Improving your WordPress SEO is essential for increasing visitors to your website. Unfortunately, most WordPress SEO tutorials are too technical for beginner users to follow.
If you are serious about improving your website traffic, you must follow WordPress SEO best practises.
We will provide the best WordPress SEO techniques in this post to help you boost your WordPress SEO and obtain more organic traffic.
But first, let us start by looking at what SEO actually is.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the process of optimising a website’s technical setup, content relevancy, and link popularity so that its pages are easier to locate, more relevant and popular to user search queries, and, as a result, search engines rank them higher.
By presenting material that meets user search demands, search engines advocate SEO activities that help both the user search experience and the page’s rating. This involves, among other things, using relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headings (H1), using descriptive URLs with keywords rather than strings of numbers, and using schema markup to identify the page’s content meaning.
People use search engines to find what they’re looking for on the internet. Search engines are a frequent starting place when you need information, whether you’re studying a product, looking for a restaurant, or planning a vacation. They provide a fantastic chance for business owners to send relevant traffic to your website.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the activity of directing your website to appear higher on a search engine results page (SERP), resulting in more visitors. Typically, the goal is to rank on the top page of Google results for search phrases that are important to your target audience. So, SEO is as much about knowing your audience’s desires and requirements as it is about the technical aspects of how to setup your website.
How do search engines work?
Search engines provide results for any search query a user enters. To do so, they survey and “understand” the vast network of websites that make up the web. They run a sophisticated algorithm that determines what results to display for each search query.
Why SEO focuses on Google
To many people, the term “search engine” is synonymous with Google, which has about 92% of the global search engine market. Because Google is the dominant search engine, SEO typically revolves around what works best for Google. It’s useful to have a clear understanding of how Google works and why.
What Google wants
Google is designed to deliver the best search experience to its users, or searchers. That means providing the most relevant results, as quickly as possible.
The 2 core elements of the search experience are the search term (the user input) and the search results (the output).
Let’s say you search “Mailchimp guides and tutorials.” This is a clear, unambiguous search. Google understands what you’re asking for, and it delivers a useful page as the top organic result—Mailchimp’s own page with that title.
From Google’s perspective, this is a very good search result and a positive user experience, because it’s likely that the user will click the top result and be happy with the outcome.
How Google makes money
Google profits from people trusting and valuing its search service. It achieves this by delivering useful search results.
Google also provides businesses with the opportunity to pay for an advertorial placement at the top of search result pages. The word “Ad” indicates these listings. Google makes money when searchers click on these pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements, which you purchase through AdWords. You’ll see these ads on more generic queries in particular.
Other than the small label, these search results look almost indistinguishable from other search results. Of course, this is intentional, as lots of users click on these results without realizing that they’re ads.
This is what Google counts on. Advertising revenues accounted for more than 80% of the $182.5 billion that Google generated in 2020. So while search functions remain its core product, it depends on its advertising business.
The anatomy of search results
SERPs consist of paid search results and “organic” search results, where the organic results don’t contribute to Google’s revenue. Instead, Google delivers organic results based on its assessment of a site’s relevance and quality. Depending on the type of search query, Google will also include different elements on the SERP, like maps, images, or videos.
The volume of ads on a SERP depends on what users have searched. If you were to search the word “shoes,” for example, you’d likely find a substantial number of the top results are ads. In fact, you’ll probably have to scroll down the page to find the first organic result.
A query like this usually generates so many ads because there’s a strong chance that the searcher is looking to buy shoes online, and there are lots of shoe companies willing to pay for a feature in the AdWords results for this query.
On the other hand, if you search for something like “Atlanta Falcons,” your results will be different. Because this search is mostly tied to the professional American football team by that name, the top results relate to that. But it’s still a less clear query. You’ll find news stories, a knowledge graph, and their homepage. These 3 kinds of results at the top indicate that Google doesn’t know the precise intention of your search, but provides quick pathways to learn about the team, read their latest news, or go to their website.
Since there appears to be no purchase intent behind the query, advertisers are not willing to bid for the keyword, so there are no AdWords results.
However, if you change the query to “Atlanta Falcons hat,” which signals to Google that you might be shopping, the SERP results change to feature more sponsored results
There are an estimated 5.4 billion Google searches daily, therefore, as a business owner, SEO must not be overlooked.
So, here are eight simple steps for beginners – that can help your website rank on Google:
Create SEO friendly content
1) Find popular search terms. Use Google to find related suggestions.
2) Choose your target audience, and find out what they may be looking for.
For example, “Best Coffee shops in London”, the target audience here will be those are in or looking to go to London for a coffee shop.
3) Create text content using these search terms that you have gathered. Google generally favours pages with 1,000 plus words.
Install Yoast SEO Plugin
4) Install “Yoast SEO” plugin on your WordPress website
5) Change the meta tags and meta descriptions so that it is Google SEO friendly
Let Google know about your content
6) Install the “Site Kit by Google” plugin
7) Setup the plugin by clicking “start setup” then click onto “My Dashboard”
Submit your sitemap
8) Go to your WordPress Dashboard, click SEO, then features
9) Click on “see XML sitemap”
10) Copy the sitemap link on your browser and paste it within your Google Search Console
These are simple steps to help you rank on Google, if you wish to rank even higher then hire the best SEO agency in London.
Nawed Wahedi
