For any enterprise, it’s of vital importance how to do SEO for your WordPress website to optimize your search engine. My favourite CMS (Content management system) to assure this is WordPress.
WordPress offers a wide variety of plugins. You can pick and choose from what you need. It’s quite easy to work with this program.
The overall structure of your CMS is not only flexible but even users with a limited understanding of coding may easily adapt this information to best serve your website.
Here, we’ll share some of the best tips to enable you to set up SEO for Your WordPress Website (Search engine optimisation).
How To SEO Your Singapore WordPress Website
One of the first things necessary to facilitate the setup is to get Yoast’s Plugin.
Yoast Studio
To best optimise your website, the first order is to develop a theme. A theme. You need a theme that is well-designed and popular to best increase your SEO ranking.
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Page Structure and overall layout of the site
Before attempting any change, the first consideration should be the layout and page structure of your website. It’s important to know how to link pages together to allow the visitor easy and understandable access.
The way you set up your URL and how the sections are laid out, one leading to another.
To achieve the most satisfying and greatest reception of your blog, it would be preferable to keep the order of information.
This means that the home page of your blog will have within each blog links from the category that lead the visitor to the ultimate category.
When this is properly set up, SEOs will see the pages displayed as having the highest priority for the crawler.
The more activity and interest in your blog, the more you should see your site rise within the ranking of search engines.
The best way to optimize your pages according to a category is the use of keywords.
Later, we shall explain this in greater detail. The main point to remember is the importance of having the structure of links within your blog properly and correctly made to assure a more effective way for SEOs to assimilate the content for your benefit.
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URL Structure
You have to make certain to set up your permalinks in proper order.
WordPress adds the date of your post to the URL. For you and visitors alike this is rather useless. You can, however, change this at Settings>Permalinks. There you may select the Post Name radio button as shown here.
wordpress-permalinks
In this way, you ensure that the URLs of your blog posts will make sure that your posts will contain targeted keywords within your headers.
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Create links to other blog articles you’ll have written.
Creating external backlinks to your articles, you should never forget the vital importance of creating internal links to each post as well.
This gives you the benefit of having PageRank cut through to your website’s feature page while SEO crawlers easily move through your content.
It is inadvisable to add too many links within each post.
As a general rule, it’s best to have a maximum of three links within each four to five hundred words. This however is only a generality. The content of your blog
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Titles for your pages and how to optimise them
Perhaps the most important thing to remember in the creation of your web pages will be titled. The titles you choose for your web pages are of the utmost importance.
Using Yoast’s SEO plugin mentioned earlier, the difficulties of setting up web pages so that each post has its SEO.
You may also place a footer at the end of every post taking advantage of the various options that Yoast’s plugin includes.
seo-page-titles-1024x308
Titles must always be relevant to the content of your post. This would demand the inclusion of keywords to target the reader so that they will appear in the SERPs and be easily understandably by the user.
To post your primary web page on Google would render it without value unless ensuring that your titles make sense. Not doing so would only hurt the surfer who clicks quickly through web pages.
snippet-preview
With the great page title installed, you may preview its final appearance within SERPs.
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Optimise images within the pages
Since so the number of blended search results will appear, it is of utmost importance for you to make certain that all images that you’ll have appeared on your web pages be optimised for more elaborate inclusion in search engines.
This can easily be accomplished in three easy steps as follows:
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- You should be sure to include relevant keywords inside the file name of the image you select (for example wooden-ladders. jpg.)
- Be sure to include relevant keywords within the ALT attribute (for example alt=’Image of wooden ladders’).
- Make certain that the folder for your images cannot be blocked by your robots.txt file.
The first two steps are self-explanatory and can be done at the time of inserting a new image into your post.
You may save your image on your hard drive. You should then give it a new name including a keyword Here you need to place hyphens between each word. Following this, the next step is to fill in the fields: ‘title’ and ‘attributes’ with keywords. Next, you press ‘insert into post’ and this aspect of your website is done. Quite simple. Just follow the instructions.
image-optimisation
You’ll want to be sure that your website doesn’t keep search engines from crawling your website in any way. Therefore, it may be necessary to make a few changes to your robots.txt file. Below is a popular way as an example of the way a proper WordPress site robots.txt should appear.
User-agent
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- Disallow:/feed/
- Disallow: /trackback/
- Disallow:/wp-admin/
- Disallow: /wp-content/
- Disallow: /wp-includes/
- Disallow: /xmirpc.php
- Disallow: /wp-
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Sitemap
WordPress at this time doesn’t offer you the ability to directly edit your robots.txt file. There is, however, a way for you to do this simply by downloading this little free plugin.
Set up a Sitemap
At this point, you’ll want to set up a sitemap. You must create an XML (extensible markup language) sitemap for your blog. In this way, you permit search engines to know exactly what to look for and where they’ll find it.
Earlier we spoke of a plugin for the dashboard on your WordPress site. You have only to use it once more. Search the Yoast SEO plugin setting and locate XML Sitemaps.
xml-sitemap
You now simply tick the box labelled: ‘check this box to enable XML sitemap functionality and now the plugin will do the heavy lifting for you. It should now create your sitemap automatically: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
You can also check out this video to learn more!
Have your Blog Social-Ready!
Today, social signals have become and continue to grow more important than ever for SEOs.
Therefore, you need to make it as easy as possible for others to share all your content. There is a free plugin with the title: Sociable.
You should find this to be of immense value to you in that it allows you to place social media sharing buttons on your blog. You’ll be able to customize these buttons with a good many options so that you can fit these to suit your needs.
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Google+ Authorship
Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin offers another exceptional feature. This has simplified how you can encode your articles allowing you to link your Google+ account to them.
In your user profile on the dashboard (Users>Your Profile) and there enter the URL of your Google+ profile. Now the plugin automatically adds the necessary code to the sections of your web pages.
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Google+ URL
Having completed the tasks above, you now have only to go to your Google+ profile and add your WordPress website into the section labelled ‘Contributor to’ section.
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Contributor to the links section
Although it may take a week or more for you to be able to review the changes you’ve made, your profile image (remembering to follow the rules of Google’s Terms of Service) should be displayed within your SERP search engine results page)snippet.
A recent study shows that WordPress powers more than 25% of the internet and 1 in every 4 websites is built using it. Singapore is no exception, most website design and development agencies prefer WordPress to other content management systems due to its flexibility and advanced security features.
In the context of search engine optimisation (SEO) in Singapore, WordPress is the best platform as most of its features and templates are in line with Google and other search engines SEO best practices. However, that does not mean optimising a website that is powered by WordPress is easy.
There are several WordPress SEO mistakes that most web developers make that affect site visibility on SERPs. Let us look at these mistakes as well as how to avoid them.
Source: https://www.eukhost.com/infographics/5-seo-tips-to-optimise-your-wordpress-posts/
Top 10 WordPress SEO Mistakes
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Mistake 1# Not Setting the Time Zone
When creating a new WordPress website, one of the most ignored yet the most important option is selecting the time zone. This option is found under Settings > General.
If you do not set a time, you will realize that your scheduled posts are not published at your preferred time. Make sure that you set it correctly to ensure that your content is published on time.
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Mistake 2# Not Setting Google Analytics Goals
Google Analytics will come in handy when monitoring the performance of your website. The results will help you to know if your SEO campaign was successful. For instance, you can increase your site organic traffic to 1 million page views a month, but if a majority of the visitors do not end up purchasing your product, it means your pages are not well optimised or conveying the intended message to the customers.
Ideally, if someone takes an action that leads to revenue such as joining your email list or purchasing the product, redirect him or her to a congratulations page. Such simple adjustments will have huge positive ramifications on your website performance.
Set Google Analytics goals to know how each page on the site is performing. The results will also help you to pinpoint the friction areas and solutions.
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Mistake 3: Not Adding Open Graph Social Meta Data
Even though social signals do not have a major influence on site ranking, it is no secret that social media can help you increase your clientele base and organic traffic. Your goal when creating content is to get as many people to click on the content. To achieve this goal, you need to make sure that your content is top-notch and in line with the needs and expectations of your target audience.
To achieve this goal, you need to activate open graph data for Facebook. Twitter Cards should also be activated on Twitter. You can do this in a couple of button clicks if you have the Yoast SEO plugin. To enable open graph data on Facebook or any other social networking site, head over to Yoast Settings and Enable it as shown in the image below.
You can also instruct Facebook on which image it should draw whenever your article is shared on the platform as shown below.
Twitter cards can also be acted in the Yoast Settings as shown below.
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Mistake 4# Not Creating and Submitting an XML Sitemap
Simply put, an XML sitemap is a list of every page, post and media posted on your site. It is what you submit to Google through the Search Console to inform them which pages or elements you want to be indexed.
Yoast SEO Plugin will help you create this sitemap as well. Head over to SEO Settings > XML Sitemaps. Make sure it is enabled and you can see the sitemap by using the link below.
Be sure to submit the sitemap to Google Search Console.
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Mistake 5# Not Setting Permalinks to Post Name
One of the main goals of Google is to offer user-friendly content. This means that your permalinks will have a small but significant impact on how your website pages will be ranked.
Under WordPress Settings > Permalinks, go for the option that shows the permalink will include keywords used in the post. The easiest and most convenient way of doing this is by selecting the Post Name.
In addition, indicating the day and month in the permalinks is important on how Google perceives your site, so consider using Month and Name or Day and Name options.
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Mistake 6# Not Linking to the Homepage from the Footer
Not linking to the homepage from the footer is probably one of the most common WordPress SEO mistakes that businesses and website designers make. The majority of websites have their names or brand name in the footer, so why not use it as an anchor text for linking to the homepage. That simple improvement will enhance your site’s internal linking strategy and assist Google to identify your site through branded anchor text.
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Mistake 7# Failing to Publish Fresh Content Regularly
In the current dynamic digital marketing landscape in Singapore, Content is Everything. Publishing more fresh content that is relevant to the target audience and in line with your nice is the key to success in SEO. More content means you will get more chances to rank for the target keywords. You will also be able to use more keywords, both primary and secondary, to optimise your articles thereby increasing your site visibility on SERPs.
You will also notice a sharp increase in organic web traffic when you increase the number of articles that you publish on a daily or weekly basis. Concisely, Google rewards Singapore sites that provide great content that meets users’ needs. Less publishing also means Google will crawl your site less often.
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Mistake 8# Not Updating Content Regularly
Apart from publishing content more often, it is imperative to make sure that existing content on your site is also regularly updated. If a searcher finds your article on the SERP but discovers that the content is out of date, he or she will not hesitate to hit the back button to look for other articles that are accurate. Google bots do take note of such actions and could de-value your content if it does not seem to provide value to users.
Take the time to review and update old content to continue reigning supreme in SERPs. Updating the content is a sign that you care about your website visitors and do not want to mislead them. Sites with high bounce rates and low time on site on Google Analytics should be the first to be updated.
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Mistake 9# Not Checking for Broken Links
The first thing that you need to note about this common WordPress SEO mistake is that Google and other search engines love clean websites. Broken links will direct visitors to the wrong images or show 500 and 400 errors thereby resulting in a high bounce rate.
You can automate this process by installing Broken Link Checker. Every time a link is broken, you will receive an email. Fix them promptly to avoid compromising the user experience.
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Mistake 10# Not Implement Simple Schema Markup
Most of the websites in Singapore and abroad do not leverage schema markup to influence how their pages are displayed on SERPs. Even though this might not have a major impact on ranking, it has a significant effect on click-through rates in Google searches.
Simple improvements such as star rating schema markup to show searchers how other visitors like and engage with your content could entice them to click on your links instead of the competitors who are ranked better due to having a 5-star rating.
How To Use WordPress Blogs To Help The SEO Of Your Singapore Website
Building a popular blog in your website niche requires high-quality search engine optimization.
It is hard for you to convert your blog without getting quality traffic from the search engine. WordPress is one of the most famous content marketing strategies and blogging platforms.
One of its main advantage to online users is that it is free and a hundred per cent customizable.
WordPress blog is an effective platform for Singapore websites in a bid to generate maximum lead conversions in highly competitive digital online marketing.
To be successful in WordPress blogs, you have to update them with the latest trends regularly. This article goes through some basic tips on how to use WordPress blogs to help the SEO of your Singapore website.
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Changing Your URL Structure
Most bloggers use messy URL structures leading to un-optimized blog posts. By this, you cannot get anything from your audience and search engine. You need to learn how to optimise urls for the search engine. The procedure is straightforward.
Log in to WP-admin, go to settings and click permalinks. Select the custom structure and type ‘%postname%’. You will get a simple and efficient URL structure. Additionally, your URL should have the business website keyword and be as short as possible.
This will make it easy for search engines to get you your keyword and the readers will quickly and easily digest your content.
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Use of Search Friendly Themes and Plugins
Online marketing calls for investing and blogging is no different. You have to invest to get the right amount of cash in return. Purchasing a search-friendly theme is one of the top priorities when investing your money in blogging. The main reason why you should spend on premium themes such as Genesis and Thesis is for easy optimisation of your blogs for search engines. The SEO on your website becomes easy as it is taken care of while building website themes. You should choose the best search friendly engine themes for easy optimisation of your posts and get ahead of other bloggers in your niche.
It is the keynote for you to invest your blogging money in buying premium plugins. There are many free plugins, but they won’t help get you the desired search results. Examples of premium plugins include Optin Skin, Scribe SEO and Backup Buddy. These premium plugins will not only develop an outstanding email list on your blogs but will also provide quality traffic from search engines. Make an impact on the Singapore blogosphere by investing in the right premium themes and plugins today.
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Use of Longtail Keywords
Keyword stuffing is one of the things you should avoid in your blogs. Using the same keyword many times does not impact search traffic to your site. To drive traffic from the search engine, you need to start using longtail keywords and quality bank links. Longtail keywords are a basic SEO tip for WordPress that will bring you more online visibility.
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Getting Quality Backlinks for Your Posts
Getting quality backlinks for other sites for your post is the best source of search traffic to your blog posts. Google gives a higher priority to linking to blog posts and ranks them higher. How do you get quality backlinks? The secret is writing great content that will move other bloggers. In this way, they will share the blogs on their platforms increasing the chances of getting quality backlinks for your posts.
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Use Optimized Images for Search Engines
Using images has its significance. Firstly, images provide appealing visuals to your blog readers. Secondly, images can be optimized to increase quality traffic from the search engine. To get traffic from google images, you should use title tags and image descriptions to optimise them with specified keywords. The ‘alt tags ‘use primary keywords in getting more out of your blog images.
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Interlink to Your Posts
To make your earlier blogs relevant and juicier, you need to interlink them in a great way effectively. Always using ‘anchor texts ‘and embedding them with the keywords is perfect practice and Google gives top priority to these embedded keywords with anchor texts. However, don’t use excessive internal or external links. Only use the extremely relevant links to your blogs.
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Writing of High-Quality Articles with Catchy Headlines
A catchy headline is of significant influence in making online users click on your blog post. All search engine users are interested in attention-grabbing headlines. You should spend your time coming up with a catchy headline that will make more people get into your posts.
10 Reasons Why WordPress is the Best CMS for SEO
WordPress began as a simple blogging tool to become a giant content management system.
Currently, WordPress powers 34% of the internet, with a market share of 62.4%. This market is distributed among small business owners seeking to grow their businesses, authorities in diverse niches and more.
As a website owner in Singapore, you need to put a couple of things into consideration.
For example, how much traffic are you aiming for?
SEO is and will still be one of the best strategies to drive organic traffic. To make the most of your SEO, you need to have the best website building platform at hand to achieve this.
Using WordPress puts you way ahead in the SEO game simply because it is arguably the best CMS out there.
Let’s take a look at what contributes to WordPress’s popularity and why it is the best for SEO.
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Optimising SEO images is extremely easy
Imagery gives your content a fresh look and improves readability as it breaks text monotony. This enhances user experience and indirectly affects your SEO. Images, however, should be appropriately used; otherwise, they have the opposite effect.
To maximise your visibility, you ought to optimise your SEO images. There are powerful image optimising tools for this when you use WordPress.
Here are ways WordPress can optimise your SEO images:
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- You can resize your images so that they don’t affect your page’s loading speed.
- You can use the edit option of an image in the “Alternative Text” box. For maximum results, include a version of your keyword.
- WordPress has a plugin that automatically alt text your images.
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WordPress offers the best user experience
Good user experience keeps visitors at your site. This is good news for your SEO. Bad UX can be either from terrible web design, bad images or poor content structure.
WordPress has the best themes and plugins that users enjoy. With lots of customisable themes and plugins, you can create an incredible website. This will build an active community on your website, hence lowering your overall bounce rate.
Find out the must-have WordPress plugins.
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Attractive permalinks
Permalinks are a site’s URL. WordPress allows you to edit your permalinks into nice-looking ones. The advantage of this is that you can plug your keywords into your URL.
Permalinks affect your ranking in two ways:
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- Attractive permalinks can increase your CTR.
- Keywords in the link contribute to your ranking.
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WordPress allows you to add metadata automatically
SEO title and the meta description are key playing factors in ranking. These two must be included in your post and website pages. When you use the relevant keywords to your metadata, those keywords are likely to make your site rank.
Also, you stand to increase your CTR as they are visible on search engines.
WordPress has numerous free SEO plugins that you can install. These plugins allow you to add metadata to your posts. A Plugin such as Yoast SEO offers a detailed breakdown of how to improve on-page SEO for your content.
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Site speed
Site speed indirectly affects your ranking. When your site is slow, users will leave the site resulting in a bounce rate. For mobile search, page speed is a ranking factor in Google.
Site speed is, however, not a problem with WordPress. There are numerous fast loading themes for every need. There are plugins such as ShortPixel Image Optimiser, WPOptimize, and others that specifically improve the speed of a site.
If you notice that your site’s loading speed is slow when using WordPress, this is a sign that you are misusing it. One way to check your site’s loading speed is through Google’s Page Speed Insights.
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Social media integration
Social media is one of the most powerful marketing platforms. A successful social media campaign will help improve your SEO ranking.
How does this work?
Search engines consider social signals when ranking a site. The more your content is shared on social media platforms, the higher your site will appear on Google.
For this reason, you need to integrate social sharing on your website. WordPress provides many solutions, such as Jetpack sharing that work perfectly for this. With WordPress, you can also customise your social media buttons to make it easier for users to share your content.
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WordPress is Mobile optimised
The use of smartphones and tablets to conduct online searches has increased over the years. Online marketers need to adapt to this trend by having mobile optimised websites. Google is especially particular about finding a mobile version of your website.
With WordPress, you don’t have to worry about this.
You don’t have to do anything extra as most themes are already mobile optimised. Also, you can check how your site looks on different mobile devices once you customise it.
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WordPress has numerous SEO Plugins
The right plugins help your site rank higher.
WordPress has some of the best SEO plugins that improve certain parts of your WordPress SEO platform.
Some of the outstanding SEO Plugins for WordPress include:
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a popular plugin because it optimises a website in the simplest ways possible. It comes with a couple of benefits:
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- It provides SEO title and Meta description templates.
- With it, you can optimise your content with a focus on relevant keywords.
- You can create readable content for both your users and search engine crawlers.
Google Analytics
The Google Analytics plugin comes in handy in various ways:
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- You get to know the most popular pages on your site with detailed data.
- You can see the number of clicks on your outbound links and affiliate links as well as your banner ads.
- You view your Google analytics report without leaving the WordPress dashboard.
Google XML site maps
XML site map plugin simplifies your site’s structure making it easy for search engine crawlers to understand. The plugin also alerts search engines of your new posts.
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SEO friendly themes
WordPress offers a lot of components to improve your SEO. One of them is themes.
With these themes, you can build any website you like to suit your end goals. With a quality theme, your site can contain the right HTML Markup to cover your technical SEO.
Quality WordPress themes also give your site a professional and attractive look which is an appealing thing to users. Users are likely to stay on your website for a long time which will then contribute to your ranking.
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Software integration
WordPress also integrates with other software tools that all maximise your SEO efforts. These tools ensure that your site runs like it is supposed to which boosts user engagement.
Software tools that work with WordPress include G Suite [best for emails, documents and spreadsheets], ConvertKit [for landing pages, forms], and Sucuri [very useful for security].
WordPress has proven to be search engine friendly over the years. Its extensive SEO capabilities make it the perfect CMS for SEO. The above reasons are proof enough.
As a marketer in Singapore, you need WordPress if your goal is to feature on Google’s front pages.
WordPress SEO Best Practices To Boost Your Singapore Business Website Traffic
Are you looking for the best WordPress SEO practices that will boost the amount of traffic that your Singapore business website records per day?
Indeed, without enough website traffic, you will always be lagging in terms of sales and visibility online.
The best SEO agency in Singapore can help optimize your business website and keep track of its performance to be sure, of what tactics are working. A/B tests on new elements will also be done to ensure that the entire website is properly optimized.
Today, we will look at the best WordPress SEO tactics/hacks that you can count on to boost your website traffic not only in Singapore but also anywhere across the globe.
6 WordPress SEO Best Practices
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WordPress Yoast SEO Plugin
What is it and how does it work? A wordPress SEO plugin is designed to help you make the necessary tweak to every piece of content that you publish on the website.
There are two versions of this plugin, free and premium. The free version is good, but once the site is fully established, you can upgrade to the premium version that has more features.
Concisely, this plugin will give you a blueprint of what exactly you need to do to ensure that every website page, post and other element added by your Singapore web design company is correctly optimized. For example, it will help you add focus keywords in the titles, create Meta descriptions to your pages, add slugs and much more.
One of the highlights of this plugin is that it supports virtually all content types and analyses all elements of the website. More importantly, it comes with Webmaster Tools that enable you to upload the sitemap of your website, and social media profiles as well as work with search consoles.
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Mobile Optimization
Before we proceed, one of the facts that you need to keep in mind when optimising your website is that Google is very cunning. They change the algorithm now and then, so it is imperative to monitor the market for trends and changes in SEO.
Recently, Google announced that they will be focusing more time and effort on mobile devices that are widely used to browse the internet. This is due to the increase in the number of people who prefer using mobile devices to access websites and other online platforms instead of computers.
Already, we have noticed that mobile-optimized websites are highly ranked compared to their counterparts. Therefore, go ahead and optimize your site for mobile users. Luckily, most of the WordPress themes are fully responsive so all your website pages will be mobile-friendly. You could also request the website designer to create a custom theme that is mobile friendly for your business to stand out from the crowd.
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Make Sure All Images are Optimised
Website load speed is another primary factor that Google and other search engines use to rank websites. People tend to abandon a slow site, and this results in a high bounce rate and low conversion rate since very few potential customers wait for more than 4 seconds for the entire website to load.
Use a tested and proven website audit tool to check the current load time. The audit report will give you tips on what exactly needs to be done to increase the speed. One sure way of increasing load time is by making sure that all the pages are properly optimised. Your Singapore web design and SEO team can do this for you thereby saving you time for other equally essential business tasks.
How to Optimize Images on WordPress Using Imagify
Imagify is one of the most efficient and reliable WordPress plugin tools that you can use to optimise your website images. The beauty of this application is that it does not compromise the quality of the images when compressing the size.
Go an extra mile, add alternate text (Alt text) to every image, and incorporate the focus keyword in the title. This text can be displayed if the browser fails to load the images. Google bots will also use this text to know the message you are trying to put across using the images.
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SSL Encryption
What is SSL encryption? SSL encryption is a technologically advanced way of securing the connection between the website visitor/user and the host. Numerous reports have proven that Google makes use of HTTPS and SSL certificates to rank websites and determine which ones should be displayed on SERPs.
Concisely, SSL Encryption helps build trust. Virtually all hosting companies such as GoDaddy and Bluehost offer SSL certificates to their clients. The certificate will be installed on the server by the hosting company team on your behalf. Unknown to most people is that this certificate improves SEO and consequently boosts website traffic since the website will be ranked well than those that do not have it.
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Keyword Placement
Keyword placement is one of the SEO practices that have stood the test of time and still helps websites rank better and increase their traffic. Yoast SEO plugin will give you a comprehensive analysis of where and how to use various keywords in your website pages.
Here are additional tips on keyword placement that will boost your onsite SEO.
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- Add a focus keyword on the page and post the title
- Include the focus keyword in the first heading of your website page/post
- Include the focus keyword in at least one subheading
- Include the focus keyword in the meta description
- The focus keyword should be in the first paragraph of your post
- Add an inbound and outbound link in every post/page
Top WordPress Technical SEO Processes You Should Do
The above WordPress SEO will give your brand the muscle it requires to get indexed by Google bots and ranked well in SERPs. However, you need to focus also on technical SEO to catapult your online business to the next level of success.
Here are the top WordPress Technical SEO Processes You Should Do on your website to get ahead of the curve.
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Start by Selecting a Good Website Hosting Company
Having a good website hosting company will save you the time and money that you would have spent transferring your website to a new host after a disappointing experience. There is no shortage of hosting companies today.
Take the time to compare the features of each hosting package and the reputation of the hosting company to get value for money.
Here are some of the characteristics of a good website hosting company.
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- Easy WordPress installation process
- Fast website page loading speed
- SSL certificate
- Staging environment to help you experiment with different ideas such as page formats
- High reliability to ensure your site doesn’t crash due to traffic surges
- 24/7 technical support
Note that page loading speed and SSL certificate are two important factors used by Google to rank websites. SSL certificate not only shows Google that your website is secure but also wins the trust of website visitors as it’s a mark of security.
On the other hand, Google Page Experience Algorithm Update which was introduced in June 2021 focuses on ranking websites that offer exceptional user experience highly. Some of the factors that it considers are load times and stability of the website pages.
A reliable web hosting company will ensure that your website conforms to this algorithm update requirements.
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Use the Right WordPress Theme
Now that you have selected the right hosting company, the next decision that you need to make is which theme to use to create the website.
WordPress has a theme for virtually any business model and niche. The wrong theme will hinder you from realising the full potential of your business.
Below are the reasons why you should steer clear of poorly designed and cheap themes.
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- Results in a slow and unfunctional website
- Reduce conversion rate as it doesn’t compel visitors to buy your product or service
- Tamper with redirects and outbound links
- Compromises the website structure thereby making it difficult for Google bot to understand the site architecture.
- Poor website navigation
All these factors have a direct impact on on-site SEO. Invest in a reputable WordPress theme to create a website that is fully search engine optimised and capable of converting regular website visitors into buying customers.
From experience, themes developed using Genesis and Divi framework are the best. Consult reputable website developers to make an informed decision.
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Install Yoast SEO Plugin
There are several SEO plugins that you can install on your website to optimise content.
Yoast SEO Plugin is preferred by thousands of website developers as it’s user-friendly and in line with the most recent Google SEO best practices.
Use it to carry out the various on-site SEO processes such as;
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- Modifying and optimising post titles and meta description
- Optimise on-site content for the target keywords
- Monitor and analyse on-page SEO
- Monitor open graph tags for social media marketing
- Check the readability of on-page content
- Create robots.txt and sitemap
- Create and manage redirects and many more.
Why hire an SEO company to do the above processes when you can do it without breaking a sweat by installing the Yoast plugin?
However, it’s still recommendable to have a reputable SEO agency on your side to analyse the reports and create robust SEO strategies.
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Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Your WordPress website should be able to provide information to the target audience fast and reliably regardless of their location.
Content Delivery Network (CDN), also referred to as a content distribution network makes it possible for website admins to achieve this goal.
Ideally, a CDN is a series of servers and data centres located in different parts of the world. Their main role is to ensure efficient and fast content distribution to website visitors based on their geographic location.
If you don’t connect your WordPress website to a CDN, requests from users for content are first sent to the website host’s physical location and then relayed back to the users.
This process takes minutes and with the attention spans of online customers getting shorter, you risk losing prospects to your competitors.
When vetting web hosting service providers, inquire about the specific location of their servers. Otherwise, if the servers are located thousands of kilometres away from the regions you service, page load time will be affected negatively. That is, website visitors will have to wait for up to one minute for some of the page elements to load fully.
Unlike before, there is a wide array of CDN solutions and you don’t have to break the bank.
Free options such as Cloudflare are ideal for new businesses that are on a tight budget. As mentioned earlier, page load time is an important ranking factor. The right CDN will ensure that the pages load at rocket speed thereby endearing your website to Google.
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Create and Optimise your Website Robots.txt
One of the benefits of using WordPress is that it comes with a ready robots.txt file. You can also create one using simple SEO plugins such as Yoast. You may not need to change the file but also your business scales up, it’s recommendable to optimise the robots.txt to manage how Google bots crawl your website.
That is, optimise the file to direct the search engines to only crawl and index specific website pages such as the service pages and landing pages. The disallow command will block search engine bots from crawling the selected pages such as login pages.
You can also use it to fly dark to your competitors by using advanced SEO tool bots used by Majestic, Ahrefs, SEMRush and Moz.
Another reason to optimise your WordPress website robots.txt file is to prevent foreign search engines from areas that you don’t service from crawling your website. For example, blocking a Russian based search engine such as Yandex from crawling a website based in Singapore and only offering services to customers based in the country is a good idea to prevent exhausting your crawl budget.
Also, you can optimise the robots.txt file by adding one or multiple sitemap URLs for Google to find. The sitemaps will help search engines crawl and rank your website better.
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Add Structured Data
What is structured data? Simply put, structured data refers to data that is set to follow a specific data model.
It makes it easy for search engine bots to understand the page content. SEO experts usually refer to this form of data as data markup, rich markup or Schema.org.
Unlike before, it’s utterly easy to add Schema.org to a WordPress website but in some instances, you may have to do it by writing an HTML code for theme code, templates, blog posts and pages.
It’s also important to note that Schema.org is not one of Google’s ranking factors but it will increase the chances of your website getting ranked highly in SERPs by helping you win featured snippets.
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Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)
Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source HTML framework that was developed by Google to compete with Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles.
One of the benefits of applying AMP on a WordPress website is that it helps website pages load instantly on mobile.
A few years ago, SEO experts thought AMP was a ranking factor but reports indicate that Google pays less attention to it when ranking websites.
Applying the recommendable technical SEO standards and working on page speed is more effective in increasing the performance of your website than AMP.
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Optimise Images
One of the causes of slow page load time is image file size. Uploading high definition images will add immense value to your website than blocks of text. Website visitors process messages conveyed using visuals such as photos better than text.
However, you need to be careful about the number of images you add to the website pages.
More importantly, the files should be optimised before uploading to prevent slowing down the website pages.
No need to worry if you already uploaded the images, there are servers with advanced capabilities for optimising the images. Kraken.io is one of the best tools for optimising images before uploading them. However, if they are already live on the website, optimise them using Imagify.io.
Try their free versions to get a clear perspective of how they work before you subscribe to the premium options.
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Optimise the .HTACCESS File
Firstly, not all WordPress have a .htaccess file especially if your website is powered by Nginx and IIS servers.
Virtually all websites on Apache-based servers have this file. Optimise it for different reasons such as cache control, 301 redirects, spam blocking, and GZIP compression, to stop directory browsing and expiry dates.
WP Rocket is the best plugin for optimisation related to page speed.
On the other hand, enhance security and do spam blocking optimisations using 7G Firewall .htaccess code. Also, it’s recommendable to create 301 redirects by using the .htaccess file instead of installing a plugin for this purpose.
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Speed Up Website by Caching
Caching refers to the process of storing copies of a website on a cache to enable them to access the pages faster.
The cache is a temporary storage location for website files. Website browsers such as Mozilla and Chrome are designed to cache images, JavaScript, and HTML files to load websites that users frequently visit faster.
On the other hand, DNS servers are tailored to cache DNS records to facilitate faster lookups while CDN servers cache content in a bid to reduce latency.
In the context of WordPress technical SEO, you should use plugins or caching systems to crank up your website speed. Just like image optimisation, caching your website will positively influence your site ranking on Google as well as increase your conversion rate.
Use free tools such as WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache for this purpose, but thereafter use premium tools to get even better results.
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Master How to Use Search Console
Search Console previously referred to as Google Webmasters, is one of the tools you need to improve and monitor your WordPress website’s technical SEO.
The tool is 100% free and generates reports from website traffic from Google. It’s trusted by millions of website admins and so should you scale up your brand to the next level of success.
Go ahead and create your profile and get your WordPress site verified in Search Console, then do the following;
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- Indicate your preferred source of traffic. If a majority of your website traffic is from Singapore, indicate that on your profile
- Submit your WordPress website sitemap
- Check and submit the robots.txt and sitemap files to guide Google bots when crawling your website
- Speed up the speed at which Google crawls and indexes your website pages by manually sending indexing requests
- Check technical errors on your websites such as errors in the structured data, mobile performance, and AMP pages. All the errors will be listed on your Search Console profile. Respond to them promptly to safeguard your site ranking and performance.
- Continuously monitor your WordPress website organic traffic by analysing related metrics such as average website position in SERPs, number of impressions, CTR, and clicks
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Use Google Optimise or Tag Manager
Google Analytics is a reliable tool for monitoring your website, but it’s not sufficient for tracking specific events and optimising site conversion rate. Therefore, it’s recommendable to install Google Optimise or Google Tag Manager with better tracking capabilities.
Such tools can track not only events but also generate reports about form submissions and clicks.
The reports generated will give you detailed insights into your website and enable you to optimise it accordingly.
Finally, most of the technical SEO processes require specialised skills and expertise. One mistake can wreak havoc on your website.
Hire a reputable SEO agency to implement the changes instead of trying to wing everything yourself. Outsourcing will not only ensure that your site SEO is perfect but also free up your schedule for other equally important tasks.
Closing Remarks
If you are planning to create a website in Singapore, WordPress is a great way to go! Make sure that the website design is expertly crafted and tested to ensure all elements are working optimally.
More importantly, avoid all the top 10 WordPress SEO mistakes we have discussed in this article. A regular website audits can also help pinpoint flaws and cushion you from Google penalties.
Get in touch with us today for custom SEO services in Singapore.