WordPress Features That Will Set You Up for Online Marketing Success
From hosting and plugins to javascript and SEO friendly design — these WordPress features can help determine the success of your online marketing.
Whichever way you want to drive your online marketing campaign, whether it’s SEO, content marketing, video marketing, there is nothing better than using the WordPress platform to make it a success. You can create websites from scratch, or easily migrate existing websites from platforms like Drupal to WordPress. It’s easy to see why so many businesses are attracted to WordPress — it’s feature rich, highly flexible and almost endless in terms of functionality make building and maintaining a website so easy.
When it comes to WordPress features what should you be looking for to help make your online marketing campaign a success? You must first understand what WordPress has to offer and then match it with your specific requirements. Depending on the type of marketing, you can make use of many different SEO friendly features of WordPress to bolster your marketing efforts and direct it towards high performance. For utilizing the powers of WordPress fully, you really have to understand what features will benefit you. Let’s take a look at what you can do with WordPress to give you the cutting edge in marketing on the internet.
Take Control of Search Engine Indexing
There are WordPress feature that allow you to tell search engines about the readiness of your content so that only finished and worthwhile content is picked up for indexing. This can be very important when developing content on your site so that search engines aren’t picking up half baked content.
There may be other times when you simply want to stop posts or pages from appearing in Google search results all together. A common example would be category archives that cause duplicate content. Proper hierarchical structure is integral to a websites’ performance, so eliminating conflicting or duplicate issues will be equally as critical. Fortunately, this is easy to solve using the Yoast SEO Plugin. In Yoast you can easily noindex, nofollow, or use other advanced robots settings to control how your content is indexed.
By consolidating these content overlaps, you should begin to see improved website crawling and hopefully an increase in rankings & traffic.
No-Indexing can come in very handy in other instances of duplication as well. If you use the same titles for blog posts, blog categories, pages, etc. then during indexing, search engines would treat all of that as duplicate content too. Again this would be detrimental to SEO as it affects search rankings adversely. The WordPress ‘no index’ option allows you to keep the less relevant pages from being indexed allowing your featured pages to reap the full benefit in search.
Weed out poor quality links
Only high-quality links should be your target when building your backlink profile, but it is not always possible. Unfortunately, some inferior links will always find a way to mix in among the good ones. You have to scan backlinks regularly to identify the poor ones and keep removing them in order to maintain an inventory of good quality links. Using a plugin like LinkPatrol (a premium WordPress Plugin) is a great way of preventing inferior links from appearing as part of your link profile.
Speed up WordPress websites with plugins
The speed of a website is an essential factor for providing the better user experience. It’s not just user experience that makes page speed important — it’s now a top level Google Ranking Factor. Both users and search engines love fast loading websites that open pages in a split second and allow switching between pages and content at the same speed. If you want your site to open faster, you can use WordPress caching plugins that not only accelerate the speed but also lessens the load on the server. Caching plugins such as WP Super Cache can cache both static and dynamic content, which ensure quick display of pages against queries. According to the official WP Super Cache page, it has been installed over a million times. It’s also free, easy to use and requires little to no configuration.
Get more speed by optimizing images
The images on the website contribute to the website speed, and you must be careful that the images occupy minimal space. Image optimization is essential because large images slow down the speed of websites. By optimizing images, you can improve search rankings. A necessary step in optimizing images is to use a keyword in the alt text section of the image and pictures should occupy limited space varying between 30 kb to 100 kb with a resolution of 72 dpi. Large images take a longer time to load, and you have to compress the images for its size without compromising on its quality so that it occupies less space and help faster opening of pages. You can optimize the pictures and then upload it to the website, or you can optimize images that you have already uploaded by using suitable WordPress plugins.
EWWW Image Optimizer is a great option for WordPress image compression plugin. It is easy to use and can automatically optimize images you upload on the fly. It can also compress and optimize your previously uploaded images in bulk.
Use CDN for the website
Another way to speed up your WordPress website is to use a CDN or Content Delivery Network. A CDN deploys an array of servers for delivering content to users by using the server that is nearest to the user’s location. CDNs allow for rapid content delivery worldwide so that our content can be accessed anywhere on the globe without a time delay. Naturally, the content reaches the user faster, and it improves website performance.
There are a lot of CDN options available, but if you want to save yourself a lot of time and hassle, check out WP Engine for your hosting solution. WP Engine provides total support plus added services like CDNs, an SSL, sitewide https, and dedicated IPs that are all extremely useful.
These are only a fraction of WordPress features that can help improve your online marketing campaigns, lets look at some more SEO focused features.
WordPress Features for SEO Friendly Design
What You Can Do to Create SEO Friendly Design Specifically for WordPress Websites
Creating a professional and beautifully designed WordPress website is essential for driving traffic, but the looks and functions alone doesn’t get the job done. Technical aspects such as hosting, image cacheing, and CDN’s are important features, but making your website design SEO friendly is another key component essential to driving traffic.
Search engine friendly designs make your site more visible and in turn attracts more traffic. For a better understanding the role of web design has in creating search engine-friendly websites, and to achieve it, keep reading this article.
Make the website social media-friendly first
The professionals at the best SEO Houston agency know well how much search engines value the social media, stating that;
“sharable content is a key component in naturally building links, improving authority and ultimately bringing in new customers.”
The great thing about a social media first strategy is that you really don’t have to be a designer to implement this on your site.
The first thing you’ll need to do is make sure that your technical aspects are covered for creating shareable content. Fortunately, WordPress makes this pretty easy through a variety of plugins like:
1. Social Warfare
This plugin makes it easy to add visually stunning sharing buttons to your blog in a variety of locations – you can add share buttons above/below your posts, via shortcodes and even floating share buttons.
And it gets better: you also get access to a number of powerful features that can give you a massive boost in social shares.
One customer reported a 300% increase in social shares when using this plugin.
2. The second thing you’ll want to do is create great posts.
The perfect post for your business will depend in large part upon who your audience are. Revisit your market research and find out about the kind of content that has engaged your audience in the past. Click here for a tutorial on how to craft the perfect social media post.
Social media links demonstrate the high credibility of a website with it’s audience and in turn gains the attention of search engines for securing good ranks in search results.
Use JavaScript selectively
Web designers often take the approach of leaving SEO up to someone else. As a web designer my job is to make the site function. however there is a lot that can be done by the web developer to improve SEO and JavaScript is usually one of the big ones. If you use too much JavaScript in the design, or use it improperly many things can happen affecting how the page loads, how the pages is rendered and ultimately how the page is indexed in search. Javascript is a common necessity in web development, but when it causes your site to take longer than 5 seconds to load, you may want to take a look at that.
A plugin like WP Asset Clean Up, can really help with this.
Pay attention to design accessibility
Easy accessibility to the website ensures that it maintains good ranks in search results that lead to higher conversion. Choose the design elements in such way so that the site remains accessible on all kinds of browsers and devices. Higher visibility of websites on different browsers increases user engagement that leads to better conversion. The design should not affect the speed of loading, and the navigation must be easy because users like fast loading websites and better user experience lead to better search engine response. When designing for SEO it’s essential that you optimize your website for responsive search engine friendly layouts in order to deliver the best layout, with optimal title and button sizes for every devices type. You may want to check out this recent post for the BEST SEO friendly wordpress themes.
The Use of Keywords
It’s beneficial to have your search query represented in your H1 Heading, and other headings (H2, H3, etc) as appropriate, the first 100 words in the body copy and 2-3 times as variations within the rest of the body copy – just make sure that your copy is relevant to the visitor, and reads sensibly.
When it comes to keywords there are multiple phases that you will need to look at as apposed to just picking a few that you think might work and scattering them about.
1. Keyword research tools play a vital role in content marketing when it comes to trending searches and topics as well as user intent. These 8 keyword research tools should be in your toolbox.
2. An in-depth look at keyword research and implementing them into your SEO strategy.
User-friendly URL is must
The URL of your website must disclose some hints about the nature of the site so that search engines and users can easily make out how much relevant it would be for them. While specifying the type of website, limit the categories of the links in the URL because too many links could be confusing. Using hyphens instead of the underscore is a better practice in separating words in the URL.
All the above are simple to implement, but the impact could be quite high in generating better ranks and more visibility.
