Running a website is much more than creating a beautiful design and posting a few blogs now and then. Hi there and here we are going to transpire some secrets of SEO to you so that you can have all the wonderful people of the world pouring onto your website.
It’s likely that you are starting out as a blogger or perhaps building your business using a WordPress based website. Whether you are selling your product online, providing a service, running a content website or it’s just a fun hobby; the success of it is determined by the organic traffic that visits your website daily. Optimizing your website for search engines is a great way to enhance your inbound traffic significantly. People think that SEO is a difficult and onetime job, which is entirely false. Anyone can easily optimize a site but it’s not a onetime process. A website which is regularly optimized is ranked better by Google. We are here sharing with you some secrets of SEO which will boost your organic traffic without a doubt.
First Things First: Selecting a website builder
If you are starting a website or a blog, selecting a website builder is of paramount importance. It’s likely that you might not be a developer and simply want to offer yourself through your website to the world. At this point in time, knowing the importance and selecting the right website builder is of utmost importance. Though, today there are a lot of website builders in the market but some have proven to be the best.
Around 19,500,000 websites are based on WordPress and every day 500+ websites get online using the most popular CMS. WordPress is a free to use the website builder with a whole suite of amazing and effortless features that helps you develop a beautiful, neat and highly effective website. Website builders like Wix, BoldGrid, Weebly, and space are also some of the popular builders. Selecting a website builder depends upon a lot of factors, majorly the ease and hassle-free the tools are, plugins and add-ons the builders support and how in the long run a builder will help you grow your website.
Saying this, we must move on to know what really are the simple secrets of working with SEO so that you have the traffic that you wish to crawl your website.
What is the Yoast SEO?
The first thing that I recommend is that you quickly install the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast which is free and also supports a premium version. The plugin is a one-click install and once you activate the plugin, it makes SEO a piece of cake for you.
The Yoast SEO offers an array of features to help you optimize your pages, posts and almost every element of your website. Adding focus keyword in titles, adding slugs and meta-description to your pages and posts helps you improve your SEO. Yoast SEO lets you do it effortlessly.
At the bottom of your page, the Yoast SEO window appears where there is a section of analyze which is by far one of the most significant sections that will help you if you’re new to SEO or running a WordPress site. The section gives you suggestions as to what can be revamped and amended on your page or your post to enhance your SEO and how it can be done.
The plugin supports all content types and penetrates very deep into the elements of a website and lets you optimize all of it. Yoast SEO is equipped with Webmaster Tools where you upload a sitemap for your site, work with search consoles, social media profiles, and other important tweaks. You can visit the Yoast SEO Youtube Channel for detailed tutorials on how to use the plugin for maximum benefit.
Mobile Optimization
It’s a well-known fact that Google keeps changing its algorithm every now and then. Recently Google declared that they will be focusing more on mobile devices like smartphones, feature phones, tablets etc. Google made it clear that a big chunk of internet access is in effect through these mobile devices.
Google is boosting those websites which are highly optimized for mobile devices. Optimizing for mobile devices may help you in getting a better rank from Google and it will appear in the search preferences easily. People prefer sites that load faster and are properly designed for mobiles specifically. Many WordPress themes today are fully responsive, which means it gets automatically optimized for mobiles as you develop it.
Do not forget
- Responsive themes are useful for mobile optimization but they are not enough. They only let you move your columns and content around in a different layout but do not let you control what should be seen on the mobile and on the desktop version of the site separately.
- Google has been penalizing website who do not have mobile friendly versions. Make sure that you have a responsive theme and optimize other elements using CSS and java.
- Jetpack and WPtouch are two WordPress plugins that let you optimize your website for mobile devices very easily.
Optimize Images for Godspeed!
People tend to close website sooner which are slow to load. Website with a good response rate and load time is preferred by users and search engines alike. A lot of people who start out a website on their own face this problem that their websites are loading very slowly.
To check your speed you can go to Pingdom.com. You will realize that a lot of it is because of heavy media on the website. If you are a professional then you may use more “techy” methods to boost the site speed but if you have just started out as a blogger, you must begin by compressing your images.
How to optimize Images?
- Imagify is a WordPress plugin which is easy to use and lets you compress your image size without compromising on the quality of the image.
- Add alternate text to your images and add the focus keyword in its title. Alternate text is a text which can be displayed instead of your image if the browser does not load images. This boosts your SEO in a significant way.
SSL Encryption
SSL encryption is a way to secure the connection between the user and the host. Google uses SSL certificate or HTTPS as a ranking factor in their search results. It means that Google prefers websites that are secure and can avoid misuse of user data.
You can purchase an SSL certificate from hosting providers like Bluehost and GoDaddy. The hosting provider installs the certificate on the server. Putting up an SSL certificate will not only provide a secure connection to both the user and the website but it also helps you improve your SEO.
Keyword placement
Keyword placement is a significant aspect of boosting SEO. If you have already installed Yoast SEO then it already offers analysis which suggests a lot of keyword placement to boost SEO. Otherwise, make sure to use the tips given below to increase SEO for your site:
- Add the focus keyword in the Title of your post or Page.
- Add the focus keyword in the first heading of your post/page.
- Add the focus keyword in the first paragraph of your copy.
- The meta-description should contain the focus keyword and must be of a nice length.
- Subheading must include focus Keyword.
- Add outbound and inbound link in your copy, this Boosts SEO.
SEO is an important aspect in order to rank in the search results of various search engines. We hope that this has helped you grasp the basics of SEO and prep you for loads of traffic which is coming your way.
All the best!
