12 WordPress SEO Tricks to Increase Your Business Website Traffic

We all want websites that are search engine friendly. But sometimes when you’re busy, it’s easy to post a new blog post and move on to the next task on your to-do list.

Over time, this can really hurt your SEO efforts. That’s why I’ve created this short list of things you can do to improve your WordPress SEO.

Schedule these tasks on your calendar to get your blog traffic skyrocketing!

1) Post new stuff regularly

Google has a bias towards fresh content. Part of Google’s algorithm analyzes how new the content is and gives preference to the most recent results. Therefore, it is important to publish original content on a regular basis.

Also size matters when it comes to content. Typically, longer content ranks higher than shorter content. So strive to make your post at least 500 words long.

2) Create a list of keywords

If SEO is a priority, you’ll want to develop a list of keywords. This is basically a list of keywords and phrases that describe your products and services. These keywords should include words from the search terms that are most likely to be used to find your offerings online.

Google has some amazing tools to make keyword research easy, like Google Search, Google Suggest, Google Instant, and Google Wonder Wheel.

Tip: If you want a really targeted keyword list, hire an SEO expert!

3) Install an SEO plugin

This will allow you to set custom keyword-rich titles and Meta descriptions for your posts for search engines.

A couple of popular SEO plugins to consider are All in One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast.

Again, this is something that your web designer or SEO professional can easily install for you.

4) Manual submission to search engines

What good is a site if no one can find it? That’s why getting listed on Google and other popular search engines and directories is one of the most effective ways to get free targeted traffic to your website.

You’ve probably seen many autosubmit services where you pay a small fee to have your site submitted to hundreds of search engines. Not only will these services not help you, they may harm you.

Almost all of these free directories never send a real visitor to your website and getting links from them can affect your ability to rank in real search engines like Google and Bing.

The best practice is to manually submit your site to search engines yourself. WordPress makes it easy once you set up an account with Google, Bing, and Yandex Webmaster Tools.

If you’re not sure, ask your webmaster or SEO specialist to set up these accounts.

5) Add tags to your posts

WordPress, right out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Tags features are one of those SEO friendly features that you should take advantage of.

Be sure to add relevant keyword-rich tags to every post you publish.

6) Leave comments on other blogs

Start linking more to other people’s posts on your blogs and encourage them to link back to you.

One search engine factor that Google considers is backlinking. A website that has more backlinks is considered more of an authority site and gets higher rankings.

7) Block spam comments

When people leave comments on your blog, it counts as content for Google. So if you have a crafting website and someone leaves 5 comments about “cheap enhancement pills” that ruin your keyword relevancy and hurt your ranking.

Therefore, blocking spam comments from being posted on your blog will improve your SEO, as well as make your actual blog readers happy.

8) Internal link

An easy way to get more traffic is to add internal links to your blog posts.

For example, if you have an article on how to overcome your resistance to blogging, at the bottom of that article you can post links to “Other Related Articles You May Enjoy”: 4 Content Marketing Trends for Business Owners in 2017 and other related items. WordPress SEO by Yoast does this automatically for you, as you can see at the bottom of this post.

9) Use alternate image tags

For every image you use in your post, be sure to add the Alt tag to help them rank better in image searches. This is another great place to put relevant keywords.

Google has an image search feature that works pretty much the same way as searching for web pages with keywords and relevance. So adding Alt tags helps Google find and include your images when someone does an image search.

10) Modify blog post titles

If you’ve quickly written titles for your blog posts before, take the time to review them before posting.

Your blog post titles are vitally important to your SEO rankings, so compare the keywords used against your keyword list and make your blog titles more keyword rich.

11) Add Social Sharing Buttons

When Google sees that a blog post gets a lot of posts and shares on social media, it increases the ranking of that blog post.

So making it easy for readers to share your posts helps others to tweet and share your great content.

12) Update your theme

Not all WordPress themes are SEO friendly and free WordPress themes may be hurting your search engine rankings because of this.

Having a premium WordPress theme ensures that search engines index your content, as the developers have taken special time to optimize all aspects in terms of security and SEO.

It’s smart to make sure your theme programming isn’t overloaded with inefficient code that slows down page load times. We find this a lot with purchased themes and that is why we only provide custom designed and built WordPress themes for our clients.