If you want to be ahead of the plethora of websites of your competition, you will need to follow a few of the best practices regarding WordPress SEO. This includes using the best WordPress SEO plugins, that are free and easy to use.
These are not too technical and can be used by even a beginner as there is no need to design any codes for it even. However, you will need to know what the best WordPress SEO practices are and how exactly you can use them to make a big difference and optimize your SEO results.
Most of the site owners find WordPress SEO far better when compared to the others with similar capabilities, which is why you should also follow suit.
Category and Tags
One of the most significant methods of improving your WordPress SEO as suggested by experts from SEO Company In New York is to use the categories and tags in WordPress properly. Ideally, these categories and tags in WordPress will allow you to sort the blog posts according to different categories and tags.
- This will make it easier for you to manage the content according to the different topics.
- As for your users, it will be easy for them to find the exact content that they are looking for.
The categories and tags will not only help you or your users but it will also help the search engines to understand the structure and content of your website in a much better way which will eventually tell upon your site rankings.
Ways to Use Categories and Tags
Often it is seen that the beginners in WordPress SEO get confused while using the categories and tags. They do not know how best they can use it. Here is what you should know to use the categories and tags in the best way possible and the best approach to follow.
Ideally, categories are used primarily to group your posts in a broader way. For example, if a blog is about a book then the best category for it will be the table of contents. On the other hand, all personal blogs can be categorized under different heads such as:
- Food
- Music
- Travel
- Photography and many more.
Typically, categories are hierarchical and therefore you can even add child categories to them.
On the other hand, the tags are considered to be more specific keywords. These describe the contents of the individual post. For example, a personal blog post that is grouped under the ‘food’ category may have different tags such as:
- Lunch
- Breakfast
- Salad
- Pancakes
- Desserts and many more.
Ideally, tags are much more like the indexes section that you may find in a textbook.
In short, both categories and tags are the SEO best practices to follow so as to sort your content. If you use categories and tags properly, you will make it easy for the users to browse your site and due to that reason, it will also be easier for the search engines to browse your site as well.
Focus on Internal Linking
Another good practice to ensure a better WordPress SEO is to make Internal Linking a habit. Typically, internal linking in WordPress will help you in many ways.
- It will help the search engines to assign each page of your site with a score that will indicate the page authority.
- This score or the recipe of it will be kept secret so that no one can game the results.
It is a proven fact that for most of the sites the most common signals of authority are the internal links. That is why you should link to your own content from the other blog posts and pages of yours. Make it a habit and do this interlinking to your own posts whenever and wherever possible.
However, remember that you will have to create a pre-publish blog post checklist if you have several authors. This checklist will need them to interlink at least three other blog posts. The benefits of this include:
- Boosting your page views and
- Increasing the time spent by the users on your site.
Both these will play a significant role in improving the SEO score of the individual blog posts and pages. That will eventually improve your WordPress SEO results.
Optimize WordPress comments
Comments play a significant role in WordPress SEO as well. These are typically a strong indication of the user engagement on your site. If you have more engaged users, it will result in:
- More backlinks to your site
- More traffic to your site and
An Improved SEO
However, it is elementary that you make sure that all these comments are true and not spam. Spammers usually submit comments that contain bad links. This will not only affect your SEO in a negative way but will also ruin your search rankings.
It is for this reason you should use a proper plugin, preferably those that are pre-installed with your WordPress site. These plugins will help you in a great way to deal with the comment spam.
On the other hand, if your site or blog posts get a lot of genuine and spam-free comments, then you will well and truly have a more engaging website. However, too many comments on a post may not be good as well. This is because it will make it load slower and therefore affects your search engine rankings also and loading speed will seriously affect your SEO.
Prepare Your Site
Therefore, in order to make sure that you get the SEO results as expected, you will need to prepare your site well beforehand so that it can handle all your comments in a much better way without feeling burdened.
Such preparation will put your site on the right server with the right speed and add to that you can even split comments into multiple pages. Paginating comments in WordPress will help you to get more comments on your site which will facilitate your WordPress SEO and blog posts, which is ideally your goal to accomplish.