Nowadays, for many website owners, getting their sites ranked on the first page of Google search results seems like an unattainable dream. Others say there is no way to achieve such performance, but the truth is actually very different. It is possible to make your site stand out from the competition in search engines through an effective and structured SEO optimization strategy.
What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing web pages in order to direct and increase the quality and quantity of a site’s organic traffic from search engines like Google. Doing SEO the right way means making your website more visible to users in search results on Google and other search engines.
Best SEO practices help search engines easily select content and display it to users in search results through three steps:
- Crawling: they identify content on the Internet by scanning every URL they find.
- Indexing: they organize the content found during crawling so that it can be quickly listed in search results for relevant queries.
- Ranking: they order the indexed content in search results so that the most relevant content is displayed first.
Every day Google processes over 3.5 billion searches, and with a high ranking a website can gain much more traffic.
One of the most effective CMS (Content Management System) platforms for SEO optimization is WordPress.
How does WordPress SEO work?
SEO on WordPress is very simple to manage and allows you to optimize the performance of content on any website.
To gain a full understanding of SEO, it is important to know exactly how SEO works for WordPress and to know what Google Analytics is, essential for monitoring all SEO practices.
Google has a listing or indexing process for websites that it shows in user search results, but since the listing constantly changes in real time, it would be impossible to maintain the index manually.
Therefore, Google uses proprietary algorithms and programs called web crawlers to systematically scan the Internet and update website indexes.
Not only do Google crawlers collect information about what data is contained in each website, but they also organize the information accordingly. For this reason, when you conduct a search on Google, millions of possible results are immediately presented.
Google crawlers pay close attention to new websites, dead links, and changes to existing websites. As such, it is not necessary to manually submit websites to Google for inclusion because they are automatically found by crawlers that are always searching for new web content.
Understanding how major search engines collect site data can help select the most relevant information and thus help a site rank higher in search results.
At the same time, however, it is possible to do SEO the wrong way, in which case search engines may penalize a site and bury it deep in user search results. It is therefore essential to organize a solid SEO strategic plan that leaves nothing to chance and that, after reviewing the checklist, helps a website rank much higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
How to plan an effective SEO strategy?
To create an effective SEO strategy, you need to take into account specific techniques and some steps to follow.
First of all, index the reference website. When Google indexes a website, it inserts the site’s information into its database. If the reference website is not in the database, users will not find it through search.
Another step to keep in mind is choosing the website URL. A short, organized, and easy-to-read URL is usually SEO-friendly, meaning that both search engines and online users can quickly find it and easily understand what the web page is about. Non-optimized URLs, on the other hand, are disorganized and long, usually including numbers, letters, and special characters.
Website security is essential for search engines, especially Google, which aims to ensure that people accessing websites through its search engine are safe and that user privacy is protected. For this reason, it recommends implementing SSL on all websites, an industry-standard security measure that creates an encrypted link between each visitor’s browser and the reference website. This adds an extra level of security represented by a padlock in the address bar, indicating to your visitors that they are on a secure page. The site address will start with HTTPS instead of just HTTP, meaning the site is encrypted and therefore, when an online user accesses the site or purchases a product, the SSL certificate will better protect their information.
You can obtain a free SSL certificate through a WordPress hosting site or a WordPress SSL plugin that helps optimize sites with intuitive features.
Once the basic WordPress SEO settings are configured and a sitemap of the site is created – a list of all important URLs on your site to allow Google to understand and index the content – you can move on to optimizing site posts for SEO.
How to optimize website posts?
SEO-friendly content optimized for search results improves post clickthrough rates in results and generates more traffic to any website, such as the title, meta description, and keywords.
To improve the performance of site content, keyword research is a crucial part. This practice allows you to identify the words people enter into search engines so that you can use them in posts and increase visibility.
There are many different factors to consider when doing keyword research:
- Relevance: the keywords most relevant to the content offered.
- High search volume: the keywords most people will use.
- Competition: ideally, use low-competition keywords so that content can be ranked more easily.
Keywords are an important Google ranking factor, which determines whether a particular post is displayed in search results.
Other key factors in content optimization are internal and external links, image optimization, and organizing content into categories and tags. These techniques facilitate navigation, make content more reliable, and above all generate greater interest among readers who will be encouraged to spend more time on the site.
In conclusion, to improve WordPress SEO and ensure effective visibility, it is also necessary to analyze the reference site, add schema markup, and optimize sharing on other channels, such as social media.
Analyzing sites allows you to understand the site’s status and highlight any problems and critical issues. Schema markup is code that, inserted into the website, helps search engines return more informative results for users. Finally, optimizing sharing on social media by adding a title and description to the featured image simplifies sharing for users on other platforms.
An SEO strategy will not be flawless overnight, but like anything difficult, mastering SEO brings great rewards, such as having content on the first page of Google search results!
