step-by-step guide in Optimizing your WordPress page
WordPress can be a great SEO friendly platform but for better search engine visibility you need to optimize each and every page you publish online.
One thing to note is that before doing SEO for your posts or pages, you should review and make sure that your homepage is optimized.
This also has an impact on the SEO performance of the other pages on your website.
So, once you get homepage SEO correct, you can proceed with optimizing your WordPress pages.
1. URL Optimization
The first thing that you need to check is that WordPress is set up to use SEO friendly URLs.
An SEO friendly URL has the following characteristics:
It is meaningful and describes what a page or post is about
It has ‘-’ to separate each and every word that makes up the URL
It doesn’t include unnecessary characters and it’s not too lengthy (the limit for a URL is more than 2000 characters but for SEO purposes the shorter, the better)
Here are a few examples of good and bad formatted URLs.
2. Page Title Optimization
The next item to optimize is the title of a page or post.
Providing for an SEO Friendly title is one of the most important on-page SEO factors of anything that is published online.
Search engines while crawling a page, search the HTML code to find and interpret the <title> tag.
What they find in the title is a strong signal on what the page is about.
Of course, there are many other signals that are part of their ranking algorithms but the title plays a prominent role.
When thinking about your title consider the following:
The length of a good title is between 45 – 60 characters. The title should not be too short i.e. only a couple of words and also not over 60 characters since search engines show about 60 characters in the SERPS.
The title should be catchy and promising. This is what users will see in the search results and if the title is not interesting they won’t click even if your page appears in the top positions.
The title should accurately describe the page content. In your effort to make your title interesting don’t overdo it by providing for a title that is not backed up by the page content.
Remember that your goal is to optimize the page for search engines and not just to grab the user’s attention. Consistency in the title and content is necessary for SEO success.
Add keywords in your title.
This is also necessary and important. When writing your title think what keywords are relevant to the page content and what keywords users may type in the search box.
3. Optimize media for a better user experience
Having images, screenshots, videos, and other media elements makes a page more interesting and easier to read.
Things to consider:
Too many media elements increase the loading time of a website and this is not good especially for mobile users.
If you have videos, then upload them in a streaming video service like YouTube or Amazon WES and embed them on your website. Hosting the videos on your own server is not a good idea.
Use ALT Text for images and the proper schemas for Videos.
4. Page introduction Optimization
The content found at the top of any page is important for SEO.
Google always assumes that the most useful parts of a page are closer to the top.
To take advantage of this make sure that:
You have text content as close as possible to the top of the page.
The first couple of lines should accurately describe the page.
Include keywords that are consistent with the page title.
Think of this as a summary of the page and a way to tell search engines (and users) in a few words what the page is about.
You can use the first 150 characters of your introduction as the meta description tag of the page as well.
5. Optimize Your Subheadings (H2, H3)
It is proven that long blog posts (over 1500 words) perform better in SEO.
On the other hand, this means that pages become longer and more difficult to read.
To keep your readers interested you should try and break down your content into sections and use subheadings to describe each section.
Subheadings are good for SEO and also useful for people who use skimming when reading.
Approach the structure of your page in the same way you would approach the setup of a ‘table of contents’ for a book.
The page titles are your book chapters and the subheadings of a page are the chapter contents.
In terms of technical SEO, the page title should have the <H1> tag (and you should only have one H1 per page) and the subheadings can be <H2> or <H3>.
6. Content formatting
Besides subheadings, make use of other formatting options to make your pages more appealing to the eye.
Things like bold text, italics, and small paragraphs help in beautifying a page.
Many people think that this is not very important because search engine crawlers cannot really ‘see’ a page like a human but this is wrong.
Crawlers are able to tell if formatting work has been done on the page but most important of all, don’t forget that the user experience is what matters most and this is where you should concentrate all your efforts.
Make your users happy so that they spend more time on your page, engage with your content, and come back for more.
7. Make use of internal links
One of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal when optimizing a page for SEO is internal linking.
Internal links are simply links pointing to pages (or posts) in the same domain
They serve four major purposes
First, they give users an easy way to read more about a certain topic.
Second, they act as pointers to search engines so that they crawl and discover more pages from your website.
Third, the anchor text of the internal links is used by search engines as a ‘guide’ on what the linking page is about.
Fourth, it’s a great way to make search engines differentiate the important pages of your website from the rest. This is useful in cases you want to improve the ranking of a page for specific keywords.
Best practices when using internal linking
Use internal links only when they are useful for users. Don’t just add internal links for the sake of having links to a page.
Don’t be afraid to have keywords in your anchor text for internal links. Google will not penalize you.
Vary the anchor text. While as mentioned above it is ok to use optimized anchor text for your links, don’t overdo it but try to vary the anchor text. As a general rule of thumb, over-optimization is never good.
Don’t just link to old posts from new posts but try to go back and edit older posts and add links to newer posts.
8. Annotate your content with schemas
Structured data is good for SEO. Schemas can improve the way your website is shown in the search results and this has a number of benefits.
When optimizing your WordPress posts or pages, you need to make sure that the relevant schema is implemented in your pages.
For more details read, What is Schema Markup in SEO.
9. Build high-quality external links
No SEO optimization guide is complete without mentioning the importance of incoming links.
Links pointing to a website or webpage are considered by search engines as ‘votes of trust’ and this works in a positive way when it comes to achieving higher rankings.
Author's bio
Demola Ojo
SEO specialist and Digital marketing expert at Haba Naija