Best WordPress SEO Tips To Improve Your Ranking in 2020

Powerful, easy to implement and most probably the best wordpress SEO tips for your amazing blogs, websites or online business. As we all know search engine optimization is an essential task to perform before starting or publishing any article.

Well regarding this topic you might find tons of valuable information. But there’s a big problem, some article discusses high standard SEO strategies which rarely get into heads of everyday bloggers, and there are some basic suggestions which most of the bloggers already know.

But if you are a novice or have just steeped into blogging, internet marketing or freelancing then it would be a hard time for you even to understand the basics.

Remember that SEO is a very broad topic with lots of sections, sub sections. And in this year we have found that topic like social media, author rank, copyright issues, duplicate content and other can also impact your optimization effort.

Few of the relevant subsections can be on-page / off page optimization, link generation, domain authority, page rank, domain age, page authority, quality of websites liking and much more.

Essential WordPress SEO Tips

Let us start with choosing the platform to start your website. Well, there are so many platforms for you to choose like blogger, weekly, Joomla, Drupal, Wix and WordPress. But the problem is not all are easy to customize and use.

Blogspot or Blogger is Google product, and it is incredibly easy to manage and to modify.
Now considering Joomla and Drupal, they are web applications which I personally feel is best for big websites, online newspapers but aren’t good for personal blogging or startups. They are hard to manage, you will have to spend a lot for the customizations, and they have hard to understand interface.

Now let’s consider wordpress, today more than 16.7% of top 1 million websites used it to power their business, corporate relations and to manage their readers.

WordPress itself is SEO friendly, is secured, is robust, is powerful and most importantly you can easily customize and modify its functionality using different free or premium wordpress themes and plugins.

But before we move ahead let’s discuss one of the biggest questions of 2017.

Should we care about SEO & keyword density?

Personally and according to what I have found at moz’s blog, searchengineland and other websites, you don’t need to know anything but just these six important guidelines. Follow them, implement and see the outstanding results.

Actually according to Matt Cutts who is the chief of the anti-web spam team at Google, if you want to improve your position or ranking then just focus on offering the best content, user experience and try to keep your readers engaged.

He meant, you have to create such articles that would provide in-depth information regarding any subject, which your visitors would like to share on social media and would love to link with.

In simple terms you will have to perform three tasks;

• Present topic & keyword research.
• Create & add attractive elements like images, videos, etc.
• Promote your post on social media, bookmarking and networking websites.

Finally, leave the rest to your readers and to search giant Google.

1. WordPress SEO Permalink Structure

Google SEO guide for beginner asks every blogger or webmaster to keep there URL structure as small as possible. Considering wordpress, it provides it users with six options of which 5 are pre-built forms and 1 is custom.

If you want to have the best permalink, then %postname% is most perfect, but if you are considering the page speed, then I will suggest using /archives/%postname%/. But now it again depends on the type of web hosting you are using.

2. Install Social Media Sharing Plugin

In 2013 it was reveled that search engines like Google and Bing are considering the social signals ( not any particular but the complete network as a whole ) for finding the perfect page to place on their result pages.

So it has become crucial to offer your visitors with complete sets of social buttons so as to make it easy for them to share your posts on their network.

One of the best ways to improve your social shares is using floating bar and by placing the buttons at the bottom or the top of your posts. Using small size icons for posts and using big rounder buttons for the floating bar can be a good idea.

And if you install Digg Digg plugin then you get both of these options in one single addon. For me, it works best as you get the option to add or exclude multiple networking websites. Furthermore, you get lots of different options to modify its look as per your site’s design.

3. Install WordPress SEO By Yoast Plugin

According to me, it’s only and one of the best wordpress SEO plugins you will ever need to create SEO friendly articles. If you are planning to make your wordpress SEO friendly, then this plugin will help you make your complete website along with its content optimized for both search bots and your visitors.

• WordPress SEO by Yoast has options for the entire site and also offer settings for every individual post, page, category, tags and even for your custom post types.
• It helps you generate sitemaps and also submit them to webmaster tools.
• Yoast allows you to verify Google authorship quickly.
• It makes your website more social friendly by adding the Facebook open graph and Twitter meta data information.
• Yoast even allows you to verify Bing, Google webmaster verification.
• Finally, it has one option named Force rewrite rule, which once selected enforces the SEO settings you have made using this plugin on your complete website.

So here I have highlighted few of its outstanding features. But there are few more options which help to make your site more perfect and contributes to preventing duplicate content problems.

3.1 Fix ?replytocom Link Issues & Attachment URL

As you can see in the above image, I have highlighted the two area, you just to select them and have to click on save button.

Once completed it will automatically redirect all indexed attachments pages to the original post page. It will also improve the pagerank and page authority and will prevent duplicate content issues.

The second one is replytocom which arise due to your comment reply button. Whenever any one on your blog reply to any other comment, Google might index them and thus creates an additional page containing the same content. So its necessary to select this option so as to improve your position in SERP.

Click on Site Apperance >> HTML Improvement.

From here you can have a brief look at all types of duplicate issues. It will show you the duplicate title, meta description, content and other HTML-related problems. You also get the links and thus enables you to correct it instantly.

3.2 Title & Sitewide Meta Settings

Make sure to select the force rewrite rule as it will enforce the settings you have made in Yoast plugin and will override all other settings based on the theme or by any other plugin.

You should also select to noindex all sub-pages which Google usually index. They are the link generated via paginations which appear at the bottom of your homepage post block.

Over here you will also find some other settings, but they are not necessary. The description regarding each functionality is already provided.

3.3 Social Settings: Facebook, Twitter & Google Plus

Inorder to perform social settings in Yoast plugin you should move to your WP dashboard and from theme move down to SEO. Now from the hover on the menu select the Social option. Once done you will see the screen shown in the above graphics.

Facebook: Here you get options to connect your FB account and to set the default image which will be used when anyone shares your posts on their social profile.

Twitter: Here you can select to add the meta data.

Google Plus: here you are asked to enter the Google publisher page link and to choose the author name with which you want to establish authorship.

4. Placing Your Keywords

The very first task of writing any article should be performing an in-depth research regarding any subject or topic. I have already discussed this in section 1.

But even if you perform your research, but if you don’t know how to use your phrases, then it is a complete waste of your time. Below I am sharing my tips for perfect placement of your focused phrase.

• Add your keyword in your first sentence, must be under 150 words.
• Add your keyphrase in your last sentence.
• Only highlight your targeted or most related words with bold, italic or underline.
• Use them in your H2 headings, H3 subtitles.
• Try to sprinkle your phrases all throughout your article and place them especially in your middle paragraph.

You should also perform at least one outbound and one inbound linking using your key words.

5. Add Custom Meta Description Tag

Though, you might think that it doesn’t matter. And I agree that Google, itself is capable of finding the most appropriate text to display in search results. But it is no harm to put custom written description tag. It is not only user-friendly but also carries your targeted key-phrase.

What I do is, I just copy the first sentence of my first paragraph from my post ( refer to section 4) and then finally add the custom description. It helps me to insert the valuable text, and at the same time, I get the opportunity to impress Googlers.

I Also Suggest Adding Meta Keyword Tags

Remember that Google is not the only search engines, though it might have the largest search shares on the internet; still, you should focus on Yahoo, Bing, Ask which still use keyword tags for finding the most appropriate website.

Now one of the biggest problem related to keyword tags is spamming or in plain language keyword stuffing. If you are planning to do any of these two then, first of all, you will be penalized by Google Panda. And secondly you will hardly get any organic traffic to your websites.

Simple guidelines;

1. Add targeted key-phrase.
2. Also, try to implement related phrases.
3. Don’t repeat the same keyword again and again.
4. Keep your tags natural and easy to understand.
5. Don’t add more than 3 to 5 keywords.

So these were 5 of my personal strategies for making wordpress SEO friendly. If you have any suggestions or have any question, then please let us know in the comment area.