best ways to optimize and boost SEO of your WordPress website

WordPress is a popular CMS as it is very easy to use and we can easily optimize WordPress website to rank high in Google. WordPress provides easy ways to optimize and boost SEO of website. There are lots of things that we can consider to rank high in Google. However, we can follow the following things which developing a website in WordPress. Here we have listed some of the best ways to optimize and boost SEO of the WordPress website.

1. Default Permalink 

While installing WordPress we have to change the default permalink structure. By default WordPress uses posts with id which can be replaced by post name. Websites with titles are more likely to come in Google search results.

2. Load time of website

It is very necessary for the website to load fast. Load time of the website also is one of the factor for SEO. If you websites takes too much time to load then the visitors can easily quit the website. Moreover, there are lots of things that we can consider to load the website fast like we can embed all the JavaScript code right above the closing body tag. Make sure you select a WordPress theme that loads very fast. Another thing we can do is to use caching plugin.

3. Using caching plugin to speed the blog
There are lots of caching plugin which creates a html version of your posts so that whenever the WordPress websites gets request then the websites loads fast. Plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache are very popular for this purpose. These caching plugin speeds up the load time by reducing the frequent database access and server access. As soon as you use these plugins then you will feel the difference. However, sometimes to reflect the change we need to remove the cache.

4. Use of Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The concept of Content Delivery Network is to provide you reliable and fast content based on the geo location of the client. The concept of CDN is to deliver the content from the server which is very close to the client. It reduces the load of a server since we can download content in parallel from multiple servers.

5. Enable G-Zip Compression
some of the plugins like w3 total cache provides the g-zip compression option. However, we can implement G-Zip compression directly from the .htaccess itself. Moreover, we can mention the life of images, css and js files so that each time a client sends the request to the server, the server do not have to send those files over and over again. It can directly be accessed or loaded from the cache of the user.

6. Optimize images
If the size of your images is relatively very large then website will load very slow. It is always good to optimize images and upload so that they load fast

7. Using plugins for SEO

There are different plugins which gives us the flexibility to alter title of the article, meta description, canonical url, whether to index or not and many more things.  One of the popular plugin is SEO Yoast. These plugins will also notify if there is no focus of keywords in meta title and description. Duplicate title for multiple pages is also harmful from SEO perspective. SEO plugin will automatically check these things.

8. nofollow external links

It is always wise to nofollow external links since your page rank can transfer if external links are not properly set to nofollow.

9.  Canonical URLs

Same page can be found via different links like sometimes we can find a particular page or article from search result in such a case same page can be browsed via 2 different links which can be the case of duplicate content. Duplicate content is penalized by Google. Hence, we need to setup canonical urls to tell our search engine that if a particular page is found via 2 different urls then we should consider it as one.

10. Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate contents is a very serious issue. Hence, we must avoid duplicate content with the website and our website content should not be matched from other websites. If so our website can be penalized by Google.

11. Use of Keywords in article

The use of keywords in article is important. If your article does not contain important keywords then the website will not be ranked for that particular keyword while user searches in the Internet. Hence important keywords should be bold in our article and moreover our keywords has to be repeated sufficient number of times. Excessive use of keywords in an article can also be penalized by Google. Hence, keywords should appear in a relevant way.

12. Authority to posts

These days it is very much necessary for posts to be linked with some author. If an article is related to a particular author or a google plus account then the authenticity of the article is proved. It is a positive sign is for Google.

13. Listing business in local market place

Our website official address has to be listed in Google. More over which searching for a product Google gives importance to websites that are local. It is also necessary for your website to be listed in local business directories or similar websites.

14. intralink is important

Important articles has to be linked from multiple other pages of the website so that it becomes more popular. Intralink is a good way to tell search engines about the structure of the website. Use of keywords in intralink helps our website to rank in the particular keyword.

15. Integrating social media

It is a good practice to share your articles in social media like facebook, twitter and others. Lots of visitors can be redirected form social media these days. However, we should have engaging content so that once the user comes to our website then they have to stay for a reasonable amount of time in our website.

16. responsive design

It is equally important for the website to be mobile friendly these days. We have free Google tools to check the compatibility of our website I desktop and mobile. Responsive designs are relatively ranked high compared to others since these days visiting website via mobile and tablets are common.

17. Submitting both xml and html version of sitemap

HTML version of sitemap is important for visitors however xml sitemap is a good way to tell search engine like Google about the number of pages in the website. XML sitemap helps our website to index fast in Google.

18. Using analytics to track the customer

Google analytics is a free tool to analyze the trend of our customers. Moreover we can also know how users are interacting with our website. If the bounce rate is very high then we need to work on that to reduce it. We can study how users are interacting with our website. We can learn lots of things about the visitors of our website like demographics, behavior, visit time and much more.

19. Integrating Google webmaster

Google webmaster is an easy way to check the html errors in our website. We can also check the pages of our website that are already indexed by Google. Moreover, it also shows the information of websites from where our pages are linked. In this case we can remove unrelated and irrelevant website.

20. using robots.txt

Robots.txt should be used in a proper way else it can block all the search engines from visiting and indexing the website. Robots.txt tells our search engines to visit the pages from our website. We can also restrict certain areas of our website from indexing by search engines.

21. regular updates and new posts

The website should contain fresh new posts regularly. This helps search engines like Google to crawl regularly. If the content is fresh and good then the website is more likely to come in the search result.