How To Ensure Your WordPress Site Ranks Highly
WordPress is by far the most common Content Management System. It is also one of the best when it comes to SEO and user experience. As such, optimizing it to rank highly is something every business owner should take seriously. When your site is appearing on the first page or at the top of Search Results for your keywords, you are better placed to reach a wider and more diverse audience. Our Free Pre-Built WordPress Websites would be a great place to start building your WordPress website.
But how do you ensure your WordPress site ranks highly for your preferred keywords? Here are 5 ways to achieve it.
· Optimize your content
Content is everything! Creating the best content is a sure way to back up your keywords and ensure you benefit maximumly from the search intent. When a user keys in a search query on their browser, they are looking for the most engaging, impactful and trustworthy answers to what they need. You should focus on creating unique content for your site. It should also be well-optimized so that users can easily access it on any device and get the message in the right format. Creating unique content and optimizing it for your targeted keywords will help your site overcome competition and rank highly, even when you are in direct competition with well-established businesses.
· Employ a solid site structure
Optimizing your site structure will help users access your content and understand it more easily. Moreover, when search engines periodically crawl your site for indexing, they will more easily understand your content, understand which product pages are the most important and index them accordingly. Always ensure you have well-defined categories as well as tags. Tags and categories that are related to your targeted keyword make it easier for search engine bots to understand your content better.
· Always check on site speed
Speed is one of the key matrices of ranking. Sites that load within a very short time are increasingly preferred during indexing and ranking. For your WordPress site, increasing the site speed makes visitors more likely to visit again, convert, engage, recommend your brand or share the content to their networks. All those aspects of user engagement considerably increase your chances of ranking favourably in search engines. Furthermore, when a high number of visitors consistently share your content, search engines and social media sites will ‘perceive’ you as an authoritative brand and hence prioritize your content whenever you publish.
· Secure your site
Search engines have come to value cybersecurity more than most in the recent past. Without that ‘HTTPS’ tag, you will find it increasingly difficult to turn your site and your content into anything worthy. Security goes far and beyond that but that is what you should implement first. Always ensure your site is secured with SSL Certificates. They help encrypt communication on your website and prevent hackers from accessing data shared between you and your site visitors.
· Consider mobile accessibility
More than 70% of websites and indexed content is accessed through mobile devices. When optimizing your WordPress site, therefore, always ensure you place a premium on mobile usability. By making your site mobile friendly (fast and easily accessible on mobile devices), you are already reaching at least 70% of your target audience. This figure is expected to go up as mobile devices gain prominence. What’s more, search engines have come to prioritize mobile-friendly sites!
Always keep in mind that you are competing with millions of websites across the world. Attention to detail is therefore important when it comes to ranking. Do not allow search engines to take your site for granted because of the very basic issues that you can easily fix.
