WordPress is easy and fun to use, so it’s no surprise that in 2014 it was reported that nearly 75 million sites worldwide were on the platform. One thing many owners of these websites have in common is their need for a good, organic search ranking strategy. Whether this advice comes in the form of 1v1 consultations with a top SEO trainer, or a specialist who’s a WordPress SEO expert, nailing down a path to page 1 will guarantee tons of targeted web traffic.
As a long-time San Francisco SEO specialist and user of about two dozen different WP sites, I’m happy to share these 3 SEO secrets I learned over the years. Check them out below, implement them on your website and track the results. If you need help with your WordPress site’s rankings, feel free to get in touch with me at corttafoya@gmail.com or fill out the form at the bottom of the page.
WordPress SEO Tip #1
This is one you definitely learn from experience. If you’re aware of how PageRank works, you know the majority of it starts at your home page and flows down through your site. So if you make a web page that you want to rank well, put it in your top level navigation.
This becomes a problem when you try to write a click baity title tag. Long title tags won’t fit well on your menu.
The solution is to install the WordPress SEO plugin called Yoast, which allows you to keep short title tags for your menu, but display any title tag you want in search results.
WordPress Expert Tip #2
Limit the number of links in your footer! Not only do these no longer help with rankings because Google devalues them, they may dilute PageRank. If you have excessive About style pages, FAQ pages, terms and services pages, these are not URLs that need PageRank. Try consolidating them like Moz (a SEO industry leader) suggests in this post.
WordPress SEO Tip #3
Adding keywords to your URLs is a good thing when you’re targeting a phrase. Google reads URLs and if the text matches part of the searchers query, your page will be more likely to come up. It also makes sense to silo your content – putting sub pages in the right parent pages.
WordPress makes all of this easy by allowing you to designate a parent page (if you want to) for any new pages you make.
The result will by something like this: I made a Google Analytics consulting parent page, and a sub page to all about Google Analytics training. Here are the URLs for both –
/google-analytics-consultant-san-francisco-bay-area/
/google-analytics-consultant-san-francisco-bay-area/google-analytics-training-san-francisco-bay-area/.
Google not only reads the keywords, but understands the pages and content are related, which helps the search engine rank them for the appropriate queries. It looks a little redundant, but because Google understand how parent page URLs attach to sub page URLs, it’s not violating any quality guidelines.
For more help with your WordPress SEO, visit this page or fill out the form below. Thanks for reading.
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