9 WordPress SEO tips to drive more traffic to your website

To attract any sort of online traffic, you need to be discoverable by search engines. And not only that, you also need to rank high enough so that when someone searches for something, they find your website.

However, ranking high with search engines can be a difficult task, especially if you are just starting out. This is where SEO comes in play.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization or the process of making your website and your content more discoverable by the search engine bots. There are countless comprehensive guides, tutorials, and even videos about WordPress SEO tips that you can easily find on the web.

However, as they differ, you’re probably wondering which one should you use? Which one of them would work best for your particular web blog?

While there isn’t a universal guide on how to rank higher, there are several WordPress SEO tips that you can follow which can guarantee you improved rankings.

Create engaging content

The most important part of every blog is its content. You cannot compensate for it, regardless of the other features of your site.

You may gain a lot visits for a given period of time if you follow all other guidelines we’ve listed here.

However, you’ll not get returning visitors. That’s why you should always place top priority on the quality and relevance of your data.

Prior to writing an article, you can try to learn more about your targeted audience – what kind of blog posts are most often shared and commented.

Also, check out other popular articles on the subject and see what you can offer your customers that these articles can’t.

Remember, your focus should always be on the quality of an article and not on the number of articles you can write.

Another tip on writing content – if you are just starting out, you should use an SEO plugin in the style of Yoast SEO. It will help you better understand how to optimize your writing for both human readability and search engine bots.

Create attractive titles

The title is crucial for each of your blog articles. It will be the first thing a visitors see when they find your site on a search engine. So, your titles must be written in a way to attract the click of this visitor.

There are several tips on how to write more engaging articles.

• Titles should be short. Google will cut off anything longer than 70 characters, so try to fit in that limit.
• People are more inclined to click on articles with numbers in them, specifically odd numbers. List posts are statistically proven to be the most shared type of content across the web.
• How-to posts are another very popular article type that people love to comment on and share.
• Each of your posts should have a specific keyword, which it aims to rank for. Make sure you include this keyword in the title.
• Use powerful adverbs that elicit some sort of emotion in the visitor. Here is a list of power words that will instantly boost the quality of your titles.
• Use clarifications in your title – interview, infographic, podcast, etc. This way, you’ll set clear expectations from the very beginning, which means that your visitors will be prepared for the structure and the data they’re about to find the very moment they see your post.
• Use the date (month, year) in order to convey more relevance to the current times.

To further advance your title writing skills, you can check out this article from teamgate.com and this article from moz.com

Build backlinks

Once you have engaging content with attractive titles, it’s time to build backlinks. A lot of people today will try to downplay the value of backlinks, but they are still the most important SEO factor out there.

In simple words, the more quality backlinks you have, the better you will rank.

There are several ways to build backlinks.

The most simple way is to simply create great content, share it on social media and wait for people to naturally link to it. However, this method is generally unreliable as there is no guarantee that it will produce results.

A better way is to build the backlinks yourself.

One of the most effective techniques to building backlinks is to see which sites link to articles that are on the same subject. Then contact these sites, show them your content, explain why it is better and ask them to link back to you.

It’s hard work and requires a lot of research, but in the end, it’s worth the time and effort.

Internal linking is just as important as backlinks

Another type of links that you need to consider is internal links. They will help search engine bots to faster crawl all of your pages, they will point visitors to interesting content on your website and they will help with your SEO.

While search engines don’t place the same level of weight on a link from another site and on a link from your sites, internal links are indeed a ranking factor.

Always remember to use the anchor text you want to rank from when linking to a specific page. For example, if you have a page that you want to rank for “imported beers”, make sure that you link the word “imported beers” from other pages to the original page.

We have noticed on several occasions how by just creating more internal links, a page has climbed 2 or 3 positions higher in the search results.

Clean up your permalinks

Permalinks are the name WordPress uses for the URL address of each one of your pages and posts. As you can imagine, they are almost as important as titles. A general rule is to keep them as short and precise as possible.

Here is a simple guide to how to write better permalinks.

• All permalinks need to be less than 100 characters. The shorter they are, the better.
• Include your focus keyword, but don’t make the permalink overstuffed with keywords.
• Ignore words like “and” and “or” and replace them with hyphens. A simple example – “A-song-of-ice-and-fire” – “song-ice-fire”.

Optimize your images

As the saying goes “A picture is worth a thousand words”. And as cinema people love to say “show, don’t tell”. What this means is – use images in your posts. Photos, graphs, infographics, anything that can better convey your point.

However, just as the images support your post visually, they can also support it on an SEO level. How, do you ask? With their name, and their title and alt tags.

If you want to add a picture to your posts, don’t use the default name it came with off the camera. Rename it to better illustrate what is in the picture. If you have to option to use the focus keyword in the filename, use it.

Repeat the same process for the title and the alt tags.

Always remember that Google indexes content and images separately and offers a special image search. Consider the image search as one more channel people can use to find your site.

Make a Sitemap

If you have a website with a lot of pages, it can take some time before the search engines crawl them all. But you can give them a helping hand with a sitemap.

A sitemap is basically a list of all the pages on your website. You can create one with a number of free plugins and online tools. The most popular plugin for the last few years has been Google XML Sitemaps and popular online services are XML Sitemaps and XML Sitemap Generator.

Once you have your sitemap ready upload the newly created .xml file to your website. Once it’s up, you need to tell the search engines where to find it.  Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools). Navigate to “Crawl” in the left-hand menu and click on Sitemaps. In there, simply click on the A

With the Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools) the process is very simple. Navigate to “Crawl” in the left-hand menu and click on Sitemaps. In there, simply click on the “Add/Test Sitemap” button in the top right.

If you have lots of video content, both self-hosted or embedded from YouTube, Vimeo or a similar site, you should consider creating a dedicated video sitemap.

A video sitemap servers the same function as a regular sitemap, but refers just to videos. It will help search engines discover the videos on your website faster and serve them to anyone looking.

Creating a video sitemap is a bit more difficult than a regular sitemap, as it requires a bit more information about the videos. However, you can use the Google XML Sitemap for Videos plugin to do all the job for you.

Create a strong social media presence

While not everyone has a website, almost everyone has a social media profile. So, creating a strong social media presence, either via a dedicated profile or as an extension of your personal profile is a great way to reach new audiences.

And while shares on social media won’t count as backlinks and won’t directly boost your rankings, they will surely drive more traffic to your website.

A quick tip on getting more social media interactions – go where your potential customers as. Search for relevant groups or pages on Facebook.

Another effective tactic for getting more traffic from social media is to get in touch with influencers and ask them to promote your site to their followers.

Choose a responsive theme

While this tip has nothing to do with SEO, it has everything to do with improving the user experience. Recent studies show that mobile traffic will soon eclipse desktop traffic.

A responsive theme will help you to better serve all users. No matter what device they use, as the theme will adapt to the device. And the better the users like your website, the more likely are they to visit it again, share it or refer their friends.

Also, keep in mind that Google has two sets of search results – one for desktop users and one for mobile users. If your site is not optimized for mobile users, you will not be listed in the mobile search results.

And in the end, search engine presence and more shares will result in more traffic.

When you implement a responsive theme, make sure you also check the Google guidelines for mobile-friendly sites.

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In the end, keep in mind that SEO is not an exact science. While one approach can work with a specific website, it may not work for another site.

The WordPress SEO tips above, however, are pretty much universal, which means that you simply can’t go wrong following them. But that should not stop or limit you to try different data optimization techniques until you get the results that you want.

And if you have other tips you think can help drive more traffic, don’t hesitate to share them in the comments.