SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of rules and guidelines for optimizing your website in order to achieve higher ranking in search engines. In today’s digital landscape SEO and SEO marketing is more important than ever. Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems. And you want people to find your site, right? Then you need to get your site as high up as possible in the search engine results!

1. Install a SEO plugin

The first best (and obvious) thing you can do to improve SEO on your site is installing a SEO plugin. With a SEO plugin you get features like defining page title, description and keywords for each page. The plugin should also be able to generate search engine sitemaps.

Yoast SEO is the largest and most known SEO plugin at the WordPress plugin market today. It has a premium version but you get most of the functionality in the free version. With Yoast SEO you can define keywords, customize page title, meta description, and it also analyzes your post content and gives you feedback on how to improve.

2. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

Today more than half of all website visits all over the world happen through a mobile device. Google picked this trend up already in 2015 and changed its algorithm to rank mobile-friendly sites much higher. Pages not optimized for mobile are today filtered out or seriously down-ranked. Also in Google has announced that they will switch to mobile-first indexing for all websites in September 2020.

Make sure your WordPress theme is responsive (styling that adjusts according to screen size). You can easily check it by dragging the right edge of your browser on your computer inwards. The content should start to stack on top of each other and the main menu should convert into a mobile menu button. No content should ever be hidden to the right “outside the screen”, behind a horizontal scrollbar. If your site is rocking a non-responsive design that isn’t mobile-friendly get a new theme as soon as possible!

You can use Google’s free tool to confirm that your site is mobile-friendly: Google’s mobile-friendly test. Type in your URL and click Test. If it reports back that it’s mobile-friendly, you’re good to go!

3. Add SSL

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) are protocols for authenticated and encrypted communication between two computers or servers. To put it very simply adding SSL to a site is making it more secure. It makes your site get https:// instead of http:// in the URL – and it adds the “secure lock” icon found in most known browsers.

You should never enter your credit card details or other sensitive information to a site that is unsecured (http://). Today most browsers will actually alert you when visiting an unsecure site. And accordingly Google’s search algorithms favor secure sites.

The process of adding SSL to your site is investing in a SSL certificate. This is basically a file that you need to install on your website’s server. A SSL certificate is usually offered by your hosting provider, either for free or for a small fee. 

4. Improve page speed

The speed your website loads is among the most significant success factors websites face in SEO. Google and other search engines measure and factor in the speed in their ranking algorithm.

There are many ways to improve page speed and it depends on your site. Use Google’s free test tool PageSpeed Insights to analyze your site and get a detailed report on what you can do to improve.

Common things (but the most easy to fix) that drag down the page speed are;

• Large images. Make sure to optimize and rescale images to minimize their file size as much as possible or use alternative image files types. If you have a good image editing software like Photoshop, use its functions to export images to lower file size without loss of quality. There are multiple online image compressors you can use as well.
• External resources. Your site might request resources such as external font libraries (e.g. GoogleFonts), or other scripts or styles for site features, social media, or integrations. The problem is that your website has to wait for all of them to answer before the page can be rendered. See if you can avoid these – follow the hints provided by Google PageSpeed Insights.
• Too many large script and style files. A common problem with WordPress is that there can often be a lot of styles and script files. WordPress has its own, the theme has its own, and any plugins you have each have their own. In total it would be a lot of requests for styles and scripts. If this is a serious problem on your site, consider cutting down on un-used plugins or find ways to minimize these files if they are large in file size.
• Slow hosting provider. If you cheapen out on your hosting provider, you risk ending up with a provider that serve sites slow. The only way to go around this is investing in a good hosting provider.

A good strategy to increase website performance and reducing load times is using a cache plugin. 

5. Good URL structure

A website’s URL structure matters. It serves as a way to inform the search engines of how important the different parts of your content is.

As minimum you should activate “pretty permalinks” in WordPress. In WordPress admin go to Settings > Permalinks. When you install WordPress it defaults to “Plain” URL’s, which look something like this: https://domain.com/?p=123. This is a no-go for SEO! I recommend choosing “Post name”. This generates a slug version of the post’s title in the URL.

Keep in mind that you can edit the post’s URL slug. Search engines prefer shorter URL’s so keep the number of words in the slug to 5 or less. It’s also a good idea to include the keywords you want to rank for in the slug.

Search engines’s crawlers that read your site also look at the number of “directories” or the number of “/” away from the domain. What I mean by this is that an URL domain.com/fantastic-post is considered more important than domain.com/subfolder/fantastic-post, and that in turn is considered more important than domain.com/subfolder/anothersubfolder/fantastic-post.

Place your most important pages just one “directory” away from your domain (e.g. domain.com/fantastic-post). Avoid having URL structures down more than three levels.

6. Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console

How can you know how to improve SEO if you don’t track your current ranking and traffic? Google has two free and fantastic tools for SEO: Google Analytics and Google Search Console (previously named Google Webmaster Tools).

Google Analytics (GA) is a web service that tracks and reports website traffic. With this tool you get a lot of information about your site’s traffic, where they come from, how they found you, how long they spend on your site, and much, much more.

Google Search Console (GSC) is a web service that gives you information about the visibility of your site in search engines. With GSC you can track what people searched for before they clicked on your site, and how high in the search results your site appears.

All you need for both services is a Google account. When you create a new profile for your website on both tools, you get a code that you need to add to your website. This is easily solved by using a free plugin that inserts the GA and GSC codes, or by simply editing the theme header file. You will find plenty of guides online about how to do this.

After you have set up Google Search Console for your site you should submit your site’s sitemap. Your site should have a sitemap provided by your SEO plugin (see checklist item 1). Find its URL and submit this to Google Search Console. This makes it easier for Google to crawl your pages.

7. Optimize your writing

Finally keep in mind that search engines also look at how you write your content. The length of posts, use and frequency of (key)words, links, and content structuring such as subheadings. These days all that really matters is quality. Getting higher ranking by spamming keywords and dummy articles no longer work – they can actually hurt you.

The main takeaway here is to write quality content. There are some tweaks and guidelines you can keep in mind though. If you are interested in this topic there are pleny of litterature on how to copywrite (marketing) and how to write SEO optimized.