You’ve spent hours crafting the most interesting and informative blog highlighting your unique business. Perfected over editing, your blog is officially ready to go live. You upload your blog to your website, and it’s time to sit back, relax and observe the hundreds of leads through website traffic. But wait. It’s been a week, and Google Analytics shows the only consumers of your brilliant content have been yourself, your dog, and your mom. If only there were a way to improve your blog post SEO through WordPress! As experts in this area, we will walk you through our Top 3 Tips to increase your SEO ranking.
What is SEO, and Why is it Important?
To fully understand what you are trying to improve, let’s begin by defining SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
It is a process of increasing your website’s free, organic traffic to help your website’s rank and visibility in search engines such as Google. Optimizing your SEO makes you more likely to reach the audience actively searching for information or products connected to yours.
In addition, an organic ad can appear more trustworthy to a potential customer than a paid ad space. Improving your blog SEO can benefit any business as it is a free, painless, and effective way to increase website traffic, generate more leads, and improve conversions.
You can boost your blog SEO using these 3 Tytanium key pointers:
1. Change Permalinks
A permalink is the full, permanent URL attached to any post, page, or content on your website. A permalink includes your domain name, www.tytanium.com, and a “slug.” A slug appears after the domain and is an effective way to summarize your content’s main focus. This allows the user to understand what they are clicking on. A shorter slug is far more attractive and sharable than a long URL. For example, if you read a blog post titled “Improve Your Blog Performance Through SEO” on the Tytanium Ideas website, your permalink may read www.tytaniumideas.com/improve/blog/seo. A simple permalink allows the reader to understand and share the content easily.
However, your viewer is not the only one reading your permalink. Search engines also read and analyze the permalink’s content. Search engines like Google read permalinks to determine whether your post or page’s content applies to certain search inquiries. For this reason, creating an SEO-friendly URL is critical to a blog’s ranking and exposure. A URL becomes SEO-friendly when it is short, sweet, and to the point.
You can easily change a permalink through WordPress by heading to your dashboard. Click settings, then permalinks, and select “custom structure.” Here, you can add your personalized, to-the-point permalink.
2. Utilize Image Alt Text
You can also optimize your SEO score using image alt text. Image alt text is a secondary description of an image on your website. Much like permalinks, image alt text benefits both the consumer search engines. For consumers, it can help readability for the visually impaired by adding the picture description.
Search engines use image alt text to rank a site and determine whether or not your image has the information searched by others. Effective use of image alt text can increase the chances of an image within a blog appearing in relevant image search results.
When writing image alt text, it is important to use multiple descriptive and specific words about the image and blog content. Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing image alt text:
- Add context that is relevant to the topic of the post, page, or content
- Keep alt text under 125 characters
- Incorporate target keyword in alt text
- Jump right into the description
- Don’t begin alt text with “picture of” or “image of”
An effective use of image alt text can help search engines to understand what the images are about in addition to the website as a whole. To add image alt text to your photo through WordPress, use SEO plugins.
3. Use SEO Plugins
WordPress offers tens of thousands of plugins to improve website functionality with SEO tools not included in the software.
Our website design team’s favorite is Yoast. Yoast is the #1 SEO plugin that helps websites rank higher in search results. Yoast SEO features automated SEO improvements, advanced XML sitemaps, title and meta description templating, and creates faster loading times.
For content writing specifically, Yoast has many features, including SEO analysis, readability analysis, and insight tools to help create the perfect, highly-ranked content.
Plugins are a great way to enhance, analyze and optimize your SEO. To add a plugin to WordPress, simply download and install your plugin of choice and begin immediately improving your SEO.
Need Someone To Handle SEO For You?
We know all this marketing, website development, and advertisement stuff can be tricky. That’s why we’re here to help! We work with numerous clients in many industries and have found a process that delivers results for everyone. Let us prove it to you!