Why WordPress Speed Matters?

Google does take website speed as one of the ranking factors. This means your SEO performance is affected by the loading time of your website. So, if your website loads slow then Google downranks your website. Fast loading websites are not only a good experience for users but also it will be easier for a search engine to crawl. This directly impacts the conversion rate but also reduces the bounce rate of the website.  So, it is super important to make the website as fast as possible in order to rank well on the search engines.

You can check the loading speed of your website in Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Related Article – First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Meaningful Paint (FMP) Explained

10 Free Techniques To Speed Up WordPress Website

1. Choose Good Hosting

Investing in a reliable hosting service is an important part of your business. If you do not have reliable hosting, your website will not be available to the users at the time of the query (or maybe load slow). If your website is not available, Google can not find you, and once Google notices it, your website will not be indexed.

So, investing in reliable hosting is a key decision you need to take. We have been using the Siteground for such a long time and their service is just great. In fact, it is the top three hosting companies recommended by WordPress itself.

It has tools that make managing WordPress sites easy: one-click install, managed updates, WP-Cli, WordPress staging, and git integration. They have a very fast support team with advanced WordPress expertise available 24/7.

2. Use CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and as the name suggests, it is the delivery of the content based on the geographical location. The core concept of CDN is serving content from the nearest possible physical location in order to increase the speed of the website. When you use CDN, copies of your site are stored at multiple, geographically diverse data centers so that users have faster and more reliable access to your site.

The CDN server closest to a user is known as the “edge server”. When a user requests content from a website served through a CDN, they’re connected to the closest edge server, ensuring the best online experience possible.

3. Optimize Image

Image optimization is another important task of Search Engine Optimization. For WordPress, there are many image optimizer plugins available, among all, Smush and ShortPixel Image Optimizer is widely used plugins. These plugins do a great job after you upload images, but you have to do lots of things before you even upload the images. This helps in even better image optimization. Such as –

• Image Size – You have to optimize your image size so as to make it light. This affects the loading speed of your website. But one thing you should be careful of is while reducing the size of your image, you should also take care of its resolution. You can use different tools to reduce the image size such as  tinypng.com, tinyjpg.com. These online FREE TOOLs help you to reduce the size of your image keeping its quality optimum.
• Proper Alt text –  Alt text (also called “alt description”, “alt-tag”) is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if that particular image fails to load on the screen. So, putting proper alt text is important for accessibility and Image SEO. Try to put the proper image alt tag that better describes the image.
• Description of the Image – Description of your text describes the image. This is different from “alt text” because alt text is an “alternative text to the image” that will be shown on the screen when the image fails to load. But image description is the description of that particular image that is shown below the image to further describe the image.
• Choosing the Proper format – There are mainly three image formats that are in use, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. I personally do not recommend GIF unless there is a “Must Use” situation. Although PNG produces better quality images, it comes in a larger size than JPEG format. So, you have to use the JPEG image in most of the cases in order to save size and quality. However, there might be some cases where PNG produces better results than JPEG. Just balance it.
• Use Unique and High-Quality Image – Unique and High-quality images are crucial for any website. But, one important fact to understand is a high-quality image is not necessarily be of large size. We can maintain high resolution with the optimum size as well. So, optimize images before uploading them to the website.

4. Use Cache Plugin

Installing a cache plugin is another important SEO setting for the WordPress website. A cache plugin generates static HTML pages of your website and saves it on your server. Each time a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the heavy WordPress PHP scripts. This allows the caching plugin to tremendously improve your page loading time.

Tips

• Top 3 cache plugins are WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache
• Follow full documentation of the cache setup

Cache plugins like W3 Total Cache improve the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing load times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.

5. Lightweight Theme

WordPress theme quality is another important factor for the speed of the website. So, while choosing the WordPress themes, you should make sure that you pick up a lightweight theme. Some themes are so heavy that takes time to load the content.

There are thousands of WordPress themes available but the one with high speed, well-coded responsive theme is what we need to install. Fast loading and responsive theme are best for both search engines and users.

Tips

• Choose a theme that is not only appealing visually but also fast and responsive
• Keep checking Google Search Console if anything is wrong with the theme code and get the support from developers

A badly coded theme definitely going to harm your whole website.  Because the theme is the backbone of your website, you need to pick up the trusted theme from the trusted developer. There are lots of free themes available in the market, but the thing is they have designed and developed for different niches. Its speed, structure, responsiveness affect the SEO of your website. So, the theme is the first thing you should consider for better SEO. Acme Themes offers a wide range of Free and Premium Themes loved by thousands of users.

Explore the themes

What do you need to know about the theme?

• Chose the theme from the trusted developers
• The theme should be lightweight
• The theme should be SEO friendly
• Support from developer
• Use the premium theme as must as possible for better support and features

6. Remove Unnecessary Plugins

As well know, WordPress is a plugin rich platform. There are thousands of plugin developers who developed various plugins for different purposes.  But installing random and unnecessary plugins adds an extra burden to the website. Broken and unauthorized plugins degrade the speed of the website and ultimately it creates a negative impact on ranking. So, use only needed and trusted plugin on your WordPress website.

Tips

• Carefully look rating and last update date of the plugin
• Do not forget to check the compatibility
• Install only essential plugins and delete rest of the plugins

7. Use GZIP Compression

You can use GZIP compression that dramatically reduces the bandwidth usage and the time access time. GZIP compression compresses the files so, when a user makes a request, their browser will first have to unzip the website. A plugin like PageSpeed Ninja, helps you to enable GZIP compression. You can make your site load faster on desktop and mobile, fixing Google PageSpeed Insights issues with one click.

8. Don’t Upload Audio/Video Files Directly to WordPress

WordPress allows you to directly upload video or an audio file. These files take lots of bandwidth when users ask for the request. So, instead of directly upload the video to your website, you can use different audio and video hosting platforms. For audio, you can use SoundCloud.com and for the video, you can use Youtube.com and Vimeo.com.

WordPress comes with a great feature called auto-embeds that allows your website to automatically get the embed code from YouTube or Vimeo. You just need to copy the link of the video and paste it into the relevant place. This way you can save your bandwidth and speed up the loading time of your website.

9. Minify CSS &JS

When you check your website loading speed from tools like Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights, you get the report that says minify Javascript and CSS file. That means you need to reduce the JS and CSS calls to reduce the server response time.

By optimizing your code (including removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters), you can dramatically increase your page speed. Also remove code comments, formatting, and unused code. This will eventually help you to save bandwidth usage.

10. Cleanup WordPress Database

Cleaning up the WordPress database is the process of deleting unwanted data from your database will keep its size to a minimum and also helps in reducing the size of your backups. It is also necessary to delete spam comments, fake users, old drafts of your content and maybe even unwanted plugins as well as themes. All of this will reduce the size of your databases and web files, and thus speed up WordPress – your WordPress.

Other SEO Articles:

✅7 Techniques to Bulletproof Your WordPress Website

✅What is Duplicate Content? How to Avoid it?

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

The post 10 Free Techniques To Speed Up WordPress Website appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

Wait,

driving tons of traffic sounds great right? But it is not as easy as we think. There are many competitors working in the same idea and niche. The only two ways to drive traffic on the website are either by Running Ads or by Ranking the Site Organically.

Running ads and spending a huge amount of money – is kind of not our interest.  So, another best way to drive traffic in by ranking the website organically on the search engines. It may take a few months to get ranked on the search engines, but the traffic duration and quality of traffic is must stable than paid traffic.

So in order to rank the website in a specific keyword. The very first thing you need to perform in On-Page Search Engine Optimization. 

What is On Page SEO?

In the SEO industry, there are two terms On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. On-page optimization is the technique of optimizing the content, media, links within the website.

According to Moz – On page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized.

Off-page, on the other hand, is a technique that you do outside websites like building quality backlinks. On-page SEO  is the most important factor for better ranking.

15 On Page Optimization Techniques

Here are the 15+ Actionable On-Page SEO Techniques for WordPress Website.

1. Proper Keyword Research

Before publishing any article you have to do proper keyword research. An article developed without proper keyword research is like pouring water in the sand. So, before start writing a post on a particular topic, you should conduct proper keyword research. Keyword research involves, finding out the primary keyword, analyzation of search volume & competition, keyword difficulty, pages that are already ranked for and finding out the LSI keywords. So, perper keyword research is very crucial for every blog post.

There are lots of Keyword Search Tools in the market. Some of them available for free with limited features. Google Keyword Planner is the best free keyword search tool. This tool lets you analyze, keyword search volume, competition, keyword difficulty, Cost Per Click (CPC), etc.

Tips:

• Mention the primary keyword in the first 100 words of the post
• Try to populate Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords within the blog post
• If you are in a highly competitive niche, then focus on Long Tail Keyword.

2. Page Title

Optimizing Page Title is another most important factor for SEO. Title-page, as shown in the figure below, is the first impression to the users. So, you need to put a catchy and attractive title s0 that the user could click it.

Study shows that Title tag affects the overall Click Through Rate percentage of the website.

Check out the how to Optimize Title Tag for better Click Through Rate.

Tips:

• You can include modifiers like, “Best”, “Free”, “Tips”, “How to”, “Guide”, “Latest Date” etc.
• Write title not more than 65 characters that perfectly fit on the screen.
• The page title should always be in <H1> tag.

3. URL Structure

The URL Structure of the site plays a great role in SEO and site ranking as the URL is the gateway for the web crawler.  Google Gives More Priority to the URL that contains 3-5 words. Your URL should be short and sweet.

The WordPress permalink setting allows you to choose your default permalink structure. You can choose from common settings or create custom URL structures. Once you chose the setting, WordPress automatically chose the permalink structure that you configured.

I WordPress, you will find the permalink setting in Settings>Permalink

We recommend setting the Post name as default.  Permalink according to the post name is considered to be better for SEO purposes.

Tips:

• Try to include Primary Keyword in the URL.
• Make your URL as short as possible.

4. Meta Description

Meta description is a short description that appears just below the URL link in Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs). Meta description also appears in the homepage as well.

Meta description is also an important factor for SEO as it increases the Click Through Rate (CTR) of the page. People are likely to click more those pages having proper meta descriptions. It is highly recommended to include the primary keyword along with the modifiers like, “best”, “Tips”, “Guide”, “Lates date year” etc.

Tips:

• Try to wrap up Meta Description between 50–160 characters.
• Try including a primary keyword in Meta Description.

5. Optimizing Media

Media in any website represents different formats of images and videos. Media adds extra beauty to the overall content of the website. But in terms of On-page SEO, optimizing media is one of the vital tasks.

Majorly, optimizing media on any website includes, optimizing image files. Such as Image alternative texts, Image description, reducing size. Read a detailed guide about image optimization.

Tips:

• Try uploading images below 200 kb in size.
• Use TinyPNG.com or TinyJpg.com to reduce the size of the image without losing the image quality.
• Do not forget to rename the image with a targeted keyword before upload.
• Have image cache plugin

6. Content Formatting

Content is King!

For better ranking, content should be well formatted.

According to the 11web.com, these are the 5 key content formatting steps.

• Use headings
• Use bulleted and numbered lists
• Use bold text for memorable phrases
• Use relevant graphics and images
• Give photos helpful captions

Besides these, steps. you need to improve things like internal and external linking to the related posts. This way, you can add more value to your post by providing interrelated content.

7. Optimizing Speed

Website speed has a big impact on SEO. Page speed is important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page.

Google has indicated site speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to the first byte as when it considers page speed. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.

There are a few things you need to consider to make a website faster.

• Choose good hosting
• Choose well coded and light WordPress theme
• Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Minify JavaScript and CSS

Read More about First Content  Paint (FCP) and First Meaningful Paint (FMP).

8. Mobile Friendliness

Google has made major changes in its algorithm, officially called Mobile-First Indexing. So, if your website is not responsive-meaning not optimized for mobile devices then your site automatically pushed down in the ranking.

You can test your site on the Mobile-Friendly Test tool by Google.

9. Content SEO

Content SEO is a key part of any SEO strategy. Without content, it’s impossible for your site to rank in search engines. It’s, therefore, crucial to write and structure quality content.

According to Yoast – “Content SEO refers to creating content that helps your web pages to rank high in the search engines. It includes everything to do with the writing and structuring of content on your website. There are three major elements you need to consider to produce content that will make your website rank well: keyword strategy, site structure and copywriting”. 

So, focus on three of the key elements while doing content SEO to rank higher in the SERPs.

10. Keyword Density

Maintaining the right keyword density is another important On-Page SEO technique.

Keyword refers to the repetition of the number of targeted keywords in a specific blog post. You have to maintain the optimum percentage of the keyword in the overall content.

“KEYWORD DENSITY’ is simply a PERCENTAGE value of the NUMBER OF TIMES a KEYWORD or KEY PHRASE appears on a WEB PAGE compared to the TOTAL AMOUNT OF WORDS on the page.” WIKI

The consideration is that Google will order SERPs and reward with higher ranking a page that has a ‘specific’ target keyword density percentage value.

Tips:

• Try to populate 2-3% of keyword density

11. Work in LSI Keyword

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are another important thing to work in. In order to rank better for the main keyword, these are the essential keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword. These  keywords supplement the Primary Keyword and act as helpers to give stronger contextual information to the search engines and users

These accompanying words that provide context to the main keywords are what Google understands as LSI keywords to decide which is the correct meaning. Read more about LSI Keyword Guide in this article by LSIGraph.

Tips:

• Try in include related LSI keywords in the content

12. Maintaining Headline Hierarchy

There are altogether 6 header tags used in the website from <H1> to <H6>.

Header tags used on the website make it easier for web crawlers to gauge the relevance of your web content. The proper header categorizes the content in the heading, subheading, and body.

In the hierarchy of headings, H1 text is the most important to SEO. This is the title of the web page, so search engines look to the keywords in the H1 header to categorize and surface content to users.

Maintaining proper header hierarchy is essential from both the search engine aspect as well as the user experience point of view.

Tips:

• The main keyword must be included in the <h1> tag in the header

13. Proper Internal Linking

Internal linking is the process of linking one content to another according to the context within the same website. Internal linking is one of the important factors for SEO perspective as well as the user’s perspective. Internal linking helps in navigating the different contextual pages within the website.

Tips

• Link to only relevant pages

14. Use Outbound Link

Outbound link the link that goes to different website from your website. An outbound link does help in search engine optimization. There are two types of outbound links.

They are do-follow and no-follow. Nofollow tells search engines not to follow links and do-follow passes ranking power from your website to the targeted pages. Deciding whether to have a do-follow link of no-follow link entirely depends on the site authority. The benefit of having outbound links is to increase relevancy, to increase trust, to boost value and backlinking purpose.

So, Increase Your Authority, Audience, and Ranking With Outbound Links.

Tips:

• Outbound links will be useless if they are not wrapped up in high-quality original content

Read More – about the do-follow link and no follow link

15. Developing High-Quality Content

After setting up all the necessary settings, you now focus on producing Quality, Engaging, Original and Helpful content for users. While publishing the first blog, you should consider the essential SEO guidelines so that you start pushing even better content right after.

Here, the meaning of quality content is content that creates value for the targeted customers. Engaging content means somehow, that content should engage the reader by providing relevant images/infographics, GIFs, videos.

Visually rich infographics can instantly make your content look more appealing and entertaining. But that’s not the only reason why you should learn how to make infographics that shine. Read more about How to Make an Infographic: The Ultimate Guide

Likewise, original content refers to that the content is not copied from the other sources. Instead, it is written from scratch with own experience and in-depth research. Lastly, helpful content means, that it should solve the user’s problem that they are looking for.

And the more you produce quality content, the more Google notices you and rank your content better. Find out how to get noticed by Google by improving your EAT score.

16. Make Content Easily Sharable

In today’s time, social sharing is an integral part of our internet experience. Furthermore, it’s constantly on the rise and becoming popular with older folk as well. Social media became the best way to share any information because many people engage in social media than any other platform. Social media also plays a significant role in helping you find your favorite websites.

So, we highly recommend installing the best social media sharing plugin. We don’t say exactly which one you use because there are lots of best social media sharing plugins. But, what we can say is having a social media plugin is a must for any website.

Tips:

• Use visually appealing and best Social Sharing plugins

Glossary

LSI Keyword – LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It is the list of keywords that are closely related to the primary keyword.

Long Tail Keyword – Long tail keyword is the group of keywords or phrases that make a sentence.

SERPs – Search Engine Ranking Pages are the pages that show up when user type specific keywords in the Google search bar.

CTR – Click Through Rate is the rate of the click on your page. CTR = Click/Impression.

Other Posts:

• Yoast SEO Plugin VS All in One SEO Pack – Which one is better?
• 13 Essential SEO Tips For WordPress Website
• Essential Basic Setup for Brand New WordPress Website

If you liked this article, share it with your group on social networks. Also, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn for more tips.

The post 15 Actionable On Page SEO Techniques for WordPress Website appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

If you are stuck having the following questions in mind

Which SEO Plugins in Good for WordPress in 2019?

Whether to use Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack?

Is Buying SEO plugin worth it? or How these plugins stand out differently in the market?

Then, we are going to dig down into details about Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack in this article.

And before we dive right into the details, make sure that your site is already served in HTTPS, since sites without HTTPS indicate that your site is not secure, and will potentially damage your website SEO.

What Does an SEO plugin Do For WordPress Website?

SEO plugins do not do a complex task for you. Instead, it simply helps in making the content technically sound. When it comes to quality and really good content, the SEO plugin has nothing to relate to. That means, relying completely on the SEO plugin for better ranking is one of the biggest misconceptions.

So, you need to develop the best content by yourself. But, WordPress plays nice with Google and other search engines, has loads of themes and plugins for advanced SEO optimization, is fast and mobile-friendly, community-supported, secure, and easy to learn. In short, WordPress is the perfect CMS for SEO and building websites that rank well. This is where the SEO plugins come into action.

Overview of Yoast SEO

No doubt, the Yoast SEO plugin is one of the best and most downloaded WordPress plugins as of now. This WordPress SEO plugin helps you with your search engine optimization. Since its launch time back in 2008, Yoast has helped millions of people all across the world.

Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders. A dedicated team of developers, testers, architects, and SEO experts works daily to improve the plugin with every release.

So, Yoast SEO is for a business owner, professional blogger, content creator, developer, or SEO expert. It helps you keep your website in perfect shape. 

Core Features of Yoast SEO Plugin

• The SEO analysis
• Readability Analysis
• Snippet preview for Desktop and Mobile
• The most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality at the push of a button.
• Full control over site’s breadcrumbs
• Canonical URL to avoid duplicate content

Premium [paid] Features

• Social previews
• Insights tool for focused keyword/keyphrase
• Article optimization for synonyms and related keyphrases
• Automatic internal linking suggestions and many more

Pros and Cons of Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO plugin is as popular as it offers a lot of flexibility with your content. You can set up titles, meta descriptions, and Social Media sharing information for each post and page. One of the best things about Yoast SEO is its beginner-friendly features. However, in their quest to facilitate newcomers in using Yoast, the creators have hidden all the advanced options – making you manually turn custom fields on. On top of that, Yoast SEO and readability recommendations force you keyword stuffing or disregard the importance of LSI. Sometimes, this may lead your post out of the subject. So, If you use Yoast SEO, especially as a WP beginner, you should take these suggestions as exactly that – only suggestions.

Yoast SEO

Overview of All in One SEO Pack. 

All in One SEO Pack, on the other hand, was primarily created in 2007 to help people to rank higher in search engines. 

All in One SEO comes with a similar box setting to edit SEO settings on each post and page. You simply edit the title, description as shown in the fig below. One major difference you notice is, there is no content analysis or SEO scoring unlike in Yoast. 

You can manually enable or disable features like Social Meta, Robots.txt, Sitemap.xml, Video Sitemap, File Editor, Importer/Exporter from the Feature Manager as shown in fig.

All in One SEO Pack Features

• XML Sitemap support
• Image XML Sitemap
• Google AMP support
• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Automatic notification to Search Engines after making any changes
• Automatic title optimization

Premium [Paid] Features

• Advanced Support for WooCommerce
• Advanced Google Analytics tracking
• SEO for Categories, Tags and Custom Taxonomies, and many more…

Pros and Cons of All in One SEO Pack

One good thing about the All in One SEO Pack is simple and easy to set up. When it comes to setting up SEO for individual posts, things are much simpler here – you can edit the title and description. What is more, you can use All in One SEO Pack’s advanced tools to control indexing and search engine following as well as turn it off for a particular post. On top of that, the All in One SEO Pack offers lots of features in the free version that you should not pay a single penny.

But there is no content analysis or SEO scoring unlike in Yoast.  All in One SEO does not have breadcrumbs navigation and importing data from Google Search Console features. However, not having these two features wouldn’t have any drastic impact on your site’s SEO. The free version of All in One SEO comes with no support. The All in One SEO Pack Pro version comes with one year of professional support.

All in One SEO – Best WordPress SEO Plugin – Easily Improve SEO Rankings & Increase Traffic

What is Common in Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack?

Both of the plugins are developed with the same goal – is making SEO tasks easy for WordPress websites. The plugins come with many features as much as possible to be the number one SEO plugin in the market. Some of the common features of these plugins are

• Creating and editing XML Sitemaps and Robot.txt files for a website
• Meta Descriptions and Titles
• Social media integration
• Available in Multiple Languages
• Avoiding duplicate content with canonical URL
• Schema.org Markup and many more …

Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack Stat as of 2019

[Extra] SEO Tool for WordPress Users

WordPress SEO is a complex list of tasks that requires the usage of multiple SEO tools and plugins. While Yoast SEO Plugin and All In One SEO Pack are fast to set up for WordPress installations and configurations, you still can miss essential SEO features for ranking high in Google. We found SE Ranking to be the most user-friendly software for SEO and online marketing professionals. It can analyze competitors, select keywords for keyword lists, get rid of site technical errors, examine broken links, and much more. Mind that once you’ve done with website optimization, there’s a long path to overcome to get organic traffic and grow conversions.

SE Ranking Features

• Keyword rank tracking for multiple GEO and devices
• SERP features monitoring
• Integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console
• Keyword suggestions and analysis for organic and paid search
• Detailed site audit with issue descriptions for crawled pages
• The on-page check covering content, metadata, link analysis
• Backlink profile analysis including new and lost links, referring domains, and anchor texts
• Auto reports and page changes monitoring

Conclusion!

After comparing all the features and functionality of these two plugins, now we are clear about these two plugins. At the same time, we are clear about the fact that the plugin is not going to create awesome content for us.

Having said that, installing plugins only does not make that much difference. However, choosing a good plugin may help us to do a task more effectively.

We use Yoast SEO as it is easy and features like consistent snippets in the search results, breadcrumbs setting, canonical URLs, etc. Yoast SEO also generates SEO and Readability Score which is quite helpful for determining keyword density and English readability. On top of that, the Yoast Team has lots of video tutorials about how to set up and SEP tips, whereas All in One SEO Pack seems lagging in making tutorial videos. According to our experience, Yoast is a good choice for a beginner as it makes it easy to optimize and hides most of the good stuff behind.

This makes Yoast a #1 SEO Plugin and stands out in the WordPress Community.

Other Posts:

• Yoast vs Rank Math SEO Plugin – Which One is Best?
• 13 Essential SEO Tips For WordPress Website
• Essential Basic Setup for Brand New WordPress Website

The post Yoast SEO Plugin vs All In One SEO Pack | Which One is Better? appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

Search Engine Optimization task is easier for WordPress websites. Because the dedicated WordPress plugin makes it easier for SEO guide. In our previous article, we have listed 10+ Essential WordPress Plugins for a brand new website. Which you must have to install at any cost.

In this post, we are going to discuss WordPress SEO Tips for a Beginner. Because these are fundamental task we should do prior to performing advanced Search Engine Optimization.

Read- 15+ Actionable On-Page SEO Techniques for WordPress Website

13 WordPress SEO Tips for a Beginner

1) Setup Proper Permalink Structure

When it comes to SEO, permalink plays a great role in ranking. Permalink is the website permanent URL seen in the search bar of any browser. For the WordPress website, you have different choices of how your permalink will look like. But, among them recommended setting for best SEO practice is setting www.yourdomain.com/%postname%/ as shown in the fig. below.

One good reason for setting permalink as “postname” is easy to guess what is post is all about and the keyword can also be seen in URL.

Tips

• Try to keep the URL as short as possible
• Try to include the main keyword in the URL

2) Optimize Images Before Upload

Media like images and videos are important parts of any website. Maintaining proper media setting and size is very important for any website. Media along with text adds extra value to your content. But if you do not maintain media properly, it ruins your website.

From the SEO perspective, optimizing images is one of the best practices. Because of large-sized image slows down the website and ultimately degrades the website performance. One important fact to understand is a high-quality image is not necessarily be of large size. We can maintain high resolution with the optimum size as well. So, optimize images before uploading them to the website.

Tips

• Try to keep the image size below 200 KB
• Do not forget to rename each and every image with proper keyword
• Also, add title, description and also caption while uploading
• You can use image compression websites like tinypng.com

3) Manage Plugins

As well know, WordPress is a plugin rich platform. There are thousands of plugin developers who developed various plugins for different purposes.  But installing random and unnecessary plugins adds extra burden to the website. Broken and unauthorized plugins degrade the speed of the website and ultimately it creates a negative impact on ranking. So, use only needed and trusted plugin on your WordPress website.

Tips

• Carefully look rating and last update date of the plugin
• Do not forget to check the compatibility
• Install only essential plugins and delete rest of the plugins

4) Install Cache Plugin

Installing a cache plugin is another important SEO setting for the WordPress website. A cache plugin generates static HTML pages of your website and saves it on your server. Each time a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the heavy WordPress PHP scripts. This allows the caching plugin to tremendously improve your page loading time.

Tips

• Top 3 cache plugins are WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache
• Follow full documentation of the cache setup

5) Choose Proper Theme

While choosing a WordPress theme, you should take care of two things, speed and responsiveness. There are thousands of WordPress themes available but the one with high speed, well-coded responsive theme is what we need to install. Fast loading and responsive theme are best for both search engines and users.

Tips

• Choose a theme that is not only appealing visually but also fast and responsive
• Keep checking Google Search Console if anything is wrong with the theme code and get the support from developers

6) Create a Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt

Sitemap.xml file makes it easy for Bing, Google, Yahoo, and other search engines to crawl your website. This is a file through which search engines find different pages and posts of your website. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. If you have installed SEO plugins like Yoast SEO then it automatically generated an XML file for your website. Otherwise, you have to install a Google XML sitemap plugin.

Likewise, robots.txt is also called the robots exclusion protocol, which is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots. It defines which areas of a website crawlers are allowed to search and also defines certain areas not to crawl.

These two files are very important files for any website. You can check these files of Acme Themes

• Sitemap.xml
• Robots.txt

7) Use Right SEO Plugin

We recommend using the right SEO plugin in WordPress SEO Tips for Beginner Tips.

The right SEO plugin makes easy for the WordPress website to maintain most of the SEO guidelines. Two of the most popular SEO plugins are Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack.

These plugins guides you to insert the proper amount of characters in title tag, body, and meta descriptions. Also, there are lots of essential settings required for Seach Engine Optimization.

8) Setup Google Analytics and Google Search Console

For a new website, setting up Google Analytics and Google Search Console is the first step task. Google Analytics provides in-depth knowledge of visitors, source of traffic, the platform that visitors using, geography for visitors, session and other valuable insights that can help you to build the success strategy for your business.

On the other hand, Google Search Console (GSC) helps you to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot the website’s visibility in Google Search Result Pages. If you have a particular issue with a website then you can identify through Google Search Console.

So, you must set up Google Analytics for traffic analysis and Google Search Console for fixing the website issue.

Tips

• Setup both www and non-www version of the website in Google Analytics and Google Search Console
• Actively monitor and track the GA and GSC to keep your website healthy

9) Use CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and as the name suggests, it is the delivery of the content based on the geographical location. The core concept of CDN is serving content from the nearest possible physical location in order to increase the speed of the website.

The CDN server closest to a user is known as the “edge server”. When a user requests content from a website served through a CDN, they’re connected to the closest edge server, ensuring the best online experience possible.

Read – 10 Common Off-Page SEO Techniques

10) Maintain Proper Internal Link

In the list of WordPress SEO Tips for a Beginner, we have Internal Linking.

Internal linking is the process of linking one content to another according to the context in the same website. Internal linking is one of the important factors for SEO perspective as well as the user’s perspective. Internal linking helps in navigating the different contextual pages within the website.

Tips

• Link to only relevant pages

11) Keep Checking Broken Links

Having broken links on the website is a bad experience for users and so does for search engines. So, time and again you have to keep checking if there exist any broken or dead links on the website. A broken link can be fixed manually by analyzing the Broken Link Checker plugin or using the different broken link checker tools.

12) Make Your Content Shareable

Writing helpful and quality content is a key thing but also making it easily sharable is equally important. It is because once the audiences find it very helpful, they can share with their social media profiles and groups. So, is your content is easily sharable then that multiplies your visitors. More share means more reach, more reach ultimately improves in better ranking.

Tips

• Have the easy to share social media plugins

13) Write Quality and Detailed Content

Coming up in our last point of WordPress SEO tips for a beginner, we have quality content. You have to develop quality content Because content is king in SEO.

According to the study, thoroughly written content tends to rank higher in the search engines. So, you should write long and detailed content to improve ranking.

The character limit of the post or pages are as follows-

• For Title – Max 75 Character
• For Meta Description – Max 155 Character
• Body content should be 1000+ Words for better SEO perspective

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Final Words

Above mentioned SEO tips for WordPress websites are very basic but significant for maintaining proper SEO.  These are the tips and tricks to better rank in the search engines after setting up a brand new WordPress website. These are things to consider or improve before performing any SEO action.

Other Posts:

• Types of Website Traffic 
• 20+ Best Magazine WordPress Themes 
• Essential Basic Setup for Brand New WordPress Website

The post 13 Essential WordPress SEO Tips for a Beginner appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.