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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial for website success, especially for businesses within the highly competitive tourism niche.
This is because it can help to improve your website’s visibility and ranking on search engines.
It is a great organic way to increase traffic to your site and attract new customers, and if your website is built on WordPress, there are various simple things you can do to improve it.
SEO for WordPress websites doesn’t have to be hard or complex. This is because WordPress is a great platform that provides several in-built SEO features to help you improve SEO across their websites.
In this article, we’ll explore how to do good SEO in WordPress, especially when writing WordPress blog posts.
- NOTE: Many of the tips covered within this article are also relevant to businesses who don’t use WordPress for their websites.
Page Contents:
1. Use Relevant SEO Keywords in Your WordPress Blog Posts
The first way to improve SEO in WordPress is to include relevant keywords within your blog articles.
Keywords are the terms or phrases that people use when searching for information on search engines. You should use keywords in your WordPress blog post’s title, meta description, URL, and throughout the content.
However, ensure not to overuse them within your content. Doing so is called “keyword stuffing” and is frowned upon within the world of SEO.
Google is incredibly smart these days and can smell someone trying to “screw” the system from a mile away. They are known to penalise websites suspected of doing this, causing negative impacts on your future rankings.
Related Articles:
- What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
- How to Improve SEO for Hotels and Tourism/Travel Websites
- 19 Best SEO Tools for Small Business Websites in 2023
2. Use an SEO-friendly WordPress Theme
The theme you use for your WordPress website can have a significant impact on your website’s performance, and your ability to optimise it for SEO.
That’s why it’s essential to choose a theme that allows optimisation for SEO and supports fast page loading times.
A theme that has a clean design, valid HTML code and a mobile-responsive design can help to improve how your blog articles rank in Google.
3. Optimise Your Titles and Descriptions
SEO for WordPress blog posts doesn’t need to be hard or complex. A simple way to start is by optimising your titles and descriptions.
The title and description of your blog posts are crucial when planning and implementing search engine optimisation with WordPress.
That’s why you should aim to make your title concise and designed to accurately reflect the content of your post. They should also contain your target keywords.
The meta description should be a summary of your WordPress post’s content and should also include relevant keywords.
This is your opportunity to give customers an insight into what they’ll get out of reading your article in 1-2 sentences.
If you’d like some further help getting started with SEO, ensure to check out our FREE SEO Masterclass.
4. Use Header Tags Throughout Your Content
Header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) are used to structure your content and make it easier for search engines to understand.
It’s essential to use header tags to break your content into sections and make it easier to read for both Google and your customers.
Use H1 tags for the title of your post, and H2 and H3 tags for subheadings.
5. Use High-Quality Images in Blog Articles
Images can greatly enhance the user experience on your website, but they can also slow down your website’s loading times if large file sizes are used.
That’s why it’s essential to optimise your images by compressing them and using descriptive file names.
Additionally, using alt tags to describe your images can help to improve your website’s accessibility.
6. Strive to Earn Backlinks
Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are links from other websites that point to your website.
They are an important factor in determining your website’s ranking as they signal to search engines that your website has valuable and relevant content.
You can get backlinks by guest posting on other blogs, participating in online forums, and/or by creating valuable content that others will want to link to.
7. Integrate Your Site with the Yoast SEO Plugin
If you’re wanting to do good SEO in WordPress, this is another great tip to explore.
Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress plugin that helps you improve search engine optimisation in WordPress.
It provides several features including keyword optimisation, readability checks, sitemaps and allows you to optimise your titles and meta descriptions.
Yoast SEOis a great SEO tool to use as a guide to help you improve your content’s SEO.
Related Articles:
- 19 Best SEO Tools for Small Business Websites in 2023
- 5 Ways to Improve Google SEO for Small Businesses in Australian Tourism
8. Create Quality Content
One of the most important factors for improving your website’s SEO is creating quality content.
If you’d like to attract more traffic to your website through SEO, you should focus on creating unique and informative content that provides value to your readers.
It is often a good idea to use a conversational tone throughout your content to ensure it is easy to read and understand.
Additionally, you can use relevant images, videos, and infographics to make your content more visual, engaging and shareable.
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9. Use Internal Linking
Internal linking is the practice of linking to other pages on your website from within your blog posts.
It helps search engines understand the structure of your website and improves the user experience by providing additional resources for your readers.
We recommend including internal links to related blog posts or pages as much as possible. But they should be relevant to the article the customer is reading, not spammy.
10. Optimise Your WordPress Site for Mobile
With the increasing use of mobile devices for browsing the web, it’s essential to optimise your website for mobile users.
To allow better SEO for WordPress sites, WordPress provides several mobile-friendly themes that you can use for your website.
Look for a responsive design that automatically adjusts the layout of your website based on the user’s device.
Doing so will save you a ton of time and pain as opposed to choosing a design that looks great on desktop but horrid on mobile.
11. Submit Your Sitemap to Search Engines
A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website and helps search engines to crawl and index your website.
WordPress provides a sitemap feature that automatically generates a sitemap for your website. You can then submit this to search engines like Google and Bing to improve your site’s visibility.
For Google, the main place to submit your sitemap is Google Search Console. You can read more about Google Search Console in the article below.
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12. Use Social Media
Social media can be a powerful tool to improve your website’s SEO, however there are some platforms that are more powerful than others.
As an example, you can share blog posts on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to attract more visitors to your website, or even repurpose your written content as videos on Youtube which link back to the article/ your website.
If you get a lot of social media shares and engagement, this can signal to search engines that your website is popular and relevant.
13. Add HTTPS to Your Site
Another easy way to improve search engine optimisation with WordPress is to add HTTPS to your site.
Using HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is important for website security and can help to improve your website’s SEO.
It encrypts the data transmitted between a user’s browser and a website, making it more secure. Search engines like Google tend to give websites that use HTTPS a slight ranking boost compared to those that don’t.
Websites with HTTPS are also typically perceived by customers as being more credible and legitimate sources of information.
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14. Optimise Your Permalinks
Permalinks are the URLs that are used to access your blog posts. It’s important to optimise your permalinks by making them more readable and user-friendly.
WordPress provides a feature to customise your permalinks so ensure to take advantage of this feature.
Try to use relevant keywords in your permalinks and keep them short and concise.
Adding relevant keywords into your permalinks can help to improve how your WordPress blog posts rank in Google, given they are perceived as being more relevant to the user’s search query.
15. Use Schema Markup
Schema markup is a type of structured data that helps search engines understand the content of a web page.
It uses a specific vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that can be added to HTML code to provide information about the page’s content. This can include details such as the page’s title, author, date published, and other relevant information.
Schema markup helps search engines to better understand the context of a page’s content, which can help to improve its ranking in search results.
Does schema markup differ from a sitemap?
Yes.
Schema markup helps search engines understand the content of a web page, while a sitemap helps search engines find and index all the pages on a website. Both can be useful for improving a website’s SEO.
In Summary:
15 Easy Ways to Improve SEO for WordPress Blog Posts
In summary, there are several easy ways to improve search engine optimisation with WordPress including:
- By using relevant keywords
- Optimising your titles and descriptions
- Using header tags
- Creating quality content
- and submitting your sitemap to search engines
Also remember to consider the importance of:
- User experience
- Mobile optimisation
- Regularly updating your website with fresh and relevant content
- Using the latest SEO best practices to stay ahead of the competition.
By applying these tips, you’ll be able to further improve your WordPress website’s ranking and visibility in search engines plus attract more relevant customers to your business.
If you’d like to start your SEO journey today with some simple tips and guidance, ensure to sign up for our FREE SEO Masterclass below.
