Do you know the concept of WordPress SEO? Optimizing your website to rank better in search results is essential to expanding the reach and consolidating your brand as an authority in the marketplace. Get to know some of the most important techniques and get to know which plugins can make your work easier!
Anyone who has ever been interested in creating a website has heard of WordPress. It is one of the most widely used CMSs in the world, a fame that was not achieved by chance.
In addition to facilitating the creation and management of blogs and websites, the tool enables various actions focused on SEO. Thus, it is an ally in the search for the top search engine results.
To use these qualities to your advantage, however, you must know how to produce content optimized for ranking. Moreover, knowing the plugins aimed at this goal is an advantage that can not be disregarded.
In this WordPress SEO tutorial, we separate essential tips for improving your site’s SEO from content production. We also list the best plugins available for this, as well as their benefits. Keep up!
How to produce SEO optimized content?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, which can be freely translated as search engine optimization. This technique is one of the pillars of Inbound Marketing, an approach that seeks to attract the reader to your company to educate them and, in the future, convert them into a loyal customer.
To make this process possible, you must adhere to certain SEO rules and create qualified materials that are relevant to your audience. Therefore, the first step is to know deeply the characteristics of the audience you seek to reach.
To make production more accurate, we recommend creating a persona, a profile that blends demographic and fictitious attributes to represent the ideal customer of the company.
With that established, it is feasible to start a keyword search to find the ones that draw the most attention from potential consumers.
From there, the idea is to produce content that holds the reader’s interest and design your brand as an authority on the market.
But let’s go back a little bit: With so much competition in this world of digital transformation, what SEO techniques are needed to ease the visitor’s path to you? We have listed some below.
Define an SEO title
The SEO title is the short text displayed on SERPs (search engine result pages) to describe to web surfers what will be found in the content.
A site that does not establish one of these titles leaves the search engine with the task of defining them, which may result in the use of the header or part of the text. Of course, this is not positive for the user experience.
To define the pages that will appear in the first options, Google, for example, uses an algorithm that seeks to show readers the content most relevant to their search. Thus, pages that ignore the SEO title have a harder time ranking among the top-ranked.
To create an SEO-optimized title, you must use the related keyword and write a descriptive text.
It is worth noting that this text should not be too large, or maybe cut by Google’s algorithm. To avoid this, we recommend a 60 character limit.
Optimize your titles and intertitles
Have you noticed how we currently consume much more information than before? Using the internet, we are free to find different content options on the same theme.
As a side effect, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hold the public’s attention. Therefore, it is crucial to appreciate the organization and scannability of each post.
So you need to follow a pattern. The title of an article should be written with the Header 1 tag, while the headings should be set to Header 2. If you need to organize the content of a headline, you can use Headers 3 and 4, always respecting a hierarchy.
In addition to improving the reader’s experience, this practice drives Google’s ranking of the site as its algorithm makes content more readable and optimized.
Create a meta description and invest in internal linking
The meta description is a one page HTML tag that summarizes the subject that will be covered in the content.
It appears below the Title Tag and its content should be short, compelling and informative. The goal is that when reading the meta description, the user is interested in the material and access the website.
From there, your goal is to keep it on the site so you can access more content. An important technique for this purpose is internal link building. By associating other pages of your website with words used in the article, you increase the chances of the visitor staying.
What are the main plugins available for WordPress SEO?
Yoast SEO
In terms of popularity, Yoast SEO stands out from the rest. The number of active users exceeds 5 million and the average rating by more than 25,000 people is 5 stars.
Remember that we cite titles and meta descriptions as a fundamental part of website SEO? Well, this plugin offers templates that can be easily used, even for those who do not have many bases on the subject.
However, the attribute that catches the most attention from users is the SEO review that Yoast performs on each of its posts.
Just set the content keyword and the plugin will analyze the most important points for optimization, improving scannability and avoiding repeated URLs.
In addition, it checks if the keyword has been used in the most essential areas: title, intertitles, URLs, meta description, etc.
All in one SEO Pack
One of the first WordPress SEO focused plugins, the All in One SEO Pack is also one of the most popular.
As the name suggests, the proposal is to encompass all that is important for SEO in one plugin. It stands out for its simple and highly intuitive interface, which makes it a great choice for beginners.
Importantly, despite the simplicity offered, the plugin leaves nothing to be desired in quality. In addition, it is possible to change the settings and decrease the program’s automatic responsibilities, leaving the user free to make their own changes.
Among its features, stands out the automatic optimization of posts for search engines.
Just install the All in One SEO Pack and you’ll see your titles and tags automatically updated to better meet the requirements of Google’s algorithm and other search engines.
SEOPressor
The SEOPressor is another powerful plugin and used to improve organic traffic of websites.
It comes with a real guide for optimizing each post. Compared to others, your main differentiator concerns the way you deal with keywords.
The tool allows the user to search for long-tail keywords that are related to the theme of their choice.
In addition, she conducts an overall WordPress SEO assessment of each post and gives a rating based on their performance. Thus, it aggregates in a single plugin the services that would generally require the installation of more than one program.
If you want to run tests to find out which post template is best suited to SEO techniques, just compare the reviews SEOPressor performs and opt for the posts that deliver the best results.
Remember that these notes do not only refer to the written content but also involve the images. The plugin will indicate if they contain the tags needed for optimization.
Finally, the program is excellent for internal link strategy. It allows you to manage links and associate them with a specific keyword or phrase.
W3 Total Cache
We know that providing a good experience for your site visitor is critical to the image they form about your brand.
Also, this is one of the criteria considered by the algorithms for determining your page position in SERPs. With that in mind, try to remember the factors that have already caused you to feel dissatisfied while visiting a website.
You may have remembered the slowness of some portals. Not surprisingly, it is a rather frustrating experience to navigate a slow site that takes time to load images and even access other sessions.
It is therefore essential to ensure fast and agile navigation to the visitor. And that is exactly the highest quality of W3 Total Cache.
By utilizing features like file compression and page caching, the plugin promises to improve site speed up to 10 times.
SEO Image Optimizer
Images are crucial to the visitor experience and rankings on Google. Thus, you need a lot of attention when inserting visual content to enrich your posts. With SEO Image Optimizer, this task is made easier.
With simple operation and customization possibilities, the plugin inserts ALT tags in your images dynamically and optimized.
These tags are responsible for telling the algorithm what the figure in question is about. Therefore, it is essential for your page to achieve a better position in search engine results.
Investing in SEO practices is essential if you have the ambition to establish your presence in the digital world. In today’s context, where basically anyone can create content and launch it on the internet, the competition is stronger than ever.
Knowing this, adopting organic techniques to attract your audience is a cost-effective way to provide a competitive advantage.
Applying the concepts of WordPress SEO, you open the way for the persona to find your site among the results of a Google search, which generates credibility and market authority.
So, ready to optimize your site and achieve better results? WordPress is one of the most widely used CMSs in the world, but it still has flaws. If you come across one, don’t worry! Check out this article that tells you how to resolve the 15 most common WordPress errors