” and disorganized, not meeting the ideal semantics for Google’s algorithm.

Use SEO Plugins

Yoast SEO, for example, offers several useful tools and important tips to improve your site’s positioning done on WordpPress.

If you’re new to WordPress, you might not be familiar with using plugins yet. They are little add-on software that add new features and functionality to your website.

In fact, there are many plugins specifically designed to improve website SEO.

However, if we could choose just one of them, Yoast SEO would be the one that brings together in one place the most relevant features to improve your website’s ranking.

Change Your URL Structure to ‘Permalinks’

Permalinks are permanent URLs, with clear and very descriptive text, that point to individual posts, pages and other content on your site.

Clear links that describe your content are easier for search engines to understand and thus improve rankings.

Create a ‘Sitemap’

A sitemap is a list of all the pages and other content on your website, usually arranged in a hierarchy.

While these sitemaps were originally designed to help users navigate sites better, their main purpose for some time now has been to communicate the sitemap to search engine crawlers. The sitemap allows crawlers to view all the pages on your site and understand how they relate to each other. This makes it easier for search engines to index your site and present it as relevant content in users’ searches.

Use The Title Tag and Meta Description Throughout Your Content

While a sitemap is useful in helping search engine crawlers see how your site is organized, that’s not all.

You should make it even easier to understand the algorithm in relation to what the content of your pages is about. Therefore, use the “Title” and “Meta Description” tags on all pages.

Using these Titles and Meta Descriptions to structure your content provides important information for both the Algorithm and the user who will see your site in search results.

After all, the Title and Meta Description information is exactly what appears on the page that displays Google’s search results after the search.

Incorporate Internal and External Links Throughout the Content

Google and other search engines don’t just consider your website as a ranking factor. Instead, they look at how well it’s connected, both internally and in relation to other major sites.

Using multiple links in posts and on pages tells crawlers how your site relates to similar content inside and outside your site. It also encourages others to connect to other relevant content on your site.

Use a Responsive Design

Your website needs to perform well on whatever type of device the visitor is using. You can ensure this by following the responsive design strategy. In other words, design your website so that it reacts and adapts to each user’s device. The creation of a responsive site is so important that Google uses as a ranking factor.

If your site is responsive, your chances of being ranked high in search results will be much higher. For WordPress users, the best way to get started with responsive design is to choose a theme that supports it (which many, if not most, already do).

Just be sure to check out each theme’s other SEO features as well!

Optimize Your Images

Images are important for almost any website. They provide visual appeal and context, and help to break up the text and make it more readable. As you’ve probably guessed, they can also have an impact on your SEO.

On the one hand, the quality and size of your images can affect how fast your pages load, which is a ranking factor.

In addition, crawlers analyze certain information attached to images, such as filenames and “alternative text”, also known as ALT, when trying to index and understand your site.