The final part of this tutorial presents several simple but effective recommendations which can be applied to every website and, namely, are related to content managing.
Stop Words
When it comes to optimizing URLs, changing the permalink structure of your blog is definitely not enough. Having URLs that search engines prefer is also crucial. Both titles and page URLs should contain the keywords. Stop words are ignored by the search algorithms and they are not part of the keywords. These are the words like “a”, “the”, “and”, etc. They should be removed from your posts, page titles and URLs if your aim is to optimize your blog.
SEO Blog Posts Optimization
It will be better for you to optimize your title and description to get maximum number of visitors received by clicking.
A good SEO friendly post title is human readable, contains the main keyword and is within the 70 characters limit. When your page appears in the search results, a user will decide whether or not they want to click on it based on the SEO title and the description in the search snippet. The description part may change as search engines display the most relevant part of your article as the description, but the title will remain the same. Make sure your SEO title describes exactly what people will get if they clicked on the link. And finally, simplify your title and make it catchy.
Use Tags and Categories Properly
Tags and categories are intended to give helping hand to the search engines in understanding your website content and structure.
Categories are meant for your posts broad grouping, although the new users sometimes get confused on how to best use categories and tags. Let’s imagine that your blog is a book. Then categories will be the table of content.
On a personal blog, for instance, you can have such categories as traveling, music, movies, cooking, reading, etc. Categories have hierarchical structure, which means that you can add child categories to them.
At the same time, tags are more specific keywords that describe the contents of an individual post. Thus, a blog post filled under traveling category can have tags like Czech Republic, Austria, Germany or any other country that fascinated you or you have in your travel wishlist. Think of these as indexes section in a text book.
Summaries or Excerpts vs. Full Posts
By default, WordPress shows the full text of the article on all the pages while displaying and linking to your posts from the pages like home page, date archive, author page and so on.
This influence the site SEO, as search engines may consider this content to be duplicate. Additionally, full articles also can slow down your archive pages loading.
Besides, displaying the full text of the articles everywhere impacts your page views. Like in case with users subscribed to your RSS feed who can read the full article in their feed reader without even visiting your site.
The most simple way to fix it is to show summaries or excerpts instead of the text of a full article.
To do it proceed with going to Settings >> Reading and selecting summary.
SEO Images Optimization
It is well-known fact that images are more engaging than text but, at the same time, they also need more time to load. Be careful with image sizes and quality, or they can slow down your website.
The images used on your website have to be optimized to load fast.
The use of descriptive title and alt tags is another trick you can use for optimizing your images for search engines. These tags can give the search engines the idea what your image is about.
When you upload an image WordPress gives you an opportunity to add the title and alt tags to the certain image.
Photographers or people who simply add a lot of images to their WordPress site should use a gallery plugin.
Hope this guidance was helpful in learning some new information and experience as well as giving you more details on how to properly optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Go ahead and good luck in implementing a few of these tips on WordPress SEO! No doubt, you will see an increase in your traffic within a few months as the search engines crawl your changes.
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