Search engines like Google are perhaps the largest source of your website’s traffic. The search engines use algorithms to find and rank the contents in the search results. SEO is the tool to optimize the algorithm to improve the ranking of your content. If your website’s rank is high, your website gets more clicks and views.
In simple words, SEO helps in increasing your website’s visitors by improving your index in the search engine results. If you are already using WordPress, you perhaps have already implemented all the WordPress SEO strategies to make your content.
However, in the face of increasing competition, you need to make WordPress SEO your strategy more advanced to get more organic website traffic. Don’t you think so? If you agree with me then we are on the same page. Here are 8 such WordPress SEO tips beyond the basics which you should start following:
Fixing duplicate content issues
The issue of duplicate content is more common than you think. Duplicate content is content that is available on multiple URLs on the internet. This makes the search engine confused and it cannot decide which URL to show first in the results. It is like someone showing you two different directions for the same destination and you do not know which way to go. Duplicate contents more often arise from technical issues, and it can affect the website traffic badly. Therefore, you must fix them. Start by identifying them. A simple trick is to search in Google:
site: xyz.com intitle: “Keyword X”
Google will show all the contents on xyz.com with the “Keyword X.” This is a simple trick to identify the duplicate content even on the entire web. You can resolve the issue by redirecting the duplicate content to the canonical page, adding a canonical link to the duplicate page, or adding an HTML link from the duplicate page.
Tracking conversation using UTM parameters
An issue with Google Analytics is that it does not store any data about the traffic source. This can force you to make assumptions about the source of your website traffic. As there are high chances of an assumption being wrong, you might very easily end up with wrong WordPress SEO data which can be harmful to the growth of your website. This issue can be solved using UTM parameters. If you are running an advertisement campaign, just tag the URLs with UTM parameters. Whenever a visitor clicks on the tagged links, the tags are sent back to Google Analytics where they can be tracked.
Non-index pages in WordPress
If you have added a number of new pages to your website recently that does not automatically mean all the pages are indexed or Google finds them relevant. Google does not necessarily index all the pages. Google takes time before a page and starts showing it in the results. Therefore, wait for some time before adding new pages if the sitemap is new or recently updated.
At the same time, there are some pages that Google generally does not index like category pages, author pages, pages indexed under another domain, 404 error pages, low-quality pages, and duplicate content pages. If your new pages are not indexed even after some time, then you may have duplicate content or low-quality content. Provide high quality and relevant content to improve indexes in Google.
Using structured data
Indexing or ranking in search engines like Google depends on how well Google understands your content. If the crawler does not understand your page content properly, the result could be poor ranking and website traffic.
Adding structured data to your page can resolve this WordPress SEO issue. Structured data, a standardized format, provides information about your page and helps Google to understand as well as classify the content of a page easily. Therefore, if you add structured data to your page, chances are higher that Google will find your page easily. You can use schema.org vocabulary for structured data as it is used the most.
Focusing on page speed
A poor page speed can affect your WordPress SEO in a negative way. Studies have found that the attention span of an average person is a couple of seconds. What this means is that if you do not show your content fast enough, your audience might lose interest in your website. A slow website is a no-no for anyone, even for you.
Therefore, it is important that you optimize the speed of your website to see more traffic. There are many reasons that can slow the speed down, like poorly configured web hosting server, suboptimal page size, not serving cached pages, poorly coded plug-ins, and external scripts.
Always try to identify the issues causing a slow page and find a way out. A basic way of increasing the page speed is by optimizing the images. You should also keep your WordPress website always updated.
Seeking CDN support
Content Delivery Network (CDN) has become popular for driving more traffic to websites. It is helpful especially for those who have larger websites. CDN is a network of several linked servers located at different geographical locations.
A CDN can quickly deliver all the assets required for loading content data like HTML pages, stylesheets, javascript files, images, and videos. CDN can effectively increase the loading speed of your website by distributing content from a closer server to the visitor. It can also withstand more traffic and any kind of hardware failure and thus improves the availability of your content. CDN also reduces the hosting cost as it reduces the data delivery from the original server.
Paying attention to permalink settings
In simple words, WordPress permalinks or permanent links are the URLs to your website or content. To get permanent links , use these tips that are recommended in this post. Every page on your website has a unique permalink that gives access to the respective pages. These are the URLs used by the audience to visit your content.
A properly configured and clear permalink is essential for optimal WordPress SEO strategy. Permalinks provide the users with a prior idea about the content of the page. This way, it can attract the user’s attention easily.
Also, permalinks help the search engine to understand and classify your content. It can end up in a better ranking of your website. The default WordPress permalink setting does not help much. Therefore, you should try using better permalinks if you do not want to lose viewers.
Start experimenting
If you have already mastered the basic SEO practices, it’s time you should start researching and experimenting. Learning never ends. With the world changing so fast around us, it is important to try out new things. It may sound risky but, in the longer run, only getting out of your comfort zone can bring the best out of you.
Conclusion
Going beyond the basic WordPress strategies may seem intimidating especially if you are from a non-technical background. However, if you start spending time with these tips, you will find they are not technical at all.
There are also several WordPress SEO plug-ins that can help you with SEO. Such an amazing plug-in is RankMath. RankMath improves your ranking by incorporating the best SEO strategies. Check out their website if you want an SEO-friendly website and more.
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