Boost the ranking prospects of your WordPress website by using these tips

Websites serve various goals from just entertaining and informing the audience, to promoting something, selling products and services, and many more, but all websites have a singular goal of grabbing the most attention. The logic simple – the higher is the website visibility, the more traffic reaches the website, which is fundamental to gaining popularity for achieving the goals. But visibility alone will not drive traffic to websites that need to do something more by implementing search engine optimization so that it brings the website into prominence and catches the eyes of search engines.

SEO is a bundle of strategies and techniques aimed at enabling website pages to rank higher in search results. When websites appear among the top slots of search results, it increases the likelihood of garnering more clicks and driving more traffic to the website because the site appears more credible and trustworthy.

Since most of the websites are built on WordPress, we will discuss some strategies for improving SEO on WordPress websites, but the same holds good for any other website too.

Choose a reliable hosting service

The quality of website hosting service is critical for doing well in search engine optimization because it contributes to the speed of the website, which is an important factor that Google considers for ranking websites.  The hosting service is primarily responsible for the continuous visibility of websites round the clock throughout the year by providing seamless service with almost zero downtime while ensuring that users are happy with the website speed.

Pick an SEO-ready WordPress theme

The choice of the WordPress theme for creating websites plays a vital role in website performance. Most WordPress themes are SEO-friendly in varying degrees for implementing search engine optimization right from the time of launching the website. However, all themes are not equal, and you must pick a theme that can support good website speed because some themes can make the website sluggish.

Therefore, besides paying attention to the design and aesthetics during theme selection, you must balance it well with the SEO capabilities. In addition, the theme must have clean codes, which helps to improve the chances of better ranking in search results. Look at the specific features of the theme that you want to use and see how well it matches your SEO objectives.

Use the WordPress SEO plugin

WordPress derives its power from plugins, which are additional software that enhances the features and functions of websites. Plugins help to achieve much more from the website, and there is a WordPress plugin available for almost everything that helps your SEO cause by increasing the opportunities of earning high ranks.  Many SEO plugins are available that can boost SEO performance by providing small, targeted features like allowing users to create an XML site map. Some other plugins, like Yoast SEO, will add an entire suite containing various SEO features that will expand the horizon of optimization many more times and improve performance.

Create a sitemap

A sitemap is like the contents of a book that lists all content and pages of the website arranged hierarchically. It helps to understand the site layout at a glance and what it contains. Initially, sitemaps helped viewers to navigate the site with ease, but now there has been a shift in the purpose as it is useful for communicating with the search engine crawlers or bots too. Although adding a sitemap to the website has nothing to do with search engine ranking, it is still a very important tool for SEO because it improves the crawlability of websites, which leads to better indexing and paves the way for improving ranking. Better indexing makes it easy for search engines to pick the website over other websites and present more valuable content to searchers.

Change the permalink structure

Every page, post, and other content of the website has a permalink or URL structure, which other people use a reference to link back to the website. The appearance of permalinks matters a lot because it bears a hint about what is underneath. The permalink should be crisp and clear but descriptive enough so that search engines can quickly make out what the contents are about. Although WordPress offers a default permalink, it also allows changing to make it more revealing so that it is easy to understand what the content is about. Change the permalink to suit your needs for increased effectiveness.

Use Headings in your content

The sitemap is useful for search engine bots to understand the website layout or organization, but it does not help to make sense of individual content. To enable search engines to get some hint about what is there in the content, you must use heading tags, which are formatting options that you can apply to section headings within posts and pages. The settings are visible in the WordPress editor and appear as heading 1, Heading 2, etc. Using headings for the content helps to break up the text into sections and makes reading easier while the search crawlers can better understand what the content can offer.

Create keyword-centric content

Keywords are central to SEO because it is the most vital link for communicating with search engines and increases the chances of better ranking. Keywords also help to connect users to the appropriate content. Create content around keywords by choosing a specific keyword that you want to rank for and spread it across the content by positioning it strategically for drawing maximum attention. In addition to placing keywords in the content, place it in the title, and headings too.

Internal and external links

How well your website associates with other websites is an important consideration for search engines, and it manifests through the external and internal links of the website. Internal links between pages and content tell crawlers how these are associated with one another. External links are like votes that tell search engines about the acceptance level of the website to others, which indicates the quality of the website.

Use a responsive design for the website so that it displays well on mobile devices and meets the criterion set by Google that considers it as a ranking factor.