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How to Conduct a WordPress On-Site SEO? 5 Practical Tips (+1 Bonus Tactic)

Here are several ways of conducting a WordPress on-site SEO.

If you are administering a website, chances are you’ve already heard of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s not a surprise – to say the least – because SEO is fundamental to the success of a website. Many industry reports proved this statement already:

• Over 90% of all traffic comes from a search engine
• Google alone receives more than 63 thousand searches per second on any given day

In such circumstances, every webmaster has to take care of both the off- and on-site optimization. We will focus on the latter in this post, so keep reading to learn six on-page SEO tips for the WordPress-powered website.

1.   Permalink Structure

Every webpage has its own unique URL which basically represents the digital address of your post. While this feature seems irrelevant to inexperienced webmasters, the truth is that it serves as an important keystone in terms of on-page SEO.

A webpage URL containing keywords is more likely to be recognized by search engines as meaningful and trustworthy. However, it doesn’t mean you can change the slug any way you want it.

In case you make corrections to create an SEO-friendly permalink structure, you also need to add a 301 redirect to avoid broken links. Namely, URL changes without the 301 redirect will make the existing content useless, leading users to the 404 Error page.

2.   Title Tags

Just like the name suggests, title tags are essentially headlines that reveal the topic of your post. A title tag is the first thing users see when they skim through the search results, so it plays a major role in on-page optimization. For this reason, it is crucial to use keywords in the title tag.

Keywords enable search engines to find you much faster: “The best solution is to place a keyword at the beginning of the title tag because that’s how it makes the biggest impact on search engine algorithms. At the same time, keyword-rich title tags help the target audience to figure out the purpose of your posts immediately.”

3.   Headings and Subheadings

WordPress-powered websites give you the opportunity to write headings and subheadings using HTML codes. Headings come with <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> tags and represent another valuable on-page SEO component. How come?

Well, these are content anchors that reveal the theme and its subdivisions. We suggest you use H1 only once because it’s by far the most important heading in the eyes of search engine algorithms. Besides that, you can use H2 and H3 subheadings to describe smaller paragraphs within the article.

There is also the option of adding H4 and H5 tags, but they don’t really make a significant influence on search engine crawlers, so you might as well avoid them.

4.   Content Optimization

You can hear a lot of business people claiming that “content is king” marketing-wise, but you shouldn’t underestimate its SEO potential as well. Each post has to be keyword-rich to increase online discoverability of the WordPress webpage.

You can find dozens of keyword tools available online, including free apps such as Google Keyword Planner. We recommend you use different phrases, long-tail keywords, and synonyms to enrich the content but avoid keyword-stuffing in the process.

While higher keyword density sometimes may help you to improve ranking in Google searches, it can completely ruin user experience. The point of content optimization is to make the perfect balance between the keyword-driven search engine discoverability and content quality. After all, keywords alone won’t make a difference if you don’t provide visitors with exceptional posts.

5.   Meta Description

Meta description is yet another highly important on-site SEO segment that you need to take into account while optimizing a WordPress website. The purpose of this meta element is to give a brief description of the content you are posting.

It displays right under the title tag in Google search results, so the audience can figure out the theme quickly upon reading the two content indicators. For this reason, meta description is supposed to be short and sweet.

Keep it under 160 characters because that’s how much users get to see while scanning the search results. Add keywords to attract more visitors and always use actionable tone and style to convince people to click your link instead of someone else’s.

6.   Image Optimization

Users don’t only search for textual content online but also look for photos on many occasions. This is a good reason to optimize images in your WordPress site by adding the appropriate title and ALT text.

Image titles function just like any other headline, so you only need to write a few words to display the name and explain the content of any given photo. On the other side, ALT text allows you to write a little bit more about the visual content and describe it as if the visitor cannot see it.

This SEO tactic enables search engine crawlers to find the targeted image through keywords and other related phrases that you used to describe the visual element on the page.

Conclusion

SEO is one of the most important factors of website performance, which means it has the power to make or break your entire content creation efforts. It’s a complex process which consists of many different elements, so we decided to concentrate only on one of those components here.

In this post, we showed you six on-page SEO tips for the WordPress-powered website. Do you already use any of these tactics? Do you know other website ranking boosters? Let us know in comments if you have any suggestions or inquiries – we will be glad to answer you!