WordPress Manual: 6 Secrets of Optimizing WordPress Site

When talking about WordPress, one of the most popular topics of all time is “optimization”. In this day and age, optimizing your website is no longer an option, it is a must. While a lot of people assume that they need to be an expert to optimize a WordPress website, it’s completely wrong! Continue with the series of WordPress Manual, here we’ll take a look at the basic tips that every web owner should at least be aware of to optimize their sites.

It’s so simple, as there are only 6 words that you should always bear in mind:

Content – Theme – Backlink – Permalink – Image – Social network

Now let’s start the journey!

1. Content is King

In the digital realm, content is undoubtedly the most important factor.  Especially when it comes to creating a steady and sustainable stream of traffic for your WordPress site, you can’t afford to leave it out of your tool box. Good content will help your online presence to increase search rankings, reaches and generate qualified leads. But, wait? How can we define the term “good content” in this situation?

Ideally, according to our WordPress manual, the text of your WordPress post should contain “focus keyword” that highlights the general theme. To determine the proper keyword, a common trick for you is to use the searching statistics obtained from “Keyword Planner” tool of Google Adwords.

However, please make sure that you are generating content primarily for visitors, not for search engine, so it should be understandable and readable. That’s good if your writing is SEO-friendly, but that will be much better if it is customer-oriented with valuable information. The goal of WordPress optimization is to make your site not only on the top of searching results, but also on the top of customers’ mind! Hence, we advise you to use trendy keyword, simple terms, clear sentence, short paragraph that targets the right segment of customers. If you are still confused about what to do, what about installing some useful plugins like Yoast SEO? Believe me, these plugins will certainly become your close assistant when making the “king content”.

 2. Choose a SEO-friendly theme

There are plenty of interesting things to talk about WordPress themes. Good news for you is that the online market for WordPress theme is now increasingly dynamic, providing you with thousands of choices on hundreds of topics, such as education, eCommerce, sport, etc. However, the bad news is that you start to “get lost” among those stunning creations with not-so-different features. So are there any optimal ways to choose the exact theme you need? And next, are there any ways for you to make sure your purchased theme is SEO-friendly and worth your money? Luckily, the answer from WordPress manual is “Yes”.

Be very careful when reading the theme’s features and testing its demo. For instance, a fast performing theme is good for Google ranking, so go for the one that satisfies this criterion. Moreover, it is compulsory for your theme to be responsive. It means that your WordPress theme can smoothly adjust the layout across different screen sizes and devices, from the big screen of PC to the medium screen of tablet, or the small one of a mobile phone. This results from the fact that a significant number of web traffic is generated from mobile and other handheld devices, so don’t miss this chance to make your WordPress site stand out.

3. Exchange backlinks

There is a common trick that several popular WordPress site are using: exchanging backlinks with each other. All you need to do is searching for relevant websites relating to your topics, then when writing your own content, remember to link between pages within your website. So fast, so easy, but so effective, isn’t it?

However, don’t do it with all relevant websites that you come across. You had better choose the prestigious ones, which often have high page ranking. Please avoid using certain types of backlinks that violate Google’s guideline (eg.: advertorials, backlinks generated by bots, footer backlinks, etc.)

4. Avoid long permalinks

One point you should never forget is using a short and understandable permalink. For example, instead of http://digipieces.com/page-id?learning8782734/, use http://digipieces.com/5-favorite-books-learning-wordpress/. As you may realize, an perfect URL often contains keywords that explain your article, and they are obviously easy to read by both human and search engine. As a result, your WordPress site will have more chance to rank higher in search engines.

In fact, Google has revealed that it is the best for you to use three to five words in the slug of your permalink. Additional words will unfortunately be weighed less and may even appear spammy. So keep your permalinks short, simple and don’t forget to mention the important keywords first!

5. Set good names for your images

Most people easily agree that “Content is King”, but visuals are also of great importance. In fact, in the calculation of Google ranking, images play a crucial role. Every time searching for something, do you notice that Google tends to display both text and images on the search results page? That’s the thing you had better note down.

As the relevant images contained in the post itself, they are directly linked to the corresponding page. And now the same rules for permalinks may be applied. Just try to add some keywords of a specific subject in your file name, and use the alt tag and title tag for your images. These actions may look simple and require almost no effort, but they do provide your WordPress site with better usability and optimization.

6. Connect with social network

Just like authors who write a book, you’ll need to spend just as much, and even more time promoting your content than actually writing it. 80% of marketers are already promoting their content in social media, so why are you the exception?

You don’t need to share all the links from your website to your social platform. To make this work on social media, link only to the very best content of your WordPress site. If you are not sure which one will attract the largest number of audience, what about waiting a few hours after posting to read the comments before you promote posts on social media? Each time someone clicks one of your links and enjoys the content they get, they’ll be more likely to automatically click the next link you send, thus increase the level of optimization.

Wrapping Up

You don’t have to be an advanced user, professional marketer or developer to optimize your WordPress site. The list above will go on, but I am pretty sure that the 6 aforementioned tricks from WordPress manual is the most basic, easy-to-apply and don’t take you much time and effort. Just try it right away to see the differences in your website rankings!