From the experts

Since more and more people are opting to use WordPress based websites it has become of high importance that you know how to optimise a WordPress site. Here are several tips that will help you optimise your WordPress website.

WordPress is the most used content management system in the world. Nowadays the majority of websites will have a CMS built in. This is because the clients of a web designer wants to have access to the backend of their website and be able to make simple website changes in house. The cost of building a WordPress website is also very cost effective. In fact the majority of WordPress based websites can cost less than a standard HTML site due to the less labour intensive requirements using WordPress. If you’re one of those people that currently owns a WordPress website, then it’s your duty to understand the essentials of website optimisation shared below.

These tips will help you to get the most out of your website

Start with Content

The first place to start when optimising a website is to start with the content. It could be the content used within your blog posts or it could be the content contained within each web page. To optimise your content you need to make sure that your keywords are present and certainly contained within the title tags of that page. The next phase is on-page content optimisation. Each meta title and description should not only contain the keywords but the content should also be meaningful. Don’t go after overly search engine optimised sentences that do not make sense. It is better to create something that a person would read and want to know more about by clicking on the link. That is what counts. Nowadays, the trend has changed and the best SEO is when it does not look like SEO. Since WordPress organises the content pretty well for you, this is an easy thing to do.

Name Your Images

This is the most common mistake that any SEO person comes across during any site’s SEO analysis. If you have images on your site then you must always name them properly. This will help your images getting indexed in the searches. In simple terms, if someone searches for an image using a keyword and your site has that keyword used in one of your images then that image will show up in the search results. But again this does not mean that you overload images with exact match keywords whilst assigning a name. You can use semantic words as well. Since WordPress has a separate section called ‘Media’, you will need to go through all of the images and add the name in the Alternate ‘ALT’ tag field. Thus, even if the same image shows up in more than one place, such as an replacement of a logo, you will not need to worry about naming it again as it would have already been set.

Optimise Each Website URL

This is one of the most common mistakes that website owners make. The URL of each web page should be clear and precise. A website user should know what he is going to be looking at by just looking at the URL. It is not just about the pages. If you have a product based site then you should name the bread crumb correctly as well as the way in which they denote how each product is being showed. In WordPress, this can be done through the permalink options available under the settings tab.. It’s easy to set up your URL options just as it is to set up other formats in this amazing CMS.

Apart from these tips, you should also avoid using flash content on your site. Use plug-ins to create site-maps and for setting up the Meta content. The best plug-ins for this purpose is the Yoast SEO Plugin.