WordPress SEO: 10 Practical Steps to Boost Your Visibility

Unlocking the potential of your WordPress website goes hand in hand with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Therefore, investing in WordPress SEO is the most effective and economical choice in the long run.

To stand out in the crowd, a WordPress website owner creates an augmented site consisting of high-quality content with optimized pages and images. They take the help of WordPress SEO methods and tools like Google Analytics to rank better on result pages.

If you have some spare time in hand to focus on WordPress SEO, that's great. If not, try finding professional WordPress SEO services with market expertise to get the job done.

This blog post will guide you through the steps of WordPress SEO strategies recommended by SEO experts that can boost your site's visibility.

What is WordPress SEO?

The practice of enhancing a website structure on a WordPress platform is referred to as WordPress SEO. It is the most commonly used tactic to increase organic traffic and rank higher in the search engine results pages.

The optimization process entails various strategies tailored to benefit the WordPress site in more than one way. It involves keyword optimization, quality content, title tag and meta description, and image optimization.

When your content is relevant to the search query of the visitor, the search engines crawl it and place you on the first page of Google. As a result, the chance of the visitor clicking on your page increases.

Why Is Investing in WordPress SEO Essential?

WordPress SEO experts create relevant content that syncs with the search intent of the users. These professionals take care of the off-page and technical SEO aspects to make your SEO campaign wholesome.

Investing your time and efforts in WordPress SEO can prove to be highly beneficial in more than one way for your WordPress website.

• Traffic generation: Most of the traffic is generated from Search Engines. Google and other search engines primarily use algorithms to crawl your content and rank your pages accordingly. A robust SEO strategy is necessary for indexing and crawling your website.
• Increased visibility: If you have optimized and have search engine friendly content on your WordPress websites, your page will rank better on SERPs. This will enhance your visibility and search traffic.
• Improved credibility: When your WordPress website starts climbing the search engine rankings, it creates reliability and credibility for your webpage. The site authority improves and there is a boost in your CTR.

A WordPress SEO Guide: 10 Practical Steps to Enhance the Visibility of Your WordPress Website

Let us get into the best WordPress SEO practices to increase the visibility of your website. Listed below are 10 WordPress SEO tips to create content on WordPress most profitably.

1. Website Audit

Before boosting your site's visibility, one must learn about the current standing of the website. Website audit evaluates how optimized the website is for the search engines to rank them on Google.

If your website has errors in the technical infrastructure, the on-page, off-page, and other SEO elements, a website audit will give a detailed insight into the performance of your website.

Based on the result, start to implement suitable SEO strategies that will help your site's visibility and credibility grow exponentially.

2. Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is an important step in enhancing the visibility of your sites. Understand the niche and define the target audience and their search intent. You can start by exploring the main topics related to your content followed by a thorough research on keywords of that topic. Check other websites to identify what keywords your competitors are using to secure the top rank.

Target long tail keywords with low difficulty scores and high search volume. Then, incorporate these keywords in your content, and align them with the search intent to rank easily on Google search result pages.

Now, if your website aims to target a particular location, then try to use local SEO keywords that are used commonly by the users of that area.

3. Choosing a Quality WordPress SEO Plugin

To take your WordPress site's SEO to the next level, choosing a quality SEO plugin is highly necessary. You can optimize your site with the help of popular plugins like Yoast SEO, Rank Math SEO, etc.

These WordPress plugins are powerful SEO tools designed to assist WordPress site handlers in simplifying the often-complex process of implementing SEO best practices. They guide you through the essential aspects of on-page and technical SEO like structured data on contact pages, internal and external links, and optimization of posts or pages.

A quality WordPress plugin helps to analyze the content and provide suggestions to improve it, thus making it user-friendly for both beginners and experienced users. They automatically generate XML sitemaps that help Google crawl and index your data properly.

Additionally, they manage canonical URLs and prevent duplicate content issues. It also restricts the search engines to indexing the archive pages Hence the WordPress website ranking stays secured.

However, if you are facing trouble with Yoast SEO, you can fall back to the free plugin from the WordPress repository or install it from the WordPress Dashboard.

4. Choose a Quality Hosting Provider

A good hosting provider positively impacts your site speed, security, and uptime. therefore, while choosing a hosting provider make sure it has a high uptime. It has to be tailored for WordPress. specifically. Additionally, a free SSL certificate enables your website with secured HTTPS encryption.

Therefore, it can be said that a good hosting provider can push your website to the top of the Google search results pages.

5. Check the Site's Visibility Settings

An indexable site helps Google display index it and show it on the search results pages. therefore, checking the visibility of your site turns out to be extremely essential.

If you find your website is not appearing in search results, it means that the visibility option has been checked accidentally. Just visit the site settings and uncheck the "discourage search engines from indexing this site" box.

It is often seen that this box gets checked by default. The reason is that it gives you the time to prepare your website to be live and ranked on Google.

6. Optimize your Content for Posts and Pages

High-value content is always favorable for your website as it can take your WordPress SEO to new heights. While creating articles, the point is to keep the content SEO-friendly.

Publishing high-quality content that sends E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) signals will always be the winning shot. Google always prioritizes authentic and unique content that aligns with the search intent of users.

Using relevant subheadings, SEO title tags, and meta descriptions with proper schema markup helps the visitors learn about your content at a glance.

Having an optimized page or post takes less time for visitors to browse through your website. So, you are saving the time of the visitor and also increasing your click-through rate simultaneously.

While creating content, always avoid the use of duplicate content. Having similar content on two separate links can mislead Google crawler into crawling several versions of the same content.

As a result, it affects the search rankings as it leads to the same content competing against each other. also, the wrong version of the content might get indexed.

7. Use SEO-friendly URL Structures

A friendly URL means that the link must contain a line that describes the content of the page concisely. the link must look somewhat like this -

You can fix the permalink structure into a SEO-friendly link to secure higher positions in SERPs. The most suitable permalink format for WordPress is the "Post Name" structure in the settings.

However, if the website has been active for more than 6 months, changing the structure of the permalink can adversely affect your established existing SEO ranking. Therefore, if your website falls under this category, you can take SEO experts' advice and act accordingly.

8. Submit your Sitemap to the Google search console account

XML sitemaps are specially formatted files that contain the list of all the URLs of your website's pages. It helps search engines find, evaluate, and rank the content of a site.

Submitting this sitemap URL to the Google search console gives Google an accurate map of your website. Otherwise, Google will have trouble identifying the web pages.

The benefit of submitting your XML sitemap URL is that it speeds up the process of finding your site. It helps search engines understand your site better.

9. Optimize your page speed and performance

Optimization of website pages and performance is an indispensable SEO strategy. Experts now believe that it takes just a second for users to decide whether they will stay or leave your page.

So, the website has to appear on the screen of the users in under three seconds. Otherwise, the chances of suffering from heavy bounce rates increase and it is detrimental to the website.

Since user experience is highly important, Google always prioritizes faster-performing websites on search engines.

10. Optimize links for WordPress SEO

Links play an essential part in boosting a site's visibility. Internal links, external linking, and a solid link-building strategy are important for all WordPress sites.

Focusing on internal linking of relevant content from your own website is one of the best on-page SEO strategies. Contextual internal links set up a network of pages that point your users to related content.

For instance, in a post on keyword research, linking an article on SEO copywriting makes sense. therefore, for search engines like Google, these links provide insight into how pages are related.

Additionally, external linking is done primarily to increase the credibility of your page to search engines. It increases your domain authority which measures a website's backlink profile. This means the more robust the backlink portfolio, the higher the rank on search.

WordPress SEO plugins

A plugin is a tool that increases website optimization for better ranking on search results pages. Some of the most popular plugins are listed below.

1. Yoast SEO

Install Yoast SEO and level up your website's visibility to the next level. A Yoast SEO plugin is a highly popular plugin that helps you overcome any SEO-related problem. Set the templates in the Yoast SEO settings to use components and variables to control the behavior of the page titles.

You can keep your site in shape with Yoast SEO Premium. It allows you to keep the site fine-tuned, regardless of your role or expertise, and makes technical optimization a piece of cake.

2. Rank Math SEO

Another user-compatible WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your website is Rank Math. It acts as an alternative to AIOSEO.

3. AIOSEO

All in One SEO is the best WordPress plugin that comes with a simple setup wizard. It helps you to choose the most befitting SEO settings for your website. It can be used for all kinds of e-commerce sites, blog posts, and other websites.

Enhance Visibility with WordPress SEO

You need not necessarily be an SEO expert to enhance your site structure to gain visibility. Simply following these easy guidelines can help the website attain the desired rank positions on SERPs.

Start by selecting the correct host, WordPress themes, SEO-friendly URL, and content. Utilizing proper WordPress SEO strategies will help you gain more traffic and better visibility in the long run.