04 Jan The Top 3 SEO Strategies for WordPress in 2019
If you’re thinking of creating your own website in 2019 – whether a blog, an information site or even a (small) e-commerce site – chances are you’ll choose WordPress as your platform. WordPress is the most popular blogging/website platform because of its ease of use.
But like any other blog or website, you need to pay attention to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure that Google and other search engines will find your site and rank it highly for whatever keywords you use. After all, no one wants to blog in a vacuum!
WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
WordPress.com allows you to create a site and will host it for free. Don’t think that because it’s WordPress’s own site that it will have all the bells and whistles you need, though! Because it’s free, you don’t have any bells and whistles at all – unless you choose to pay for their Business Plan, which may be more expensive than if you were to choose your own web host.
Most service providers offer WordPress for free. And it is this WordPress application to which you can add a variety of widgets, modify the code (if you have the knowledge to do that) and so on. If you go to WordPress.org, you can download the full-service application for free and then re-upload it to your provider, but make sure your provider doesn’t already offer it before you do that.
You’ve got your WordPress site or blog set up, now what are those Top 3 SEO Strategies
- Install the Yoast plugin
The Yoast plugin is free, can be installed on any self-hosted WordPress site, and is one of the best SEO plugins you’ll find. (Yoast does offer a premium version, but for most individuals, their free version will be just fine.)
Once you have Yoast installed, you will see its control panel below the text box on any Create New Post page. It will prompt you to enter a focus keyword and enable you to edit your “snippet” so that it Is not simply the first 160 characters of your post. It will also analyze your entire post to check for Readability and the presence of the focus keyword in the body of the text. A green dot means SEO is “good,” yellow is “okay,” and red is “poor.”
- Set your Permalink to “Post name.”
By default, WordPress gives each post you make a number. (http://samplesite.com/?p=123). This isn’t good for your readers, and it isn’t good for your SEO, which requires a keyword in the name/title of your post. So, go to Settings, scroll down to Permalinks, and on the right-hand side of the screen, choose the fifth option from the top, Post name. Then make sure you put a keyword into the title of each post you make.
- Use keywords (or rather keyphrases) in your posts
Google – the search engine you have to make happy – crawls your posts on a regular basis and expects to “see” quality content. Each post (or webpage, if you’re using WordPress to create a website rather than a blog) should be at least 300, but preferably 500 words, with the same keyword repeated no less – and no more – than five times.
Regardless of what you’re writing about – your travels to Disneyland, a foodie review of one of your local restaurants, a description of an item you’re selling (and you can place PayPal buttons in WordPress using their HTML widget) – you must use keywords that your potential readers may use when searching for just such as topic.
These are the three basic strategies that will help your WordPress site/blog rank high in SEO in 2019 and in years to come.
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