The World Wide Web accommodates 4 billion active users from around the world. This presents a tempting opportunity to businessmen, marketers, influencers, or basically everyone who’s looking to market their brand, products, and services through websites, social media, etc.
However, putting up your content online without a strategy will lead you to no good. You need to be able to rank high in search engine results to have good click-through rates and provide killer and engaging content to grab your audience’s attention and increase the chances of a purchase.
Therefore, strategies, such as that of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), have the potential to attract traffic to your website and boost your leads. Here, we present a guide on how to top SEO results through your WordPress website.
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Choose A Reliable Host
Your hosting provider plays a vital role in SEO. Search engines, such as Google, take into account the site’s loading speed, its downtime and the distance between the visitors and servers and ranks accordingly.
If you’re a beginner, go for the hosts which have a reputation for reliable performance. Remember, Google offers HTTPS sites a boost so you may need to consider that. However, if you already have a website up but are not satisfied with your host, you can always switch to the more reliable, faster ones.
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Logo Optimization
A logo is an iconic image for your business or company. Now with Schema.org—introduced by Google—designers can specify which image search engines use as the company’s logo. However, the IMG tag with your particular company name and location benefits just as much.
An important factor to consider here is the use of colors in your logo design. Using only transparent and white areas in your logo image won’t be visible to Google’s Knowledge Graph because it uses a white background itself. Therefore, incorporate some colors into your company logo so that Google can identify it.
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However, the use of colors should be such that the logo is legible and understandable. The classic black against white provides good contrast, however, using colors can reflect your brand and your company’s message.
Moreover, you can design your logo according to the culture of your target audience. Colors have important associations with the culture of a particular region. For example, the use of red is associated with elation in China; creativity and life in India; and danger and anger in Japan.
Incorporating A Responsive Design
Designers need to be mindful of how their website’s design will alter on various devices. For example, approximately 63% of the global population uses mobile phones. Will your design look and perform well on mobile phones? Therefore, it is recommended that you incorporate a design that adapts according to each device.
Responsive designs are crucial in SEO as Google uses them as a ranking factor. Responsive design does well in SERPs and is something all designers must consider. WordPress users can easily ensure their design is responsive by choosing a theme that can support it. Go through every theme’s SEO features and use the one which suits you.
Image Source: Behance
Optimizing the Images
Every website designer knows the importance of quality images for their site. Not only does an image provides context and appeal, but it also breaks up the text and increases readability. In other words, images play a vital role in SEO.
To ensure you get good results in SERPs, be mindful of the quality of your images. High-quality, crisp images will add to the aesthetics of your site. Moreover, the size of the image is an important factor for loading speed for your site. It is recommended that your images have a balance between the lowest file size and acceptable quality. around 1500-2000 pixels and don’t exceed 500 KB for optimal load time.
Furthermore, adding alt-text’ and filenames to your images also boosts the SEO. These are specifically used by crawlers to make sense of your images and content. Brownie points if you incorporate keywords in the images!
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External And Internal Links
Google looks at how well your site is connected internally as well as externally to other valuable, high-quality sites. Internal linking helps improve user navigation throughout your site, while external links point to other resourceful information. These links are valuable to crawlers as they make sense of your site’s value through these links. Using relevant and high-quality sites as external links to your site help in SERPs ranking.
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However, using irrelevant references and including links only to promote services a=or products will affect your rankings negatively.
Use Of Keywords
A keyword is a short phrase that describes the content on your page. The concept of keywords revolves around the notion that many people will search for these phrases in search engines while looking for specific posts. For instance, choosing the keyword ‘fishing for beginners’ for an article that enlists fishing tips for beginners.
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Keywords can be placed strategically in the title, content, and headings—however, overusing the keywords or ‘keyword stuffing’ is a definite No-No for optimization as search engines consider it spammy.
AMPs In SEO
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a webpage’s lightweight version that is void of the elements that otherwise can make a webpage slow. These include third-party Javascript, cookies, etc. Because a webpage is stripped of these elements, it becomes faster, which is beneficial for users with slow connections or who don’t like waiting for pages to load.
AMPs are an open-source initiative by Google that allows a webpage to be displayed with Quick Read Carousel in the search results and, of course, a good ranking in SERPs.
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These were our top tips for boosting your SERP results. As the bottom-line, we advise creating appealing and meaningful content that the user can benefit from. Creating content that adds value to someone’s life will be beneficial in your overall SERP rating. Follow these tips and hope for the best. May the odds forever be in your favor!