How WordPress helps you rank content in Google
Unless you are completely new to the concept of website creation and blogging, then you likely already know that WordPress is the most popular and powerful CMS on the internet today. Not only does it run the majority of sites on the internet today, WordPress also makes the process of content creation and marketing quite simple as well. WordPress handles SEO efficiently.
With there now being more than a billion active sites on the internet, it’s now harder than ever to rank near the top of the search results. This is even more competitive and time-consuming for new sites and blogs that don’t have high-quality backlinks and indexed content in place. Just like how WordPress makes it easy to install a WP theme and go live with a nice looking site, the platform also has access to millions of WP plugins as well. Each of these can be used in a number of ways, but some of them are built for use with SEO goals in mind as well.
To help with this process, today we are going to highlight some of the best methods for using WordPress to improve site rankings in Google.
Go with a Reliable WordPress Hosting Solution
While everyone is focusing their efforts on conversion optimization, design tweaks, choosing the right ecommerce tools for your WordPress site, content creation and SEO, one of the most important factors of ranking a site in Google might be getting overlooked. Which is site speed and uptime.
Without a quality web hosting provider, your site might be down or running very slow. This is something Google actively tracks and if they find that your site isn’t at max performance, it can quickly get penalized and pushed down in the rankings.
If you want to find a reliable hosting solution, all you need to do is start asking around and see what the most common names are that keep popping up. This can be done by asking your online friends and bloggers, running a search on Google, or simply making your way through any of the various review sites online.
You can see a perfect example of such WordPress hosting reviews here. It’s also not just about looking at a hosting solution and writing a review, it’s much deeper than that. A true hosting review will consist the data/server management info, server speed and uptime, age of customer, and much more. All of which you will find in the example above.
Sites like these are great for finding quality hosting solutions, not only because they list a ton of information on each web host out there, but also because they focus on providing site visitors with reviews, ratings and testimonials from real hosting clients.
After doing the proper research, make sure you go with a trusted hosting solution that has millions of customers, and thousands of positive reviews. Don’t go with the cheapest plan possible, as this is usually just a few pennies being saved and could be the difference between your site being up all the time, or not.
Take Advantage of the Best WP SEO Tools
There are many reasons why WordPress is great, but some of the most obvious reasons are that it’s free, and there is no need to have any technical or design skills. The same is true for SEO when creating a site with WP as well.
Instead of needing to understand HTML and how to write sitemaps and Google meta tags, one can simply install a WP SEO plugin and have most of the dirty work already done for them. Another benefit of WordPress plugins, is that many of them are free to use, and easy to implement and use right out of the box. One of the most popular plugins is Yoast SEO, which is free to install and very simple to use.
For new and established bloggers, SEO plugins can help with:
- Make sure the length of your titles are correct
- Showing you how to use the best keywords in descriptions and titles
- Giving you a preview of how your listing will look in to Google
- Having the option to set up ‘no-index’ and other commands for posts
In addition to Yoast SEO, there are many other premium alternatives out there as well. These are more for advanced bloggers that have a lot of traffic and are making money with their sites. The big difference between these premium market plugins, is that they often connect to another paid service that help with the analyzing of your site content, while also making recommendations in the process.
Just remember that SEO is constantly evolving, as Google’s algorithms get updates and tactics that once worked can suddenly get you penalized. By subscribing to some of the top podcasts about SEO, you’ll be able to stay in the loop.
Permalinks and Using Clean URLs
When someone starts a website or blog, they just want to create content and make sure other people are reading it. This is one of the biggest misconceptions about websites and blogs for anyone just gettingstarting. There are many factors that come into play with SEO and getting traffic from search results – and site structure, permalinks and clean URLs are just a set of them.
For the average person, these phrases are all a foreign language. The good news is, once again, WordPress uncomplicates this process and makes it super easy for site owners to just click a few buttons and make any recommended changes to their sites.
Whether it’s to shorten the URLs of your site, set up categories within the URL, or even creating a sitemap, all of this can be done right within WP without needing to touch any lines of code. You can see an example of how this would look within WordPress, and can click here to actually walk through an advanced guide on how to set all of these up within your own dashboard area.
The important thing to remember here is that WordPress makes nearly all aspects of starting and running a site pretty easy. Not just for content creation and management, but also for SEO as well.
How to Rank Higher and Faster in Google with WordPress
Now that we’ve covered some of the best ways to start using WordPress to create a site and rank content in Google, it’s time for you to start putting these methods into place.
Content creation, promotion, backlinks, and social shares are all going to play a pivotal role in this process, but you will also need to take advantage of SEO plugins and tools along the way.
Be sure to run through the list of recommendations we’ve laid out for you above, and make sure you have each of them in place. Also don’t forget to invest some time in premium WordPress plugins and themes, as these are often a great investment in your site and its overall SEO success as well.
