3 WordPress SEO Tips to Drive More Traffic
Getting an awesomely designed website and setting it up on WordPress is not that difficult, but unfortunately the job doesn’t really ends there, rather the hard part begins. You have a website up and running, good! And you also have some really useful content from which many people can benefit, again really good! But if your website doesn’t have a proper presence or people are not able to find it then how would they benefit from it? Most importantly, how would you benefit from your website if hardly anyone stops by to have a look at it?
So, while design and content is really important and should be updated time by time – getting traffic becomes sort of a mission of any website owner or a blogger. So, here are 3 WordPress SEO tips to drive more traffic to your site:
- Begin With Your Permalinks
Are you wondering what permalinks are? Oh don’t be scared, permalinks are basically how your URLs appear on the browser bar. For example, they might look like this:
domain-name.com/year/month/day/blog-post-title.html
The flexibility to edit your permalinks the way you want them to appear is what most of the WordPress users enjoy as Blogger does not allow it. However, the above mentioned appearance is not really good because it takes the blog post to appear as it’s a bit too deep down in the folders and the deeper it is the longer it will take for crawlers to index the page. So, here’s the best way in terms of better SEO:
domain-name.com/blog-post-title.html
Customize your permalinks this way and your pages will get indexed faster.
- WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast or All-In-One SEO
If you’re new to WordPress then this is certainly the best SEO Plugin to use and it’s pretty easy to use as well. It also has some some premium features that are not available in a free version but for most of the part the free version gets the job done just alright.
Its user interface is quite simple and available for every blog post or page where you can add your focus keyword, Meta description and even the Meta tags. It also tells you what you can do to completely optimize the post and shows different percentages of SEO.
- Work on the Slug
The slug is the part of the URL that points directly towards a post or a page. Don’t confuse it with the permalink that shows how your URL should appear in the browser bar whereas the slug is how the title of your posts appear in the URL. For instance, the slug in the above link is the “blog-post-title” part.
It generates automatically when you put in a title in the WordPress (adds post menu), however sometimes the results are not really ideal. In that case, you can edit the slug and make it appear cleaner, shorter and to the point. Normally 3-5 words are good for search engines. Lastly, make sure that your slug is relevant to your post and is not missing any important words.
These are all beginner level tips yet many experienced WordPress users don’t pay much attention to them. However, all of these tips are really good from SEO point of view and can help to get more traffic.
And also, do provide quality contents for your readers so that they will come back on a regular basis and even share with their friends via social media.
Interesting! I didn’t know that how the permalink appears can affect how quickly my page gets indexed. I’ll work on making mine more SEO friendly.
Hi Matt Ryan,
Permalink makes your pages easier to read by Google spiders.
To me, that is one of the key point.
Many thanks
Alan