Wouldn't it be great if you could optimize your WordPress site for SEO without having to be an SEO expert? Below, I'll share with you Factors to Consider in Optimizing your website, but I will also share which plugins you can use, so you don't have to worry about the details and coding.
WordPress SEO Plugins To Optimize Your Site
WordPress SEO Plugins for Site Speed and Performance Optimization
If your site loads slow, what you'll find is your conversion rates drop.
Imagine yourself being on your phone, searching on Google, and you land on a site that is taking forever to load. What would you do? Would you sit there and wait for the site to load? Of course not.
You're going to click the back button and go to a different page.
And that's why you'd want to make sure that your site loads fast.
Amazon themselves had to lose billions of dollars when their website loads slow.
And that's Amazon! Of course, you're not going to lose as much as them because none of us make as much as Jeff Bezos. But percentage-wise, we're going to lose way more than them because we don't have as well as an established brand.
Here are a few things that affect your site load time:
A cache is where people don't have to keep loading up your images.
They know that you're saving the same ones over and over again, so they cache them.
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network takes your content and puts it all over the web, like servers in India and Brazil, and United States. That way, whenever someone's visiting your site from the UK, you don't have to crawl through the broadband pipes underneath the sea to visit your site. They'll just ping a server in the UK so that way just loads faster.
Minification of Images
Not necessarily changing the size of the images,
but it does change the file size.
Lazy Load
When you go to a site and you scroll down, there's no need for them to load up all the images at once. Instead, they just load them as you scroll
so that way you can improve the experience.
JavaScript
If you have too much JavaScript on your site, it can slow things down.
Image Compression
WordPress SEO Plugins to Check Out:
- WP rocket
- NitroPack
- WP Fastest Cache
- W3 Total Cash
- WP Smush for image compression.
WordPress SEO Plugins for Technical SEO
If Google can't crawl your page and understand what's on your page or able to read the content on your site. How are you going to rank for anything? And that's why technical SEO is super important.
Everyone talks about link building, and you need all these links, new content, and they're right.
You do need links and you do need content.
But if Google still can't crawl your website, understand the content on your page, and read the code. Then it doesn't matter how many links you have. You're not going to rank for much.
Here are some of the Technical SEO Elements:
Site Map is a page or a file and you can do another XML that lists all your pages on your site or all your articles.
Titles and Meta Descriptions
Whenever you do a Google search, you see a title and a text underneath that, a description, that's your title tag and meta description.
Robots.txt File
This is a file that you can block Google from calling certain pages.
If you have a login page or checkout page with credit card information,
you don't want people just scraping that kind of stuff.
Check for Broken Links
You don't want Google to crawl a link and find out that it's dead.
That makes you look bad.
AMP Pages
More people use Google from their mobile devices than desktop devices.
The AMP framework makes your pages load faster on mobile devices specifically for text-based articles.
Check your Redirects.
There are 301 redirects, 302 redirects. One's permanent, one's temporary,
but that can be because the bots go around in circles if you've done your redirects wrong.
Schema Markup
You know whenever you go on Google and you're searching for a product or a restaurant, you're seeing those star ratings, that's an example of schema markup.
Websites are passing that information to Google, so that helps.
SSL Certificates
Do you see that lock symbol next to your URL? That makes people feel more secure. And Google's looking for that when they're ranking websites.
WordPress SEO Plugins that can Help:
- All In One SEO
- Yoast SEO plugin
- SEOPress
- Schema Pro for Schema Markup
- Rank Math
- Simple SSL
- AMP for WordPress
You don't have to use all of them but these are the list you can pick from. There's no wrong or right way as all plugins are getting better.
WordPress SEO Plugins for Content Marketing
If you write content, no matter how amazing it is, if no one reads it, no one sees it.
You're not going to do well if you don't focus on the marketing of that content and making sure that your content is buttoned up as well.
Here are the Factors to Consider for Content Marketing:
Push Notifications - You can send this out on your website to get more visitors.
Grammar
No one wants to read content that's poorly written. Make sure you check your grammar and fix it.
Because Google's like at the source in a dictionary, they know what's good spelling, bad spelling, great grammar, bad grammar. If you're writing, I love using Grammarly.
Social Sharing
Even though Facebook's reach isn't that great compared to what it was years ago it is still better than nothing. You'd still want to share that content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn, depending on where your niche is.
Collect Emails
They always say, the money's in the list. Whenever you create a new blog article, you can send out an email blast and get that traffic rolling in.
WordPress SEO Plugins to Check Out:
- Subscribers for Push Notification
- Hello Bar for Email Collection and Call to Action
- Grammarly for grammar
- Shared Counts for getting more social shares
WordPress SEO Plugins for Security
These days we're all worried about privacy and security. You don't want hackers to inject malicious code into your website or publish fake content on your website. And it happens.
It's super important for you to avoid.
I've mentioned SSL earlier, but there are also a few other plugins that can help like Sucuri and Wordfence.
If you want to do it all manually, you can. But if you use these plugins,
it'll give you a kickstart without having to learn all the nitty-gritty details of SEO.