Quick on-page SEO fixes for WordPress
When it comes to on-page SEO on WordPress websites, I’m sure you’ve heard enough about meta tags and keyword density! If you’re looking for some practical strategies that you can use on your WordPress site today, then you’ll love this blog post.
It’s a simple checklist of 22 quick fixes that will bring more organic search engine traffic for your content pages on your website.
Content SEO fixes
- High quality content – I suggest that each page or blog post on your website should have a minimum of 350 words.
- Keyword variations – Variations of your subject key words and phrases should be used consistently throughout your content but be careful not to over optimise! You still need to ensure your copy is natural.
- Fresh content – By regularly adding fresh content to your website you are letting Google know that you are up-to-date on information in your industry and that you are willing to share your findings. Natural and unique content is best.
- Keyword hierarchy – Important keywords should be mentioned at the top of each article or post on your site. It is also good to make these links back to your relevant pages.
- Link to good sources! – Authoritative outbound links to quality sources e.g Wikipedia, Education bodies etc
- Internal linking – By linking to your key service pages with relevant anchor text you are informing Google which pages are your most important keywords and topics.
- Use keywords for your post topics – By publishing blog posts that are based around your keyword and keyword variations.
- SEO friendly URLs – Make your web page links search engine friendly e.g “/website-design-banbury.html” rather than “/dhdh-2014-zftyywebsites-99.html” Generally, the shorter the better!
Server side SEO fixes
- Website speed – Google doesn’t want to display a slow loading website in their search results pages and therefore give a bad user experience. Make sure your website reside on a good hosting platform. I use HeartInternet, in my opinion the best out there. The 24/7 support is brilliant too!
- Set up site maps – Ensure that your website has both an XML and HTML site map. Search engine such as Google will use the XML version whilst site visitors can navigate via a HTML site map.
- Set up redirects from old material and content – To avoid your site visitors landing on 404 pages you should create 301 redirects so that any old pages or files forward on to your new pages.
- Tell Google what they should be crawling – You can allow and disallow Google access to any of your websites files or folders using a robots.txt. This will make indexing of your site content much clearer.
- Create an error page – If people are going to get an error whilst browsing your website do make sure a 404 page is in place to catch broken links and redirect users quickly.
Coding/ mark up fixes
- Meta tags – Title, description, keywords…
- Structured data markup – Google rich snippets (Authorship, recipes, people, places, product prices, reviews etc)
- Heading tags – 1 h1 tag, h2s, h3s etc
- Alt image tags – Use keywords but make tags relevant to image
- Dont index poor pages e.g search pages and archives
- W3C validation
Design fixes
- Mobile optimise sites if necessary
- Image file names with keywords (title tag and description)
- Breadcrumbs if relevant (internal linking)
I hope this will help with your WordPress SEO
I hope that you have found this post useful and that you can take away some practical strategies to use on your WordPress website. If you have any further WordPress SEO suggestions to add to the list please let me know by leaving a comment below.
