9 - 5 Things You Can Do Every Month to Optimize Your WordPress SEO

5 Things You Can Do Every Month to Optimize Your WordPress SEO

WordPress pages are a major investment in terms of time and effort, but ultimately pay off in conversions if you play your cards right. There are some misconceptions over the role websites play, and one may understandably believe that a page is but a static asset you leave up while you do engage in more involved business processes. This is a mistake that might sell the value of your online storefront short.

Your page is the world’s window to your brand, and it’d do you a lot of good to take advantage of its built-in functionality. WordPress has a wide range of SEO options that allow you to stand out in searches. These however, are not a magic bullet– they do require a bit of skill to work. SEO optimization is a finicky thing, but ultimately worth investing in.

If you pop in under the hood, you could find little nooks and crannies like fields for metadata among others. Those are there for a reason! Filling those sections in should help your WordPress page index better, allowing people to search you with relative ease. While those are fairly static, Google’s search algorithm also has crawlers constantly ranking every single site they see, and you could get in good with them by constantly updating your site with relevant content.

Now, if this sounds like a weird, clingy relationship, that’s because it is. You try to make yourself look good to grab their attention. When you do finally have it, you then need to keep things fresh with new content. There’s a rhythm to it, and if you keep at it long enough, it’ll all become second nature to you. That said, what are some steps we could take to ensure proper SEO rankings?

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Proper slugs and URL permalinks

By default, your page’s URL structures are an incomprehensible string of numbers– this makes it a complete pain to index, let alone search. By changing the permalink settings on your site’s backend to ‘post name.’ From there, you could then change your WordPress page’s individual URLs to something a lot catchier– with actual words! Do this early on, so you don’t have to worry about building your SEO ranking back up, as this resets your stats.

Make use of a good SEO plugin

There are so many rules to SEO that it only makes sense to cram most of them into a purpose-built plugin that allows you to keep tabs on keyword density and word choice. Yoast, for example, is a popular option that allows you to keep everything in check as you craft your content. Sure, you could do all of this yourself, but it doesn’t hurt if you’re looking to cross reference your material for good SEO practices.

Do regular keyword searches

Try and establish a working pool of keywords at first. Stay close to your industry, and you should be in the clear. You could bring up a tool like SEM Rush– this’ll allow you to view how hot your keywords are, and could possibly suggest less dense search terms that don’t see as much competition. It’s a careful balancing act, and you can learn to adapt your content periodically to ensure it follows search trends.

Review top ranking searches

Now that you’re used to keyword tools, you may want to take a second look at the most popular keywords for your particular industry. The top search results for every keyword are likely up there for a reason, and you could use them as a reference point for best practices. Learn from the best, then be better!

Fix your title tags and meta descriptions

These are a bit sneakier, but for each single page and post, there are little fields for tags and meta descriptions. You absolutely need to fill these out so crawlers could index them better. They’re fairly easy to gloss over, so you may want to review your tags periodically.