Generally speaking, most people working in modern businesses don’t need explanations about SEO. WordPress SEO is the practice of identifying internal and external factors that may affect the amount of traffic you receive from search engines and trying to influence them.
As a result, good SEO practices help you remove uncertainty from your marketing. As long as your SEO is properly maintained, you can reap the benefits of long-lasting and comparatively inexpensive organic marketing channels for your business. Your SEO marketing strategy must, however, be in sync with other key aspects of your business, including product development, communications, and website design, in order to be successful.
Therefore, we’ll discuss the key areas of SEO that we can immediately address when designing, developing, and maintaining your website to ensure long-term, high-quality traffic.
In the mid-nineties, Google began crawling the web
Google’s mission is to continuously improve the browsing experience of anyone looking for a solution to a problem, a product, a service, or anything else they wish to find. Algorithms designed to identify the best websites for these purposes are constantly crawling the web, assessing each website based on over two hundred factors, such as loading speed, content relevance, or time spent on the site.
Each quarter, these algorithms undergo major updates, followed by a multitude of minor updates. In some cases, the changes are monumental; for example, Google’s mobile-first indexing change received about a year’s notice so that marketers and website operators could optimize their websites for mobile devices. There are also updates that are much more sudden and come without warning, such as Google’s recent changes to its spam filters, which can affect your website traffic significantly.
In reality, most of the partners who approach us lack the basic fundamentals of sound SEO implementation.
Google Analytics can show red on your website as a result of too many bad links or a poor user experience on your website, which has led to high bounce rates. As there are so many variables to consider, it’s important to have a reliable partner who can continually monitor and analyze performance and suggest improvements. How intensive your attention should depend on how big your company is and the scope of your operations. But good SEO doesn’t need to be complicated. Generally, most partners who approach us have not implemented a solid SEO strategy at the core of their website.
WordPress SEO Best Practices
The design of your new website is the first step to good SEO practices. A new website development or a relaunch is a multi-year investment, one that will grow with you through multiple unprecedented developments, changes in your business strategy, and responses to external market conditions.
It’s important to think long-term when designing the content strategy and information architecture of your website. How big is your website now, and how big will it be in the next two or three years? By designing a website with long-term content and strategic goals in mind, you will be able to scale and accommodate new products, services, and content pieces as they become available. UX design that is scalable provides the ultimate browsing experience and ensures navigation and click paths do not become cluttered or confusing.
You need to think long-term when designing your website’s content strategy and information architecture.
Be sure to conduct proper keyword research when designing the content architecture of your new website. As a result, the language and terminology you use to name your sub-pages and sub-headings should match the one used by the target audience.
In terms of UX, a good rule of thumb is to always ask yourself: Am I designing this website for my boss or my customer? Involving expert consultations and user feedback in the design process increases the chances of a flawless user experience, which in turn will help your site to score well in search engine results. A complex UX should be avoided if you realize that your customers don’t understand it after you design, build, and implement it.
How To Optimize WordPress SEO In Web Development
Whenever I develop SEO measures for our partners, I observe a U-shaped trend. In other words, the majority of SEO work occurs during the conception and wire framing phases, with less during development and a peak before launch. In spite of that, we can still optimize many aspects of a website during this very important stage.
When putting together a website, we need to pay attention to the amount and quality of plugins we are implementing. The use of outdated plugins does not only pose a security risk to your business. In many cases, plugins add an extra script or style that slows down the Page Speed of your website, one of the key factors that Google algorithms consider when analyzing your site. Additional factors can affect PageSpeed, including the physical distance between your user and the server. A Cloudflare setup makes sense if you have an international audience, as Google algorithms will reward your site when they recognize your site has a fast average page speed regardless of location.
WordPress SEO Checks For A Completed Website
In the true sense of the word, a website is never finished. Updating, maintaining, and improving it is a constant process. When nourishing SEO, we need to keep a few things in mind aside from security.
Your website’s content is one of the key factors that will influence its SEO. The use of content marketing is an effective tool for a wide range of businesses and industries. It is unfortunate that the content space is somewhat bloated with low-quality blogs or comparison sites. It’s easy to write content just for the sake of writing it. The most important thing to remember when developing our content strategy is to focus on quality rather than quantity.
Give your customers answers to the questions they are asking!
Those starting out in business need to spend time and energy researching what their customers want. Instead of getting distracted by what their competitors are currently offering. To fill those gaps, they should analyze current industry knowledge gaps regarding information, content types, sizes, and angles. Based on the data and comments of past readers, these content pieces will need to be refined over time. Companies need to take this time to analyze old content and remove outdated articles. As well as actively improve and update the new content. You should create shareable and mobile-optimized content that is high-quality, sticky, and shareable. Also, make sure your content is structured so that it is easily indexed and found
You don’t just want to create content your audience will read. As well as creating active pathways between your content and other pages on your site, you should also make sure that your content links to other pages on the internet. Likewise, a domain deemed strong by Google has a lot of backlinks coming from high-quality sites. As easy as that sounds, it’s not easy to do. Make sure you don’t get hurt overnight by an increase in low-quality links linking to your profile. To avoid this keep an eye on your backlink profile.
In Conclusion
One of the most common questions is, what is the shortest path to this goal? While there are quick fixes and tricks, we shouldn’t rely on them.
Search engine optimization doesn’t have many shortcuts, and it’s very important to pay attention to the details. Customers and partners sometimes find this frustrating. Some of our partners ask me during consultations, “how can we achieve this goal in the shortest amount of time? I always respond with the same answer, Quick fixes and tricks are available, but we shouldn’t use them. Most quick fixes only produce short-term gains, and before we know it, Google’s algorithm will have updated again. Then we’ll have to revisit the subject all over again. Rather, we come up with sustainable solutions for making the best version of a website and reaping the benefits long-term.
Patricia has worked in digital marketing for 12 years.
And is the author of two books on the subject
