One of the benefits of using WordPress for your business website is that it’s easy to optimize — both for better results in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and for better visitor experience.
These tips are all easy enough to accomplish in just a few minutes each. So if you’re managing your own site, they don’t have to eat up hours of your time. Just add one or two of these tips to your do-list each time you make a new post.
- Update Your Theme. Are your traffic numbers flat or falling? When’s the last time you updated your WordPress theme? The answers might be related. If your theme no longer reflects the current branding of your company, then update or switch to a new theme.
- Improve Your Permalinks. Include fewer (but higher value) keywords in the URLs when you create a new post or page. It might improve the ranking of those articles on the search engines.
- Leverage Your Images. Each time you upload an image, make sure to tag it with appropriate “title” and “alternate text” tags to assist your search engine rank. The “title” is also what appears when someone tries to “pin” your image to Pinterest.
- Improve the Sidebars. Use this tutorial to populate the sidebar areas of your site with content that can be dynamically selected and displayed based on a number of different parameters that you specify.
- Hide Certain Post Categories From Your Home Page. Install the PE Category Filter to keep certain categories of post off your home page, but still keep them available on other portions of your site.
- Make Sure Everything is Current. This should almost go without saying, but take a few minutes today to make sure that your WordPress install, your plugins and current theme are all current.
- Enable Avatars. In order to make your commenting environment more personal, you can enable avatars in the >> Settings>>Discussion area of your dashboard
- Check Your Site as a Visitor. If you’re only viewing your site through your admin dashboard, you may be missing out if something weird happens to the display. Logout of WordPress then reload your site to verify.
- Members Only. Consider building a membership area of your website by selecting a new theme or plugin with those capabilities.
- Use Breadcrumb Navigation. “Breadcrumb Navigation” is a navigation that can provide you with SEO advantages, and can make your site easier to use by your site visitors. If your theme doesn’t offer native support, consider a plugin such as this.
- Encourage Social Sharing. Make it easier for your readers to share your website on Facebook and Twitter with a comprehensive social sharing plugin.
- Personalize Your Greeting. Use a plugin like WP Greet Box to change the message that appears at the top of the page when someone loads your blog, depending on how they found your blog.
- Schedule Future Publication. On each new post page, there’s an option to schedule future publication of a post. This means you can prepare a number of posts all at once, then schedule them to be published a few days or weeks later to keep fresh new content appearing without having to log into your site every day.
- Speed Load Times. Google prefers to display sites that load fast, so a slow loading site may end up buried in the SERPs. Use a caching plugin to make your site load faster. Use a plugin like W3 Total Cache.
- Install Google Analytics. If you’re not yet using Google Analytics to analyze your site traffic then install a Google Analytics plugin and get started today.
These are just a few of the many little things you can do with WordPress that can add up to big results. They’ll also help you become more familiar with WordPress and a better webmaster if you manage your own site.