Google doesn’t want people to know about its ranking algorithm. That’s why they keep updating it. Also, they introduce new algorithms from time to time to keep things unpredictable.
SEO experts always try to crack the algorithm and find out how to improve SEO rankings on a website. Whenever Google feels its algorithm is compromised, they update it. But there are some tricks to improve your SEO that won’t be modified ever. Those tips can help you to improve your off-page and on-page SEO ranking in the long term. Let’s find out some in-depth basics that can improve the SEO ranking of WordPress-powered sites.
Things You Need To Do To Improve
Off Page and On Page SEO Ranking
Optimize Images
Image optimization for websites is an underrated topic of SEO. Most site owners don’t consider it as something important, but it is.
Using size-optimized images can make your site a lot faster. It’ll help your site to be fast-loading which can make your site Google’s favorite. Also, it gives the visitors a smoother experience while visiting your site.
Besides that, you should consider the image format while uploading an image Every browser supports not all image formats. It’s better to use JPEG or PNG format because all browsers support those two formats.
Don’t forget to write the alt property of the image. Writing appropriate alt can help your site to rank in the image section. And last but not the least, make sure the images are responsive while using different screen sizes. Doing these things will help you to improve your Off Page and On Page SEO ranking quickly.
Check Duplicate Content
The same content on your website can hurt your website’s SEO ranking. This is a common event among WordPress users.
What happens when you keep duplicate content on your site?
Duplicate content confuses Googlebot about the origin of the content. And when Googlebot gets confused about it, your original content can be considered duplicate content. In that case, Your content might not get noticed, indexed, and ranked well in that case. Moreover, your content will fight with each other to rank. Sometimes people want to create a duplicate page in WordPress for easy use and forgot to edit it as they want only layouts of that content, in this case, you have to be aware to overcome your Off Page and On Page SEO hamper.
So, make sure you didn’t accidentally post duplicate content. If your site has too many pages that are not manageable with manual checking, you should consider a digital service. You can easily find duplicate content on your site, using siteliner. If you want to crosscheck things deeply, try screaming frog.
Use All Types of Media Content
Nowadays, the type of content is evolving very fast because of the choice diversity of people. So, you need to use all types of content on your website. You can use images, gifs, videos, etc, to make your content attractive.
Depending on the genre of your website, media content will perform differently. Such as, if you use videos in a travel blog, it’ll perform better. So, use different media to calculate what kind of media your audience prefers, then act accordingly. If you want you can use the WordPress export media library to use these features well after exporting files.
With time, people’s taste changes, so make sure you try different media content from time to time to check your audience’s taste. This will increase your site’s average session duration and push your site’s ranking to the top.
Check Website Speed
Just because Google considers website speed a significant factor, the website’s loading time has become necessary. Your website’s loading time must be the least to rank higher in Off Page and On Page SEO ranking. In WordPress, the speed mostly depends on the theme you’re using. To have the fastest website, we recommend you choose any faster WordPress theme for building your website. That will make things easier for you.
Google recommends PageSpeed to measure website speed. You can also use GTmetrix, Pingdom, and other services to measure your website’s speed. Besides those, you can try Google Lighthouse to check your site’s speed locally.
Create robots.txt file
The robots.txt file is a text file that gives directions to Googlebot. It directs which page to crawl and which not. To ensure the crawling of Googlebot, you must add a robots.txt file to your website. The best thing you can do is to keep the robots.txt file on the front side of your code. You can also create a sitemap for WordPress to index your web pages quickly on the Google search engine.
It can help you prevent unnecessary crawling and slowing down your site’s indexing. Without a robots.txt file, Googlebot will crawl every page of your website and try to enter pages that require authentication. It’ll also try to crawl blank pages of your site. Not having a robots.txt file will prevent your site from ranking top.
Get Backlinks
Backlinks are important to get more visitors to your site. It brings more visitors to your site from other relevant websites. Also, when other sites add your sitelink to their pages, Google considers your site a valuable source of information. And that improves your domain authority. in that case, the best free SEO plugins in WordPress help a lot to optimize your content well.
So, try to produce quality content and make people link your site with theirs. In that way, you can get backlinks that will indicate that your website is valuable and trustworthy. When having backlinks, check the quality of the site that gives you links. Because irrelevant, spammy, and low domain authority sites can lower your ranking instead of improving it.
Update Your UI
If you notice, you’ll see that popular site user interfaces are changing daily. None have them has the same UI they had 2 years ago. Because they are developing their UI continuously.
Now, it has become a new parameter of Off Page and On Page SEO ranking. Google is looking into the website’s UI deeply in recent times.
So, Google is ranking the websites that contain a better UI. If your website’s UI is not updated and responsive, maybe it’s time for a change. Change your UI and get a better result from Google. The latest WordPress theme can help you with an updated UI for your site.
Control Meta Description
You can give a meta description to your content to help people understand what is content is about. But the fact is, if your meta description is not helping people appropriately, Google will change it and put a new Meta description as their choice. It’s won’t help you much in your SEO. Rank math vs Yoast SEO plugins helps a lot to control meta description.
So, try to write a proper meta description. To write it, you must avoid keyword stuffing and writing irrelevant things. Make sure you write relevant keywords, limiting them to 160 characters, and make it catchy.
Optimize Your Code
The website is nothing but a bunch of codes. And those codes need to be optimized if you want to rank well. Optimized code ensures that your website performs better in case of user experience. If your code is not optimized, it’s difficult for Googlebot to crawl your website systematically. Also, it makes the site slower and less effective.
Using WordPress makes it easy to get optimized code containing websites. All you need to select a theme from the free WordPress eCommerce themes for your site. All those themes have optimized code for the better performance of the site. Moreover, these themes follow the AMP structure, so your content can be more structured for indexing.
Focus on Keywords
The keyword is vital for improving your Off Page and On Page SEO. Your content won’t rank if you create it randomly. You need to search for the keywords first and create content according to them. This way, you can produce quality content that people are searching for. It’s recommended not to create content depending on instinct. Suppose, you’ve created super duper content on how to use a super-computer. No matter how interesting you think it is, it won’t rank well. Because no one uses a super-computer, and none is searching for it (You can try Ubersuggest to verify it). Or you can use WordPress marketing plugins to track records.
So, use any tool to find the keywords everyone is looking for, and create content according to them. In this way, you can create content focusing on popularity. That can help you to increase your SEO ranking.
Hook Your Visitors
Everything will depend on how much time your visitors have spent on your site. So, it’s necessary to produce quality content. Also, ensure you’ve got enough content on your site so your visitor doesn’t need to get out of your website if need any other solution.
Hook your visitors to your site, so they stay longer for your quality content and feel comfortable spending time. You can also try using internal linking to make them roam around your website and you need to track your visitors with the help of WordPress analytics plugins that will help to improve your SEO rankings.
Conclusion
You don’t need to be an SEO to try those methods. These are very easy to implement, and the impacts are long-lasting. If you face any issues while trying any of those, don’t hesitate to drop a comment. We’ll guide you on how to do that. Besides following this guide, you can also check some schema plugins for WordPress.