WordPress

WordPress plugins add more power and punch to website performance.

By Charlie Brown

Numerous beautiful WordPress themes are available for all kinds of businesses, but you must consider the features and functionalities as well to ensure that it is truly an SEO WordPress Theme. Businesses of all sizes and types must implement SEO to maintain an online identity that helps to create wider outreach and is the most cost-effective means of online marketing. When going online with the business, there is hardly anything better than WordPress that has become the most popular Content Management System offering the easiest means of creating websites. Anyone with the most basic familiarity with computers but do not know the code can use WordPress for creating a website in a few minutes.  WordPress has something for everyone from the greenhorns to the most seasoned marketers, and the choice is between the two platforms, wordpress.com and wordpress.org, among which the latter is more versatile and suited for professional use.

You will find thousands of WordPress themes on wordpress.org with each having SEO compliant and responsive design features as well as compatible with Google Search Console. WordPress plugins add more power and punch to website performance. The plugins give almost infinite options to innovate and advance the SEO campaign, and you must use it to implement advanced SEO strategies built around SEO friendly themes.

What strategies you must develop and which type of WordPress plugins could give more muscles to your SEO campaign and help to take your business to new heights will become clear on going through this article.

Set up the website in Google Search Console

Setting up your website in Google Search Console is mandatory so that you are always aware of what is going on in Google’s backyard by receiving all notifications and warnings.  This would surely improve your SEO response as you can closely interact with search engines by knowing any problem encountered by the search bots during crawling that shows up in the form of notifications. If there is any manual sanction imposed by Google, you will come to know about it too instantly.  Keywords and links that drive traffic to your website become easily identifiable through the Google Search Console.

Keywords in title and header tags

Keywords are as much powerful as you can make proper use of it.  You can make keywords much more powerful than its inherent strength by knowing the techniques of use that makes it more effective. Be selective in using keywords in the content so that you never repeat it. Add versatility to the main keyword phrase to enhance its effectiveness by choosing closely related keywords that have a good connection with the topic of the content and revolves around the main keyword phrase.  Use the title tag for keyword placement because it is the best place to make it work most effectively and use keywords in the URL too. The keyword must be either at the beginning of the title or as much as possible close to it.

Create XML sitemap

Although sitemaps are not mandatory, you would do better to have one because it improves site navigation for search crawlers.  The crawlers follow the sitemap to locate content quickly and ensure that it covers all meaningful content on the website for indexing without missing any. WordPress plugins like Google XML sitemaps help to generate XML site maps automatically. Sitemaps go through automatic update whenever you add any new content to the website, but for accuracy, you must ensure that the information contained in the robot.txt and sitemap are the same. For example, any page that you might block on robot.txt should also not appear in the XML sitemap.

Use a static permalink structure

Despite choosing the SEO friendly WordPress theme, you must change the URL structure or permalink to enhance its SEO capabilities.   The permalink or URL must be self-explanatory so that by looking at it, one can understand what the page is about and what the content would be like.  For example, if you select the permalink to show as ‘http: //mybeautytips.com/ the title post’ it becomes clear what the content is about and encourages people to click on it. Making changes to the URL is easy by selecting the Permalink Settings option under the Settings tab on the WordPress dashboard.

Make your site more secure with HTTPS

Data protection of users is the primary responsibility of any website owner. Any visitor to the website who shares personal data during some monetary transactions or signing up contact form would like to see that the data remains completely protected, and website owners must ensure it to demonstrate their trustworthiness to one and all who take an interest in the website.  For completely safe and secure transactions, your website must have SSL protection for encrypting data and keeping it protected from prying eyes.  The security net protects any data that users leave on the website. Websites with adequate protection display the HTTPS prefix that users deem safe and to upgrade the security features of your website you can take help from your web host.

Speed up your website

Even if your website is speedy and you are happy with the performance, there is always room for improvement because higher is the website speed better would be its ranking. How soon a web page opens matters a lot in SEO performance because the longer time it takes for a page to open more are the chances of users going to other sites or quitting the site soon after entering it as they lose their patience. In such cases, the bounce rate goes up considerably, and it has a strong negative impact of SEO performance as it lowers ranking. The ideal page opening time should be 2 seconds, which can be a tall order because the average speed hovers around 5-9 seconds.  Determine your current page speed by using Google’s Page Insight Tool that shows the speed in a scale of 1 to 100.  The best part is that you will also come to know about what you should do to improve the speed either by image compression or browser caching.

For addressing other issues related to page speed, there are many WordPress plugins available.

Charlie Brown is a freelance content writer. Recently, he has working for a Pittsburg-based content marketing firm. His mission is to simplify and demystify online marketing for both upcoming and long-established entrepreneurs using tools such as digital signage templates by Dopublicity.com.

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