Having a website is the first goal. The second goal is to optimize your WordPress website for search engines, or no one will know about your site. “WordPress Optimization Strategies” is the key..?

Optimizing your website for search engines is a pretty crucial step in your online marketing strategy. In fact, it’s the starting point for a good SEO campaign.

This is not an overnight process, but a long-term one. And if you want to get the best SEO results for your site, you should focus on an ongoing SEO strategy that’s constantly tweaking and improving your website.

There are numerous ways to optimize your WordPress website for search engines so that you can improve its organic search rankings.

Want to start a blog? Read this guide: How To Start A WordPress Blog in 2022 (complete guide)

Here are some of the most effective ones:

1. Optimize Your Permalinks Structure

To optimize your WordPress website, you need to make sure that your permalinks are SEO-friendly. A permalink is the permanent link of a specific web page on your website. It is always recommended that you use meaningful keywords in your permalinks as it will help Google understand what the content of your post is about.

By default, the permalinks structure of a WordPress website looks something like this: https://zakariagithae.com/?p=561. But that’s not very readable for both humans and search engines.

The default permalink structure is ugly and doesn’t include keywords that would help search engines index your content, so go ahead and change it before you publish anything.

In order to change this, you can go to the Permalinks Settings from the Settings > Permalinks menu in your WP dashboard and choose a better structure > Post name.

You can either use Post name, Month and name, or Day and name depending upon your preference. You can also set up a custom permalink structure by selecting Custom Structure and entering /%postname%/ in the provided field as shown below:

Default Permalink structure: https://zakariagithae.com/?p=561

Now all of your links will look something like this: https://zakariagithae.com/seo-ranking-factors/

Here is a suggested blog? 8 On-Page SEO Techniques To Rank Your Site Faster: Beginners Guide

2. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google/Bing

You need to create a sitemap for your WordPress site and submit it to Google and Bing. This is the first step of your on-site SEO. A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.

By submitting your site map, you are telling search engines that every page on your site is worth crawling, and they will start crawling them right away. This helps you get indexed much faster than without a sitemap, especially if you just launched a new blog or website.

Here is my full guide on XML sitemap? How To Index Your New WordPress Website On Google (Faster)

Here is a quick guide

The Yoast SEO plugin makes it easy for you to create a sitemap and submit it to Google and Bing. Just install the plugin, go to the “XML sitemaps” section of the plugin, and click “Enable XML sitemap functionality.”

• 1 – Go to plugins
• 2 – Add new
• 3 – Search for “Yoast SEO”
• 4 – Install and activate
• 5 – Upload your plugin if you downloaded it from somewhere else (must be .zip file)

This will generate an XML sitemap of your page. Then, go to Google Search Console, click on Sitemaps on the left side of the page, type in /sitemap_index.xml into the box at the top of the page, and then click “Submit.”

Here is my full guide on XML sitemap? How To Index Your New WordPress Website On Google (Faster)

You can do the same thing with Bing Webmaster Tools – enter your domain name into this page and click “Add.” Then click on “Configure My Site” and follow these steps (you don’t need to use the Bingbot verification code).

Submit your sitemap by entering /sitemap_index.xml into the “Submit a Sitemap” section of your settings and clicking Submit.

Submitting a sitemap will allow Google and Bing to see how often and frequently pages are updated, which they use as a ranking factor. When they notice an increase in activity on your site, your rankings will improve!

Want to Earn Money with your Blog? Here is the guide: How to Monetize Your Blog with Google AdSense (Get Approved)

3. Remove Unnecessary Plugins and Themes

When it comes to optimizing a website for search engines like Google, speed is everything. The faster your site loads, the higher it will rank in the SERPs. It’s that simple. And if you want to improve your WordPress site’s loading time, consider removing any unnecessary plugins and themes from your installation.

Plugins are wonderful things because they can add so much functionality to your site with just a few clicks of a button. But each plugin on your site has its own codebase, and every additional line of code has to be loaded when a visitor hits your website, which increases load times.

So only keep those plugins that add real value to your website and remove the rest. You can always install them again later if you change your mind.

The same goes for themes. Only keep one theme installed on your website at any given time unless you’re running multiple sites on different subdomains or subdirectories.

If you have an old theme sitting around in your theme directory that you no longer need, delete it from the server. It will reduce the size of your WordPress installation and speed up page load times for visitors to your site.

4. Use Google Site Kit Plugin

If you are running a WordPress website, you should use the Google Site Kit plugin to optimize your website. This free plugin is developed by Google and it is available on the WordPress repository.

You can integrate this plugin with your Google Search Console account and access essential performance data right in your WordPress dashboard. In addition to showing you the search performance of your website, it also shows you the traffic data from other sources like analytics, AdSense, and page speed insights.

Make sure that you are using this plugin on your blog to optimize it for search engines.

How to Install Sitekit

WordPress dashboard > plugins > Sitekit (by Google) > install > activate > then proceed to Site Kit settings.

• 1 – plugin > add new
• 2 – search “site kit”
• 3 – install and activate it
• 4 – Site kit > Settings

Once installed, link your website with Google Search Console, Google AdSense (See your ads revenue), Insight Site Speed, and Google Analytics by authenticating your account. With this plugin installed, you can view key SEO metrics (impressions, click-through rate, and average ranking position) for every page and post on your site.

This helps you improve your pages based on what content is performing well for your site in terms of SEO.

5. Content Optimization

Content optimization is one of the most important ways to optimize your WordPress website for search engines. As the name implies, it involves optimizing the content on your site to rank higher on search engine results pages.

The content on your WordPress site needs to be both relevant and engaging for your target audience if you want to capture the attention of potential customers.

To be considered relevant by search engines, your content must contain the keywords and phrases that consumers are searching for when looking for products or services in your industry.

If the words and phrases used in your content don’t match what people are searching for, they won’t find you – and they won’t be able to connect with you or make a purchase from you.

When developing content, it’s important to understand how Google decides which websites should rank highest on its results pages.

Google uses a complex algorithm that takes into consideration more than 200 different SEO factors; one of the most important factors is the quality of your content. Google wants to provide its users with the best possible results, so it gives priority to sites with high-quality content (Learn why Google hated thin content and what it is?). See the image below.

Here are suggested blogs?

• How To Write A Perfect SEO Blog Post in 2022 (free Tips)
• How To Write A Blog Post Using Anyword (Free AI Copywriting Tool)
• 8 On-Page SEO Techniques To Rank Your Site Faster: Beginners Guide

6. General Settings: Optimize Site Title & Description

The site title and description are the first things visitors see when they search for your site on Google. They can be different from the name of your business, but they should be related to what you do.

The description is a short summary of your business that appears in the search engines and must be within a certain character limit. It should include relevant keywords and summarize what you do.

If your title and description are more attractive and relevant to visitors, you will increase the clickthrough rate (CTR) from search results to your site. In addition, CTR is also a ranking factor that helps your website rank higher in search results.

How to Change your site title

To optimize your site title and description, you need to edit them in the WordPress backend. Go to Settings > General page and fill out the Site Title and Tagline fields.

The next point is to …

7. Keep Your Site & Content Upto Date

There are a lot of things you can do to keep your WordPress website optimized for search engines. Some are about the design and website structure, while others are related to the content.

Make sure that you keep your WordPress website up to date by using the latest versions of websites, plugins, widgets, and themes. Always use updated plugins as they are often more secure and less prone to errors than older versions.

Also, it’s important to keep your content fresh by regularly creating new pages and blog posts with relevant keywords and valuable content.

Let’s say for example you have a blog on your site and you only post every once in a while, this will give off a negative impression to search engines because it shows that there isn’t much going on within your website worth sharing.

If people aren’t going, there won’t be any new content which means nothing will be updated either. Search engines love fresh content because it shows that your site is active and relevant.

Conclusion

In conclusion to our exhaustive list of WordPress optimization strategies, there is no substitute for hard work and dedication.

Search engine optimization is just like any other kind of optimization. You test things out, see what works, and adjust accordingly. It’s not something you hit a switch for and it instantly works.

There are some essential steps to remember in order to optimize your WordPress website for search engines, and this post was meant as a quick reference guide for things to start with. I hope it does that for you!

Our next section details how to optimize your content or blog posts on a WordPress website for search engines to help your site rank on Google. If you’re using your site for SEO purposes, then optimizing it with these tips will be of great benefit to you.

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