WordPress is perhaps the most preferred CMS today due to its immense powers of serving the SEO cause. The platform has innumerable features that help to extract the best ways of implementing SEO techniques. You have to understand the features that are available and know the ways of using them to your advantage. This is the only way of gaining true SEO mileage from WordPress. Unless you take into consideration how search engines behave and align the SEO features of WordPress with it, you are perhaps depriving yourself of the powers of WordPress.
Tell search engines when you are ready for indexing
Search engines are continuously scanning the Web and indexing websites that are readily available. However, it is important to ensure the indexing is done only when your content is completely ready for presentation. If indexing is done during the preparative stages of the content, like when you are writing a blog, then it will reflect poor results because the website is not prepared for indexing. To prevent this from happening, enable the feature on WordPress that discourages indexing of the site until you are ready with the content.
Identify and isolate useless links
Search engine spiders are programmed to pick up all kinds of links without any discrimination. The drawback of this process is the high probability of bad and useless links being picked up. This can severely damage SEO prospects. WordPress has the provision for preventing the spiders from picking up links that can cause harm to your site. You should activate the “no follow” option for hyperlinks that you do not want to be considered for ranking. This would prevent unwanted links from being considered for Page Rank.
Avoid indexing of duplicate page types
WordPress has empowered users with special features that can be used to communicate with search engines and be selective in indexing content. There are situations when titles are the same for blog categories and blogs. When this happens, there is a chance it could lead to situations when you face issues of duplicate content and duplicate titles. This can adversely affect indexing and is best avoided. To avoid problems, invoke the “no index” option to identify the page of lesser relevance so that it is exempt from being indexed.
Shun spam comments
When you seek SEO advice from experts online, they will tell you the technique of blocking spam comments. Links posted by users can now be blocked in WordPress by using the “no follow” feature. Spam comments are detrimental for blogs as it is irrelevant to the topic and a reason for annoyance of genuine users. It increases the chances of the post being identified as scam, ruining SEO prospects. You can check out the WordPress SEO guides that will help you to fight against spammers and make the most of your optimization efforts.
Speed up website loading time
Website loading and displaying speeds are critical. Websites should be fast loading, and switching between pages and content should also be speedy. Make use of the caching plugin of WordPress to achieve the speed you need, and also reduce the load on your Web server. The ability of caching plugins and caching both dynamic and static content helps to increase website speed and provides better viewing experience. Moreover, speedy websites are also liked by search engines — and that can be advantageous for SEO campaigns.
Use Content Delivery Network
With the dual purpose of pleasing users as well as search engines, you have to be very watchful about the outcome of using the caching plugins. Besides using the plugin, which should improve speed, you have to optimize codes to get faster speeds especially for medium-sized and large websites. In addition, you can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that can further speed up websites. The network uses multiple servers to ensure that content is delivered to specific users through the server that is nearest to the user’s location. By using a closely located server, the response time is reduced and overall performance gets a boost through faster page loading.
Go for image optimization to enhance speed
Another method of enhancing website speed is by optimizing images that are used. It means the image size has to be optimized in way that compresses it and is then presented in optimal measures that facilitates quick page loading. Smaller images contribute to optimized page size that directly impacts website speed. One way is to upload optimized images, and another way is to optimize uploaded images by using suitable WordPress plugins. Automatic image resizing is done with the help of plugins. Adding proper tags to images is also important to earn better ranks in search results.
Become mobile friendly through responsive web design
With Google giving high priority for the mobile friendliness of websites, make sure that your WordPress website is mobile-friendly too. As it is directly linked to better user experience, fall back on responsive Web design so the website is viewed with the same ease on mobile devices. There are many default WordPress themes that are based on responsive designs, and you can choose one to build your custom theme upon it.
Focus on quality content
Make sure your content is of high quality as Google has made its intentions quite clear in encouraging quality content. This would ensure that your website ranks well in search results because it would also be liked by viewers who crave relevant and quality content. The quality of content is now gauged by search engines through the use of signals from social media as well as by tracking bounce rate and on-site user activity.
After you have implemented all or some of these techniques, review the site performance and, after some time, make suitable changes. Normally, the result should encourage you to learn about more such techniques.
Evans Walsh is a passionate blogger who finds time to switch over between blogging and providing Web services in United States – www.stgeorgewebdesign.com. He has spent about 20 years in the Web industry and has seen the process evolve. He understands the needs of users and communicates with them through his blogs. Considered as an authority in WordPress, he loses no opportunity to share his views on it.The post Ways to Harness the Power of SEO to Boost Your WordPress Site appeared first on SiteProNews.
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Link: Ways to Harness the Power of SEO to Boost Your WordPress Site
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