Any business needs to market its products or services to raise awareness of its brand among people. Just like traditional marketing, digital marketing is also very essential for any business. SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is the fundamental step in digital marketing. Search Engine Optimization means optimizing a website to improve the visibility of the site in search results. Optimization is generally done in terms of content and site architecture. In order to rank your website consistently on the first page of search results, you must implement the right SEO strategies. Following SEO checklist is prepared exclusively for WordPress blogs that you can keep handy.
Choose an SEO-friendly theme for your website
There are hundreds of different free themes that are available for creating a website in WordPress. Also, several paid themes are available for an advanced dashboard for premium users. Most of these themes claim that they are SEO-friendly, but SEO experts have a different opinion. Some of these themes come with many unwanted plugins and scripts that you are not most likely to use. Having these extra scripts or plugins on your pages will surely impact the load time of your page. Page loading time is one of the crucial ranking factors for Search Engine Optimization. You need to maintain your page load time as low as possible. Means, your web pages should load faster when someone tries to open them. Pick a theme that suits your content requirements without affecting the user experience. Before installing a theme, you can run a demo on tools like Google’s web.dev to check its performance.
Do basic SEO hygiene checks
There are a lot of things you can fix by following SEO best practices before launching your blog. When trying to optimize your blog, you’ll find yourself hooked up with a lot of tools and plugins along the way. Here we have provided the best online sources available that you can employ while optimizing your blogs.
Yoast Plugin
It is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress that will make your day a lot easier. Available as both free and premium versions, it’ll help your site to meet technical SEO standards. It comes with tools to optimize your content for SEO as well as to fix readability. You can use these tools to identify your site’s shortcomings and areas for improvement.
Sitemap
Sometimes, even if you have optimized your web pages well, they might still not be crawlable by search engine bots. A sitemap will help search engine bots to crawl all your important web pages completely. It is a file where you link all the web pages of your site. This is very much needed especially when your website is large and you have image and video files on your site. Image and video files are categorized in a sitemap and make them easier to appear in search results.
Robots.txt
It is a file to instruct search engine bots which all the pages from your site need to be crawled and which all the pages need not be crawled. This is useful to avoid loads of requests to your site by managing the crawler traffic. If you have some pages that are private to you or your users, you can insert those pages in the robots.txt file. For eg, if you run an eCommerce website, you can tell the search engine bots not to crawl your user’s cart pages.
Web analytics
Web analytics tools will help you understand your website’s performance and make better decisions for your SEO strategies. You can use analytics tools like Google analytics and webmaster tools like Google search console to track your site’s performance.
Google Analytics gives you an overview of your audience. You can know their demographic area, the device type they use to see your site, their age, gender, and so on. It also gives details on how the traffic is driven to your site. You will be able to understand whether your users arrived directly to your site, or through organic search, social media, and so on. Using this tool, you can also track the behavior of your users on your site. It provides you insights on how they navigate through the pages, on which page they spend more time, so on. You can also identify if your users face any difficulties with any function of your site.
You can use the Google search console tool to get insights on how your website performed in search results. It gives you information on how many clicks and impressions your site got, which keywords yielded you good or bad results in the ranking. You can use this data to analyze your website and make appropriate changes in your SEO strategies to see improved results.
On-page SEO
This should be the most important aspect to focus on in your overall Search Engine Optimization strategy. Only when your site pages are optimized well, your visitors will stay to read the full content and come back again. You can follow these ideas while doing your on-page SEO:
Meta description
A Meta description is the short descriptive text that is shown under your blog’s URL in Google results. A well-written meta description can increase your Click-Through Rate (CTR) since it can attract the user to read your full content. Make sure to include your brand name, the keyword which is focused on your blog, and a call to action in your meta description.
The heading tags give context to search engine algorithms and bots on what your page is about. Typically, the page title should be given an H1 tag and your content need to be structured with H2 to H6 tags.
Internal linking
Search engine bots typically crawl through web pages from one link to another. So, it’s very important to interlink the pages of your site to increase the relevancy between them. This will increase the chances of your web pages get crawled and indexed. It will also guide your visitors well on navigating through the site thus increasing the session duration. Note that it is an important ranking factor that helps your site to rank well on search engines.
Conclusion
This article summarises all the important things to check before launching your WordPress blog. We, at iTrobes Technologies, follow only the best practice SEO strategies to help our clients climb through the search results ladder to be at the top. Feel free to check us out for any SEO needs for your website!
