At present, WordPress has taken the spotlight by powering more than one-third of websites in the world.
If you are building your website using WordPress, here is some good news for you; WordPress is not only popular and easy but in terms of search engine optimization, WordPress is seen as an ideal content management system.
For those of you who plan to utilize WordPress’ power, it is best to keep yourself updated with the best and latest tips and tricks for the geat CMS; WordPress. However, not doing so will put you at a loss, and unfortunately, your website will lose its high ranking, trust factor, and user-friendliness. To keep your WordPress website running smoothly, keep on reading!
Table of Contents
Here are some of the best WordPress tips you will read this year.
Choosing A Theme That Is SEO-Friendly
One major benefit of using WordPress is that it offers a vast range of themes. Who does not want free as well as paid high-quality themes? Well, we do. However, you must consider one factor when choosing a WordPress theme for your website, and that is SEO-friendliness.
Bear in mind that when you make your choice, you must think about the following factors;
Responsiveness
A responsive design makes a site look user friendly and attractive across all devices. It is a necessary factor to consider in today’s digital era. Searchers come from all over the world, and they will be using different devices to access your website, such as tablets, smartphones, desktops, etc. You must pick a design that can reform itself, and make your site suitable for use across all types of devices.
Tip: The use of mobile has seen a surge in today’s world for browsing, and it accounts for more than 50 percent of the website traffic. This is why it is a great idea to run your WordPress website through the Mobile-friendly Test tool by Google to ensure that it is performing well across mobile devices.
Lightweight-ness
Another crucial aspect of choosing an SEO friendly theme is how fast will the website load with a particular theme in place. The loading speed of a web page impacts the ranking of a website. To make sure that your website scores a high ranking on search engine result pages, you must ensure that it loads in the shortest possible time.
One of the key factors to maintaining a lightning-fast loading speed is to make sure that your website’s theme is lightweight. However, if you do not focus on these factors, you will end up with a slow website. Many themes bring pre-installed plugins with them, and these can slow down the speed of a webpage significantly.
Creating Clean Permalinks
Another useful tip that you must follow this year is to create clean permalinks.
Permalinks are permanent links that appear when a user accesses any webpage. When you create posts and pages on WordPress, a box appears in the top section at the editing page, and you can insert the permalink that you would want for your new post or page.
When you create these links, it is essential that you must make them simple and clean. A simple and clean permalink is more user friendly as compared to one that is long and filled with numbers.
Apart from its readable appearance and easy to understand nature, these simple and clean permalinks are reliable. Whereas, confusing permalinks that are random-looking and long appear suspicious to users. Any page that has a confusing, long, and symbol-filled permalink will be perceived as a malicious link.
ObtainAn SSL Certificate
Another way to maximize reliability on your website is to obtain an SSL certificate. When you open a page and see a green padlock icon beside the site’s URL, it means that the website has an SSL certificate.
SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It is basically a layer that works to encrypt the connection established between webpages and browsers and protects the user. If your website has an SSL certificate, the URL of your site will be changed from http.site.com to https.site.com.
Using an SSL certificate for your website shows internet users that your site offers a secure connection, and this can maximize users’ trust, reduce the bounce rates, and increase the number of pages that are viewed.
Apart from this, Google has been focusing on on-site security for its users and is altering its algorithm according to it. Google now favors websites that have https in their URL. Moreover, sites that do not have an SSL certificate show a red warning sign, and this tells users that the website is insecure and unreliable.
Do not ignore Backlinks
One of the age-old SEO practices is utilizing backlinks. Despite countless changes in the algorithms of Google, backlinks are still one of the most important factors used for website ranking.
Backlinks help you build page authority. If your website is backlinked by any authoritative and well-reputed website, Google will know that your website is reliable and that it must be available for more users.
Focus on building backlinks dedicatedly. However, using strategies like blog commenting, guest posting, email outreach, infographics, one can successfully achieve top-quality backlinks with time.
Optimizing The Site Speed
As per Google, mobile users will not bother to stay at your page if it is taking more than two to three seconds to load. The same is the case with desktop users. This is why it is important that you optimize your website for speed. Here are some ways in which you can increase the site speed:
- Pick a lightweight theme.
- Pick a responsive design.
- Minimize redirects.
- Make use of browser caching.
- Improve the server response time.
Optimizing for Voice Search
The increasing popularity of voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa has attracted users towards voice search for browsing. Factually, more than one in five queries of Google are done using voice search. The number is expected to grow in the coming days.
You can optimize your WordPress website for voice search by using conversational language in your website’s content. Also, you can keep your Google My Business listing updated all the time. You can also focus on optimizing your site speed.
If you are still struggling to make the most of your WordPress website, you can even hire a web development service in San Diego. It will help you create a [owerful and glitch-free website that provides great value to the users, something Google appreciates and acknowledges by assigning the specific site a high rank on its Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
