If you want to get more traffic to your website you need to improve your search engine optimization and pay attention regularly for changes and new ways to draw viewers. Many of the SEO guides that I’ve seen are hard to understand because they are to technical and not written for the new user. However, if you really want to increase your traffic then learn and apply these SEO best practices.
Even though WP follows the SEO best practices there are still a number of things that you must do to get the most traffic as possible to your site. The more that you know what to do and take regular action to be recognized by the various search engines the more you’ll benefit from your efforts.
Search engines are usually the biggest source of traffic for most websites and Search Engine Optimization is really a strategy that wise website owners use to get the best possible results in the rankings.
It’s not like fooling the system for better results and more visitors but it’s only about creating your website with optimized code and formatting that make it easier for the search engines to find your site and display it to the searcher.
The end result is a lot more traffic. So knowing how to optimize the search engines is valuable information that can always benefit you and your friends or customers website rankings.
When people search for things that you write about, you want to be as high in the rankings as possible. This being to get on the first of the search engine result pages or SERP’s and get lots of traffic to your site.
So make your website search engine friendly and get the most out of them as they are continually working to help their searchers have a better experience and find what they need.
Below I’ve listed 6 SEO tips to get more traffic to your site:
1. Visibility Settings Option
A cool WP feature is that there is an option to hide your site from the search engines. It might be checked to give you time to build it up prior to publicly releasing it.
Just log into the admin area of your site and click on>> Settings and then>> Reading. From there scroll down until you see ‘Search Engine Visibility’ and make sure that the box next to ‘Discourage search engines’ is unchecked. Click on the save changes button.
2. Add Your Site To Google Search Console
Google Search Console or Webmaster Tools is Google’s nice offering to give website owners a look at how the search engine views their site. It gives you all sorts of useful information to help you understand how your content appears in the search results and lists how often your pages are viewed.
With all of the information available at Google’s Webmaster Tools you can form a wise strategy for your content to attract more viewers to your site. The Search Console will also send out an alert if there’s any problems with your site that will affect your ranking.
After you have added your website to Google Search Console click on>> Crawl and then click Sitemaps. Then click on the Add Sitemap button. Then your sitemap>> sitemap_index.xml
After you add your sitemap it will be pending for a while, maybe even a few hours or as long as it takes to crawl your entire website. Then it will show your sitemap stats, the number of links found in your sitemap, how many of them were indexed, and much more. You should get in the habit of checking your search console every 2-4 weeks to gain info on your SEO efforts.
3. Use SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress
SEO friendly URLs clearly explain the page content like:
yoursite.com../what-is-SEO-writing-videos
SEO unfriendly URL’s have numbers and do not describe whats on the pages
yoursite.com… /?p=10213
So the unfriendly URLs do not clearly show what’s on the pages.
Use SEO friendly permalink structure which improves your chances of getting a better, higher spot in the search engine results pages. Check and update your WP site’s structure by going from your site’s dash to>> Settings>> Permalinks page and select the post name option and then Save changes. This will improve your chances of getting better spots in the search results.
To check and update your WP site’s structure: Settings>>Permalinks. Choose the post name option>>then Save Changes
>>>If your site has been live for more than 6 months do not change your permalink structure unless you’re using the numbers option. If you change your structure on an established site you will lose your social media share count and run the risk of losing your existing SEO ranking.
4. Choose Between WWW. or no
When you first create your site you need to choose whether or not you’ll be using www or not. Does it make a difference if www is shown in your website’s URL?
The search engines consider those to be two completely different websites so you need to pick one and forget about it. Some have a preference but from an SEO point of view it does not matter whether you pick one or the other.
Make your own choice by going to your site dash Settings >>General page and there you can add your preferred URL in both the ‘WordPress Address’ and the ‘Site Address fields.’
5. Choose The Best SEO Plugin
If you research on SEO plugins to find the best one you will most likely have a choice between the All-In-One SEO Pack or Yoast SEO. They are both excellent and the most popular plugins.
6. Optimize Each Blog Post For SEO
When I first started making websites I made the same mistake that many beginners make by neglecting to add my own SEO at the end of each page or post. I thought that the plugin was all that I needed, let it do it’s job right. I didn’t realize at the time that it was important for me to fill in my own meta title, description, categories, tags and keywords which are all located below the content area of your post on your edit page.
It’s important for you to check every few weeks to see that everything is set properly and make a change here or there if necessary for normal maintenance or perhaps a strategy change.
If you follow these 6 tips to get more website traffic and use the best WP SEO plugin you are ahead of most. Understanding and applying the basics regularly will make a huge difference in your efforts to increase your traffic and sales.
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