Every website owner wants to make their website beautiful, feature-rich and visually stunning. They invest a lot of time, effort and resources in creating highly engaging and addictive website user experience and website’s appearance. All your hard work will go waste if you aren’t working enough on optimizing your website.
The fact is that search engine giants like Yahoo, Google, Bing, and others don’t care about a website’s design, features or the added pretty images; despite they care more about keywords, quality content, alt tags, file names, and other relevant tech elements.
A poorly optimized website takes more time to load and if your website also isn’t well optimized then you aren’t going to win the blogging game. Fast loading websites are more users friendly, increases page views and conversions, boost organic traffic and improves ranking on search engines.
You must work on speeding up your WordPress website and if you are lack inspiration and ideas this post about the top 10 tips to optimize a WordPress blog in 2020 will surely help you in doing that. Let’s start the list:
Whether you own a corporate website or a personal blog you will need to create and publish quality content to improve your search engine rankings. You cannot achieve expected results with poorly curated content no matter how much effort you are putting on your website’s optimization.
An ideal or quality content doesn’t mean to be grammatical or spelling mistakes free only, it is more than that. An ideal content should be enough informative, understandable and easy to digest and also well SEO optimized. Writing for visitors and optimizing for search engines at the same time would be more fruitful instead of flooding your content with keywords and interlinks unnecessarily.
How quality content should be:
You don’t have to be an SEO expert or a pro blogger to optimize permalinks. Keyword-rich permalinks are easily indexed by search engines resulting in fast loading of your website. If you don’t know what the heck a permalink is, simply it can be defined as the URL of your website’s post and pages.
Most notable thing is that Google cares mostly about the first four words in any particular permalink thus you must make great effort to keep that four words relevant to your article’s topic. You can customize your website’s permalink if you own a WordPress website by going through the settings.
What will be better than owning a handful of great tools for optimizing your website properly? Google Analytics will help you get useful stats and the best thing is that it is offered by Google and is absolutely free. Using this tool you can easily track your website’s performance and traffic.
This worthy tool helps its users in analyzing the source of traffic, behavior and other important and necessary attributes in an easier way. Google Analytics also helps you perform a lot of optimization tasks including examining your website’s traffic source and behavior of the readers, finding broken links, locating page with 404 error, preventing referral spam and many more.
Exchanging backlinks was easy in previous time but nowadays you have to put real efforts in order to exchange links to your website. Google has made several rules for backlinks exchanging by updating its algorithms. When it comes to the organic ways of exchanging backlinks, there are many and I will come to it later.
Exchanging backlinks to another high authority website relevant to your blog’s niche will help your own website get easily indexed by search engines. Make sure not to go with the irrelevant website while backlink exchange, it’s not going to benefit you in any way.
Image and media can boost or ruin your website’s performance; it all depends on your media optimization techniques. These days we equip a lot of media variables to our blog posts including images, infographics, videos, and podcasts, etc. Optimizing images and other media will surely improve your ranking in image searches resulting in more clicks and organic traffic.
You must learn better image optimizing techniques to put names and tags in order to make it more SEO friendly. WordPress lets its users change the images title, alt text, description and caption of the images while uploading. Performing these tasks will surely leverage your website ranking in search engines.
Fast performing themes can be proved as a game-changing factor for your website. WordPress itself offers a great range of themes and many more agencies also do the same. Themes are loaded with best features, user interface and are aesthetically appealing but you should go for a search engine optimized theme.
A well-optimized theme let Google bots to wade through its source code and discover or detect the appropriate code. Easy code detection speeds up your website loading and makes it easy for search engines to index.
Social media is the new search engine and if you aren’t utilizing this resource then you are making a huge mistake undoubtedly. Social media platforms have become hugely popular over these recent years and you can attract more visitors in less time if compared to search engines.
Some of the top social media sites are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc can boost your brand value in less time. Make a great effort to utilize multiple social media platforms by making your blog posts more shareable.
Tips to make your content more shareable
SEO plugins are like boons for newbie bloggers and digital marketers. WordPress SEO plugins can help you a lot and comes handy in performing best SEO optimization practices. These WordPress plugins allow its users to add desired information automatically instead of adding SiteMaps, Meta descriptions and other crucial SEO details.
Few top SEO plugins to consider:
Interlinking your blog posts with relevant and informative pages increases your website’s authenticity. Doing this also makes your content more user-friendly and help your readers explore more about a certain topic or subject. Not using anchor texts and links correctly can penalize your website thus you must do it in a proper way.
All your optimization efforts will go waste if your website isn’t powered by a quality hosting service. Let me inform you that the ideal loading time of a website should be less than 4 minutes. Search engines also rank a website according to its loading speed and if your hosting does not deliver fast loading then it’s time to switch to other hosting services.
Invest in top hosting services such as Bluehost, HostGator, Hostinger, and others to reduce the loading speed of your website. Almost every hosting service comes with various plans for their customers and you should upgrade to a suitable hosting plan if needed.
Wrapping Up
The strategies and techniques for optimizing a WordPress website are many but implementing the best one can deliver better outcomes. I have also mentioned some of the top optimizing tips here which can be definitely used this New Year and beyond for achieving blogging goals.
Provide your hardly curated and optimized content best possible chances to rank higher on search engines. The tips featured above will help you make your website more user-friendly, engaging, as well as drive traffic and boost sales at the same time.
My name is Mukesh Jakhar and I am a Web Application Developer and Software Developer, currently living in Jaipur, India. I have a Master of Computer Application in Computer Science from JNU Jaipur University. I loves to write on technology and programming topics. Apart from this, I love to travel and enjoy the beauty of nature.