Every tool is only as good as the work you use it for. Your WordPress page is no exception! Set-up could be as simple as it gets, but magic happens when you really take the time to maximize the platform’s inherent utility. Each page has the capacity to go from an obscure pocket of the WordPress community, to a major part of the online commercial sphere with a little backend tweaking. So, what’s it going to take?
For starters, a bit of planning and foresight. Every good WordPress page should know what it wants to be, and we don’t just mean this in an existential sense. Think about the industry you’re in, and what people are looking for. Do you have something that’ll fill their various needs? Take note of that, because you’re going to have to set your entire site up to reflect that.
Once you have your basics down, you build on that foundation with great sustaining content that plays to your brand’s strengths, as well as your target market’s interests. Posting regularly helps keep your brand relevant, and it sure helps that search algorithms love it too. If you’re on top of what your audience likes, you’re pretty much set!
Hosting and installation
Your choice of WordPress hosting and installation matters, and for good reason– this sets the groundwork for the kind of backend customization you get to do, and the overall end response time you get from the servers you use. Uptime is incredibly important, and you want to make sure that you have a readily accessible team available in the rare event of an outage.
A great theme
You’re going to want eyes on your site for the most part, and a great theme does a lot to capture those fleeting bits of attention. Free themes aren’t exactly bad, but investing in a premium option affords you a level of customization you wouldn’t otherwise have. Some themes work better for some industries than others. If you’re a designer, a nice spread that leads to the rest of your portfolio would be nice. If you’re a B2B service provider, other themes might be more appropriate. We’ll leave the rest up to you!
Backend wizardry
Now that your site looks great, it’s time to pop under the hood to take a look at the finicky bits. First, you’re going to need to find the permalink settings on your site and switch them over to ‘post name’ to allow them to index better with actual titles instead of randomized numbers. Try to watch out for your site’s HTTPS status, and switch on over to it if you haven’t yet. Lastly, look into your core pages’ metadata and load it with appropriate keywords for your industry. Keyword research is a bit of a craft unto itself, so don’t be afraid to take your time finding the right ones.
Appropriate content
Your entire content strategy has to revolve around picking the right keywords, and posting related or adjacent material so search algorithms rank your page higher in terms of relevance and authority. We can’t stress it enough, this is important if you want anyone to find you. They’re less likely to do so if you’re past the second page of every search. Post good, relevant topics and do so fairly often.
Regular optimization
You may have done a good job this time, but don’t get cocky! It’s a good idea to look through each of your pages and posts for the month to ensure that all your assets are optimized and correctly tagged.
