Undoubtedly, WordPress is one of the most popular and naturally suited platforms to search engine optimization. Effective optimization is the key to become successful in online marketing and marketers should always have a good understanding about this concept. SEO can be classified into two categories and they include on page optimization and off page optimization.
On Page Optimization
On page optimization tells you about the changes to be made on your site so that search engines can crawl easily using the spiders and you need to apply certain changes in WordPress sites as well to optimize them in the best possible manner. Permalinks are the first one that you need to change and you can find them in the admin panel under the category known as “Settings”. A custom structure needs to be created for the permalinks and it can be done by changing the settings. First of all, you should select the radio button called “Custom structure” and then, you need to enter “/%postname%/” without the quotes. Finally, you need to click on the “Save Changes” button to name the pages and posts correctly with the titles as an integral part of the URL.
You need to optimize your posts for SEO with keywords and they should be included in the post and page titles without making too obvious. Alt tags should be included for all images because even if a visitor uses a web browser that does not support images, he/she can see the image description. You can easily learn how to do it with the help of plugins. It is always advisable to use H1 tag in html in post titles and the name of the site should also be a H1 on the front page. You can also use H2 and H3 tags on the category pages and posts effectively and WordPress performs all these tasks really well. You need to make sure that these things are done properly and they can be found in the post.php and page.php templates. At this location, you can edit them quite easily.
The load time of your site should be really fast because sites with slow load time are penalized by the search engines. You can improve the load time by installing a caching plugin and they save a local copy of certain pages and posts before checking to see if anything has changed since the copy was saved. Instead of making more calls to the database for the information, the page or post is loaded from the cache quickly to improve your load time.
Off Page Optimization
One of the basic aspects of off page optimization is to increase the number of back links. These links from other websites drive traffic to your website and when the number of back links improves; your site will reach on top of search engines. Updated and original content helps you create more backlinks and you can also check the back links of competitor’s sites by using software tools like Market Samurai or SEO Spyglass.
Google indexes the content of a website by crawling the site with the help of an automated bot known as “Googlebot”. When Google crawls your site, it identifies new content that you add every time and as a resultant factor, your site will be re-ranked.
Site crawlers take some time to identify a new content and you can make use of “pinging” to inform the search engines and other sites about the new content. By doing so; you are asking the search engine to crawl the content or provide a back link to the site. In order to automatically “ping” search engines, you can use a good number of online tools and among these tools; pingler.com can be described as one of the best options. Their premium account stores 25 links or websites and with the help of this tool, you can perform automatic pinging in a regular manner to improve your search engine visibility and traffic as well.
SEO experts in India are of the opinion that if we follow the above guidelines, wordpress sites can be best optimized for SEO.