How to Improve Search Engine Visibility for WordPress

Website traffic is essential, Learn how to improve your search engine visibility for WordPress websites in 6 simple steps to get more visits.

Find out how to improve search engine visibility for WordPress with some simple customizations that will drive more traffic.

Everyone’s got a website. Most people have a website that really doesn’t get any views. Your content needs to reach your desired audience for it to truly make an impact. If you’re wondering how to increase the visibility and traffic of your WordPress website, this article will help guide you in the right direction. 

With any website the most urgent item is getting visibility in search engines. You want to make sure your website is coming up when people search for your content because that’s going to be your biggest source of traffic. The key here is to make sure you check off all the boxes to rank high on search engines.

The good news: WordPress already has all the tools for this. 

We’re going to look at 6 easy ways to improve search engine visibility for WordPress that you can do right now.

1. Know Your Header Tags

Your header is more than a stylistic choice.

Arguably, your header tags are one of the most important aspects of your WordPress website. They tell people and algorithms what your page is about so it’s easier to connect the right people to the right content.

WordPress automatically adds your H1 tag to your blog post title, but it’s helpful to verify and customize what and where your tags are for optimization. This means your heading and subheadings should have keywords specific to that content and differentiate it from your other content.

Verify that every page has an H1 tag and get creative with what kind of words encapsulate what your content is all about.

Adding these tags is very simple: You can type it into the Text Editor or just use the Visual Editor (whichever is more comfortable for you). Check out this page on the WordPress website for more on their header features.

2. Link Credible Sources

Search engines look at your website’s connections just like people in the real world. They want to see who is linking to your website and who you’re linking to. This will increase the value of your website in SEO. Linking to other popular and relevant websites will tell search engines that you’re a useful source.

If they don’t find what they’re looking for on your page, they will likely click through one of your links and find it there. On top of SEO deeming you relevant, your audience will also find your content resourceful, leading to them coming back the next time they’re on the hunt for more information.

3. Ensure Your Website is Accessible to All

Make sure your content is accessible to all your viewers by including alt text in your images. Alt-text is utilized by programs to read the information on your page to those who cannot read it themselves.

Some of your audience may have a disability that prevents them from being able to see the images on your page, so they would benefit from having alt text that tells them what the image is showing.

Adding a short description of your image in the “alt text” box when you attach it to WordPress will increase your visibility as search engines are more likely to show your webpage to others if it’s accessible, the alt text is another opportunity to include your keywords and it’s genuinely the right thing to do. 

4. Make It Reader-Friendly

One of the factors that Google uses to determine your search engine ranking is how accessible your webpage is on different devices and browsers. This is very easy to do because WordPress has picked up on how important device accessibility is and provided you with specific mobile-friendly default wp theme to choose from and multiple advanced styling tools for mobile devices to utilize

Make sure you’re checking how your website looks on iPhones, Androids, iPads, and desktops to increase your SEO ranking, but also to make sure your audience finds your website easy to use at all times. 

If you want a short list of THE BEST free SEO friendly WordPress themes, click here.

5. Create Unique & Quality Content

Your work should be as unique as possible to ensure you don’t suffer from duplicate content. Google will rank your website much lower on a search if your content shows up on more than one web page. What this means is if your content is very similar to another website’s content, then Google will try to decide who is the “original” and lower the rank of who isn’t. This decreases your visibility, which means people searching for your content will be less likely to find it. 

Check out these tips on how to avoid duplicate content. 

Being able to come up with fresh content is vital when trying to grow your business, after all.

Marketing Insider Group has said, “The number one reason that content marketing is important is that your customers appreciate it. Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing, drives six times higher conversion rates, and has the potential for a 7.8-fold boost in web traffic”.

And, while it may be all well and good focusing on your website, looking for the latest ways on how to improve it, no one will actually see it without an effective content marketing strategy in place.

Check out this post for some Innovative Ideas on how to create original content.

6. Utilize Speed Optimization

The loading speed of your website is more important than you think. People are less patient on the internet and won’t wait around for your page to load. Additionally, loading speed is yet another factor that affects your SEO success.

First, your experience on your website is not a good indication of your viewers’ experience for a variety of reasons. So, make sure to check your loading speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights or a similar tool.

Your ideal speed should be around 2 seconds and the smallest change makes a much bigger difference than it seems. Some small changes you can make right now are making sure your images are optimized, updating your website if there’s an update available, and avoiding directly uploading videos/audios onto your page (just embed them!). 

Conclusion

These 6 tips above aren’t the end-all, be-all when it comes to increasing the visibility and traffic of your website, but they are a great start. Many of these tips are overlooked, easy adjustments that will take little effort but make a significant impact on your webpage.

Regardless, it’s clear that understanding SEO is key to any successful website and it could be your biggest advantage if utilized properly. The higher your website is ranked, the more it shows up on searches and the easier it is for your target audience to find you. 

If you’re still looking for tips on how to improve search engine visibility for WordPress sites after trying these tips, come back for more insight here.