Good SEO and right digital marketing are essential to reach success in blogging. Search Engine Optimization helps create blogs that users and search engines love while digital marketing helps attract and engage visitors.
One SEO Sydney expert states that if you are just starting your blog or already have a blog but not getting enough people into your site by driving up search engine traffic, you might need to optimize your WordPress content in line with search engine optimization guides. Here are easy tips that you can do all by yourself to boost traffic:
1) Choose a Good Web Host
The loading speed of your website is one of the most important factors to rank high in Google. The speed Gold standard of Google requires your page to load less than a second.
If you already have a host and your website is loading slow, you should contact them, or you can also visit https://www.webmarketing123.com/ for SEO and digital marketing coaching.
Moreover, 40% of visitors don't continue using a site if it loads more than 4 seconds. Here are some WordPress hosts that has high-speed ratings:
- A2 Hosting – has an average load time of 376ms
- Hostinger – has an average of 385ms load time
- Hostgator – has an average of 419ms load time
- Bluehost – has an average speed of 425ms
- A Small Orange – has an average speed of 700ms
2) Install SEO Plugin
SEO plugin automatically helps in numerous SEO aspects of your blog. It provides basic settings and guides in optimizing your site. Some can provide link canonicalization, meta description, page titles, tags, etc. Others include SEO analytics about social metrics, Google indexation, etc.
You should also use the right settings for your audience and website. To get the best result, do the trial and error process. Also, you can even use CDN since it helps distribute data on servers thereby making the load time of your site faster.
To enhance your digital marketing using WordPress, here are some plugins you can use:
- WP Statistics – obtains detailed information of your audience through statistics and charts
- LeadIn – makes you understand your viewers and promotes conversion
- Gravity Forms – creates forms you can use for your brand
- Yoast – optimizes your content for SEO in an easy to understand way
- Floating Social Bar – includes social media buttons that loads quickly
3) Customize Your SEO Permalinks
WordPress uses default permalinks for posts such as the name and date in the URL. It is the URL of your content. To be searchable, you should change your settings. Customize it into a text-based permalink structure.
It should have the post name and keywords of your blogs. Also, when changing the permalink structure, redirect your old links by editing the .thaccess file.
Here are the common permalink structures and their examples that most WordPress websites use to drive more traffic on your site:
- Post name: (postname=best SEO tips -> www.yourwebsite.com/best-SEO-tips/) – generates memorable URLs and is good for bloggers who posts multiple times a day
- Category and post name: (category/postname=digital marketing/best SEO tips -> www.yourwebsite.com/digital-marketing/best-SEO-tips/): generates most keywords into the URL which is good for SEO
- Year, month, and post name: (year no. of the month postname=2018 12 best SEO tips -> www.yourwebsite.com/2018/12/best-SEO-tips/): creates URLs shorter than the day and name
- Full date and post name: (year no. of the month day postname=2018 12 19 best SEO tips -> www.yourwebsite.com/2018/12/19/best-SEO-tips/): used by high traffic news websites so they can post dozens daily
4) Add Alt Tags to The Images On Your Site
To make your website load faster, you need to optimize your photos. You can do this through the use of online or offline resizing and optimizing tools to automatically reduce the sizes of your uploaded images.
Aside from compressing and resizing the images on your site to optimize it, add tags to make them rank better when searched. Adding this include using additional keywords in your posts.
Alt tags are used by search engines to identify relevancy of images since these tags are describing such photos.
5) Use Mobile-Friendly WordPress Themes
Google loves mobile-friendly websites, so it is important to optimize it for mobile. You can do it by using a mobile-friendly theme.
A responsive site from mobile devices shows an overall better user experience and helps you rank high in searches.
The Twenty Eleven to Twenty Twelve default WordPress themes is all responsive. Lastly, to test if your website is mobile friendly and loads fast, use Google's Mobile-Friendly Website Test.
Conclusion:
As a blogger, it is essential to know how to optimize and drive traffic to your website even for the basic ones. Good content is not enough since you need to rank high in Google searches so that people can read your blogs. Therefore, it is recommended to learn and use the SEO and digital marketing tools for your WordPress.
