You don’t have to be an SEO Wizard or even be able to code to enhance and intro your SEO resulting in a good google rankings.
1. WordPress site speed
The speed of your site is extremely important, if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, more often than not, the user will just leave or click onto something else, but the speed factor is mostly important to Google.
Despite what people may think, Google doesn’t reward fast sites – they penalise slow ones. So if your site is appears to be slow, doing what you can to speed it up can remove the penalty and improve your rankings.
There are lots of great websites you can use to test your website speed, a great one is Pingdom. However, it’s more accurate to check your speed in Google Analytics, if you have it set up
To find your site speed in Google Analytics go to Behaviour → Site Speed → Overview.
Here are two quick tips to improve your WordPress site speed in less than 10 minutes:
- Install and set up one of the popular caching plugin. Just visit your plugins section in your WordPress admin, then search for cache. You will see some results but read the reviews and comments to see other users opinions.
- Compress and reupload any huge image files on your site. You can do either using a plugin called Smush or you can do it manually using TinyPNG
- Get a better hosting package. if you are on shared hosting, consider a VPS Package which can dramatically increase your speed.
2. Mobile Optimisation
Mobile has long been the dominant factor over desktop in the number of users browsing online. And it’s only going to continue increasing.
Google knows that. And they reward mobile-friendly sites with better rankings so it is important your site is mobile ready!
It makes sense – Google’s goal is to provide the absolute best experience for the end user. Also, as most of your visitors to your website will be viewing to on a mobile device, why not give them the best experience possible?
So how do you make your site mobile friendly?
Contact Northern Monkey and speak to one of our experts who can discuss your options for enhancing the mobile experience of your website for your users.
3. Delete and redirect thin content
Thin Content? What is that?
Thin content is simply, any page on your site that’s under 300 words long and doesn’t provide clear value to the reader.
The reason we want to delete thin content is that it doesn’t provide any benefit. If you think of your website as a Garden, and google SEO being the water to water your lovely garden, but if you have a lot of dead weight pages with thin content you are basically watering dead plants.
Instead, dig up those plants (delete) and keep your water going to the plants already performing well, so they can perform even better.
4. Ensure all your images have alt text
Google image search accounts for 10.1% of all Google’s search traffic, so optimising images as much as possible, including passing alt text is vital!
Adding alt text to images is a super easy and simple way to take advantage of some of that traffic.
Plus, Google uses alt text to determine the topic of a page, so it can even help your search rankings on non-image search.
In your WordPress Admin if you select the media menu item, then click on any of your images, you will see settings for the image on the right hand side, here you can add Alt Text to all of your images individually.
5. Review your site structure and internal linking
Your site’s navigation is extremely important to SEO.
Google gives the highest ranking authority to the pages in your navigation, since they are linked to from essentially every page on your site. these are your master pages for which everything else falls under.
Remember the garden analogy? Adding internal links to important pages is like adding another stream of water to those flowers. The more internal links, the more water it gets.
Make sure your navigation is clean, and don’t link to more than 5-15 of your absolute most important pages.
If you aren’t sure which pages are your most important, just look at your analytics to see which pages get the most traffic.
Pro Tip: If you want a page to rank faster, add more internal links pointing to that page! For example, if you just published a new blog post that you spent hours creating, go into your old posts and add links to the new post.
