8 Best WordPress SEO Tips To Increase Website Traffic

Google processes over 40,000 searches per second, 3.5 billion searches per day, and more than 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

That’s incredible if you ask us.

Even if a tiny fraction of that traffic flows through and finds its way to your website, your funnels can literally light up like it’s Christmas and keep your cash register ringing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)–if done well, consistently, and for an extended period of time–can get you plenty of traffic all by itself thanks to millions of searches on Google for your specific keywords.

Simple SEO tips for WordPress users

Is SEO Dead? No!

Is SEO easy? No!

Does SEO deliver traffic and results? Absolutely yes!

Is WordPress SEO simple? It can be!

WordPress SEO can drive free traffic to your funnels

Sales funnels stand all alone, by themselves. Without traffic, there are of no use to your business. SEO can help bring in relevant traffic but it requires plenty of investment in terms of time, resources, content, and some more content.

You could hire help for SEO if you need to, but you could also do it yourself without getting too involved with SEO nitty-gritty.

You could make SEO work for you (at least the basics) without actually doing any of the song and dance that SEO pros do–all by yourself. That is without actually spending any more time than you’d spend to write blog posts and do the rest of the digital marketing that you do anyway.

Here’s how:

Tip #1: Pay attention to your WordPress foundation

Once upon a time, SEO was just about the keywords found within a piece of content on your page.

Today, it’s a bewildering mix of attributes and factors that can help rank your pages, starting with where your WordPress website lives (hosting), the speed with which your page loads, how your WordPress website is built (architecture), the code running behind the theme (Is it a bloated theme?), and more.

Before you even think of SEO ensure that you use the right kind of hosting which is in turn backed by the most optimum technology stack for WordPress–most managed WordPress hosting providers do this for you.

Tip #2: Start with Yoast SEO plugin

Yoast SEO plugin is the easiest way to get started with your WordPress–we use it here for Doneforyou too.

Yoast SEO plugin takes all the heavy work out of the equation for you and makes it relatively easy for you to do On-page SEO for every single blog post you write and publish.

You can also extend the inbuilt functionalities of Yoast SEO Plugin to help you write meta information for your WordPress pages and the overall website itself.

Yoast lets you pick a primary keyword that you want a blog post or page to rank for and then quickly analyzes the page (while you are writing the blog post) to let you know whether or not it’s optimized for the keyword you selected.

If you see a green dot (right above the page), your post is well-optimized for that particular keyword.

Yoast WordPress SEO plugin also recommends the steps you should take–one by one–to help you optimize so it works like an in-house SEO mentor.

Look for the green signal. Hit publish!

Tip #3: Use short, SE-optimized link structures

The first step for you to do before you get to creating SEO-optimized links is to change the permalink structure.

By default, WordPress permalinks look something like this: https://yoursite.com/blog/your-content?p=12543

That’s a non-SEO friendly link structure and it won’t help you at all.

By changing permalinks slightly, you can modify your links to have a pre-defined structure such as

https://yoursite.com/blog/your-awesome-seo-friendly-link/

WPBeginner has a simple tutorial to help you with this.

Get to your WordPress Dashboard> Settings > and change your permalink settings.

Once this is done, you’d only have to edit your permalink appropriately while you create your blog posts or pages as shown below:

Tip #4: Do your preliminary keyword research

With the help of tools like Google Keyword Planner (free) or Ahrefs (paid, while allowing you to check on your competitors’ keywords), do some initial research on the keywords you ought to target along with Keyword volume.

You’d then get plenty of long-tail and medium-tail keywords you can target. Structure your titles around these keywords and start writing away.

Ilia Markov of Ahrefs also recommends many other ways for you to target appropriate keywords easily:

• Listen in and gather ideas from Customers’ emails, social comments, live chat, phone calls, etc.
• Use Google’s Autocomplete (when you start typing in your keywords)
• Pick up ideas from Google Trends
• Gather keywords from “related searches” you’d find right below each search results page.
• Dig for questions asked on social communities and forums such as Quora, Reddit, and other forums around the topic you are interested in.
• You can also build keyword lists off Podcasts (on your topics), books listed on Amazon (on your topic), and more.

Tip #5: Publish on your blog regularly

If you had to only top off this list to help you with your WordPress SEO efforts, just pick this: Publish regularly on your blog. Follow a schedule and publish at an established frequency.

You can publish once a week, or three times a week, or every single day of the week.

Some publications and blogs also publish multiple times per week.

How many blog posts you publish is really up to you, but you’d have to think about the quality of your blog posts, your resources, budget, time, and many other constraints.

If needed, you can create a simple editorial calendar to help you plan your content strategy or even use a tool like CoSchedule.

Every time you hit publish, share your posts on social media. Google takes the social signals of your published content into account too.

This is in addition to getting direct traffic, fuel for conversations, a chance to network with others, and a way for you to establish your thought leadership on social media.

Tip #6: Say “hello” to Google RankBrain

Google recently introduced machine learning into its algorithm to help make rapid decisions on whether or not a page should rank. It’s apparently Google’s third most important signal and it only gets more important per day.

Brian Dean of Backlinko has a fantastic guide on Google Rankbrain. According to Brian, Google Rankbrain is looking specifically for:

• Organic Click-Through-Rate: How Interesting, relevant, and attention-grabbing are your posts when they show up on search?
• Dwell Time: How long do people spend on your posts after they arrive?
• Bounce Rate: How quickly do they leave, after consuming your content?
• Pogo-sticking: If more people click on a search result and seem happy, that link goes up the ranking hierarchy.

What does Rankbrain force you to do now, as far as content goes?

• Focus on writing headlines and meta information in a relevant and attractive way (much like ads) so that people who are searching tend to click-through
• Write long-form content, with plenty of information loaded into each post to keep them on the site.
• Try to make sure that your content is the most comprehensive answer to the question users seek when they search on Google.

Tip #7: Get some backlinks

Links are still the currency of the web. Google determines how important and relevant your site is (for a given keyword) based on how many links are pointing to you from other sources. But buying links, submitting your links to directories, link farming, and keyword stuffing won’t work.

Don’t get ahead of your yourself when trying to do backlinks for SEO–it’s not a one-time thing; your efforts won’t stop with a couple of links earned; you won’t ever be done with it.

Creating amazing content that others will automatically link to, doing guest blogging by actually writing up high-quality content on other blogs, and creating tools or products that people can use while simultaneously linking to you–now, these are a few ways using which you can certainly build links.

Tip #8: Curate content

What’s the next best thing you could do for your content marketing strategy apart from blogging regularly and going all out with content marketing?

Curate content. With all of the tools available for you to curate content, you’d only have to schedule your time or deploy resources to curate content which also adds incredible value for your long-term SEO strategy.

By curating content, you’ll essentially create your own point of view and spin on existing content which makes your content curation unique by itself.

Need more content sources and topic ideas for your blog? Try Curately, the ultimate tool for fast content creation. With Curately, you will have an endless supply of new, fresh content that will get you traffic, leads and sales! Visit http://curately.org/ to learn more.

You’ll also link out to several resources (both Internal and external) giving you a healthy link distribution & spread.

Additionally, point to other influencers, blogs, and publications which might link back to you (any one linking back to you will help boost your rankings in addition to traffic, of course)

Focus your WordPress SEO efforts for better results

WordPress SEO takes a lot of work, and time. Instead of trying to manipulate or wasting time looking for shortcuts, you are better off focusing on developing great content and then optimizing what you create for search results.

What are you going to do for your WordPress search optimization?

GSDdaily Episode 91

This week we’re going to talk about SEO. For those of you who have been around me or followed me or been familiar with a lot of my work over the last 14 years, SEO was always my thing. It was early on, it was my thing. I ended up… We did a lot of affiliate work, where we were building affiliate sites and creating affiliate content or advertorials or whatever. They would get ranked. And then would send traffic into an affiliate offer.

The affiliate offer would pay us a commission whenever something was sold. It might be a digital product or a membership course, or a membership site, or as a CPA offer. So you can think protein shakes, you can think Audible eBooks, all of that kind of stuff ended up working out really, really well in the early days. Then Google went through and basically slapped everybody’s sites. So half of all the websites that were ranking in Google were basically de-indexed in the matter of not a whole lot of time. We had sites that were making a lot of money. Four figures, five figures a month that were de-indexed and no more because they weren’t getting search traffic because the SEO game changed.

I pivoted into paid ads and building courses and all that other stuff. And that worked well, obviously. Worked great. But now, in the last couple of years, I have moved back into trying to refigure out SEO and figure out if there was a way that we could actually generate significant traffic, significant revenue from SEO based activities.

Now the game used to be that you created a piece of content and that content needed to be 500 to 700 words. And then you would basically load a bunch of keywords in there. So the keyword phrases that you wanted to rank for, whether it was because they were getting a lot of traffic in Google, or because you knew they would be getting a lot of traffic in Google. Like whenever there was a big product launch, we would always like to do a product launch review. There was a lot of that kind of stuff.

Rank Articles by stuffing more keyword phrases

You would rank these articles by stuffing them with keyword phrases and then building a lot of backlinks to them from article sites and stuff, social bookmarking services, any of that kind of stuff that could be controlled. There was lots of software out that lets you do it. You would pay and then it would build 20 to 100 backlinks in a matter of a week or whatever. But all that stuff disappeared when the algorithm changed. Which is fine. But one of the biggest kinds of things that happened was Google rather than being primarily SEO based, where they really… Somebody said you’re bringing back awesome memories. I know. Right.

About that time when everybody, like the Penguin update and the Panda update and all that stuff, whenever somebody… Google was primarily algorithm-based. All of those things that Google could see, they use to factor into rankings. The number of keywords on a phrase, what we call LSI keywords. Which are Latent Semantic Indexing keywords, all of the similar keyword phrases, all on the blog post, there were internal links? It was all quantifiable. It was all a number.

Internal links, backlinks, how many keyword phrases were in a blog post, where those keyword phrases were used, H1 tags, H2 tags, all of that stuff. All that stuff was very, very quantifiable. And that’s why it was really easy to game SEO 10 years ago because all you had to do was get the math right. You had to get the numbers right. And use the blackout kind of software that helped you get your numbers right. Do you know what I mean?

Rank Articles based on the number of shares

Then Google de-indexed everybody. And the game changed. About the same time, Facebook started getting hot. MySpace was hot. LinkedIn, there were people liking and sharing, and then basically all these social indicators started popping up. So a good piece of content, it wasn’t so much that it had a lot of keyword phrases or it got a lot of backlinks. A good piece of content might be something that was shared 340 times. So Google was relying less on their algorithms than they relied on people. And you can look now if you do a Google search, you will find that a lot of the top result pages that are showing up on page one and page two of Google, they have significant share reach behind them.

It’s still a black box. From an algorithm standpoint, SEO is still a black box, but there are some things that we’re going to cover this week that has done well for us in getting your websites to rank better. So there are some SEO plugins that have worked really well for us. There are some content tricks like video content. There are some things that we do that I wanted to share this week so that you could start getting your organic, your free traffic game leveled up, I guess. So that’s going to be the point of this week’s training. So we’re going to have five sessions on free traffic if you will. In content marketing, so free traffic in… They really go hand in hand.

Content marketing

The idea of content marketing is to

1. get traffic
2. position your prospects in a way that they’re going to buy

Every blog post that you write, should be both of those things. You should write a blog post and create a piece of content that you think reasonably, has a reasonable chance of getting traffic in the future. You should also create that piece of content so that it moves somebody along the buyer journey from just learning about you to ultimately buying something. So that is where native ads and text link ads and all that other stuff come into play. So this one piece of content attracts traffic and helps convert traffic and ultimately move them. It’s kind of like a bridge page that moves them over into the sales funnel. So that is really what we’re going to be talking about this week.

Now, the article that I have for you today, let me grab this link here. These are simple WordPress SEO tips. Something like 25% of all the websites online is running WordPress. I wanted to put together a quick little video on how to rank your WordPress sites better. At least some high-level tips. I just dropped it in the comments there.

Well at the time of the writing, Google processes 40,000 searches per second. It’s more now. And so many searches are full-sentence searches because of smart assistants. So not only are they processing more, but they are also processing more words. So rather than a one or two or three word kind of query, they’re processing six, seven, eight-word queries. And it’s a full sentence question. So take that into consideration in doing your keyword research. Queries are longer now than they ever have been. It used to be the average query was like three words. And I think it’s five now. So that’s across billions of searches every month.

Some simple SEO tips for WordPress users

1. First is to pay attention to your WordPress foundation

More than, well, I can’t say more than anything, but more than a lot. WordPress gets bloated really, really quickly. When you add a bunch of keywords or when you add a bunch of plugins, when you start messing around with different themes, when you start getting really, really image-heavy, WordPress tends to slow down really, really quickly. You always want to make sure that you only have the plugins active and the themes active and the things active that you truly need.

There’s a lot of different cache plugins that’ll help you speed up your WordPress site. But one of them is W3 Total Cache. One that we like a lot, we use it on a lot of different sites, including our own. And then W3 Total Cache actually also has a Cloudflare integration, which lets you do a free CDN ( content delivery network). You can have Cloudflare, which is a publicly-traded company. You’re going to have them manage your DNS. Then it also has some free CDN capabilities. It can offload some of your bigger image files and stuff on to a content delivery network that you’re going to have to pay for. You can also do Amazon S3 too for your CDN capabilities. But you want to make sure that your WordPress site is lean and fast.

2. You have your Yoast SEO plugin activated

Yoast, there was a previous video where we actually went through this Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast is pretty much the default. The default SEO plugin you need on your website. So Yoast does a couple of things. First is it’s free and the free version is awesome.  It’ll let you optimize blog posts for one keyword phrase and it basically works like a checklist. You have to put the keyword phrase so many times throughout the article in the meta description and the meta title and the blog post title. Many times in so many first paragraphs, last paragraph, all the things that I’ve been basically sharing forever, Yoast actually makes you do. Which is awesome.

They also have social sharing capabilities. You can actually upload your Facebook meta descriptions and stuff and your LinkedIn meta descriptions. And that will be the image and the description that Facebook and LinkedIn use when people share your stuff with them. Again, it’s a huge, huge, huge benefit. It’s free, so there’s no reason not to use it.

3. Use short SE optimized link structures

What this basically means is, it’s really easy. When you put a new blog post in WordPress, the blog post, the slug, the URL, is your title phrase. Like for this one, actually this is a great example. This title phrase is 8 Simple WordPress SEO Tips, No SEO Skills Needed! Now, look at this URL. The URL is a simple WordPress SEO tips. The keyword phrase that we’re ranking for is WordPress SEO tips. We get ranked for this one, in search engines, we can traffic forward all that other stuff. That’s why we’re updating this blog post today with a video and transcript. So that’s called content optimization. Yeah, that’s what that’s called.

Now, so you want to… And yes, we have Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO is this little green bar right here. This shows you that this blog post is. It would be red or yellow if it wasn’t. Use short search engine optimized link structures. You want to have them. So you want it to be the post name in the permalinks, but then you also want to keep all your kind of weird words out of the title, so that it really only has to be the keyword phrase that you’re ranking for, so Simple WordPress SEO Tips. That’s it. So right there, you got a little tutorial on how to do that. Your SEO post title.

4. Do your preliminary keyword research

This is something that we’re going to talk about in great detail this week because keyword research is the make or break point for your business for doing blog posts. I’ve brought it up on these GST Dailies probably five or six times. We’ve showcased it probably four. That’s how important it is. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing online. Your keyword research is really the most important activity that you’re going to do. So you want to do your preliminary keyword research first. Actually, you know what? Let’s just go do it now. So let’s just go mess around with some keyword research real quick. It’s really that important.

We’re going to make this a little bit bigger, your keyword research. What we want to do is we are inside Google Ads, their keyword planner tool. And what we want to do is we want to go discover new keyword phrases. So this particular blog post that we are looking for, so WordPress SEO Tips. So all we’re going to do is just really, really simple. We’re going to go to WordPress SEO. We’re just going to see what it says. And we’ll see what comes up. So if we hit get results, it’s going to show us all the different variations of WordPress SEO and the different ways that people search for it.

Walkthrough on various keyword phrases

Here we have WordPress SEO, which gets 2,400 searches a month. Now, just to kind of walk through this interface a little bit, so this is basically the trends. And then we have the keywords I provided were WordPress SEO, and then some keyword ideas are down here. So we’re going to go through this. Now, this is your average monthly searches, pretty self-explanatory. And then we have our competition here. Competition doesn’t have anything to do with SEO. So nothing at all. It’s 100% paid traffic based. So this is how competitive are those keyword phrases inside Google Ads. Then we have our ad impression share, again, not related to this. Top of page bid, low range is $2.40. And top of page high range is $10.45.
Here’s when I care about that.

If you have what seems to be a higher number in that top of page bid, then that means it’s a more valuable keyword phrase. WordPress SEO is a pretty valuable keyword phrase if per click people are paying $10.45 cents. That’s a lot of money per click. If it was a buck, $1.50, 50 cents, then it’s probably not that valuable of a keyword phrase. But think about the implication. If somebody is typing the keyword phrase WordPress SEO into their URL bar, then they literally want search engine optimization for their WordPress site, or they’re looking for more information. We’re going to be finding plugins, we’re going to be finding themes, probably finding services if we were to type in WordPress SEO. That’s why WordPress SEO is a pretty valuable keyword phrase. There are lots of different things that people are advertising to generate revenue for their business.

Now, Yoast SEO Premium. Yoast SEO WordPress. So those are a little bit less. Yoast SEO Premium, you might have Yoast advertising for that, maybe an affiliate program, but it’s probably against their terms of service, Yoast’s terms of service. So they’re not getting a whole lot of traffic that way. But let’s continue down. So WooCommerce SEO, $13.30, and $5.36. That’s another pretty good keyword phrase. I could write another blog post for WooCommerce SEO. WooCommerce is an SEO plugin or is a shopping cart plugin for WordPress. There’s SEOPressor, which has a pretty high top of page bid range. This is a piece of software that does have an affiliate marketing program. There’s Rank Math SEO, there are WordPress keywords.

Notice WordPress keywords, 110 searches a month, no bids. That means that the keyword phrase kind of sucks and thinks about it. It kind of does. I mean, WordPress keywords, what are you looking for when you are searching for WordPress keywords? I don’t even know. If that person who’s typing WordPress keywords, what are they looking for? They’re not looking to spend any money, what are they? I actually don’t know what they could be looking for. I don’t know. That’s interesting. Elementor SEO. Elementor is a theme.

So there’s lots and lots and lots. But what you do is, let’s say I wanted to write a blog post on WordPress SEO or I wanted to write three or four blog posts on WordPress SEO. I would just scroll through here. So normally I sort these based on average monthly searches. SEO Yoast. 6,600. So that goes right to the blog, right to the plugin. But here. SEO plug height or plug space in WordPress, 1300 searches a month. You could write a blog post that has this content in there. SEO plugin WordPress. Just copy that keyword phrase, write a blog post about it, get it ranked.

Yoast SEO Premium. Yoast SEO WordPress. You might do Yoast SEO Premium or a tutorial. And you’re going to be 590 searches for that thing. SEO plug. Eh. There’s WordPress SEO optimization. That could be a good blog post. There are WordPress SEO services. Yoast Breadcrumb, probably nothing there. Best SEO for WordPress, WordPress, and SEO. And then you just kind of go through and you look at the keyword phrases. So you just do another search or you go down a rabbit hole and say, “Okay, this is WordPress SEO, but now,” I found that WooCommerce SEO.

Let me see what else. E-commerce SEO. Let’s see if there’s anything in e-commerce SEO. We can rank for. Shopify SEO, 1900 searches a month, and that’s trending up. E-commerce SEO services. E-commerce SEO agency. There’s big commerce. There are Shopify SEO experts. Look at that. Shopify SEO experts, top of page bid one is $27.60 a click. So you can go down these rabbit holes and just do a tremendous amount of keyword research. But what that does is it gives you a good foundation for the blog post and the content that you’re going to have on your website. And if you do the keyword research prior to writing your article, you are that much further ahead in getting ranked and getting traffic for these things. Does that make sense? Okay, cool.

5. Publish on your blog regularly

You 100% want to publish regularly. And as evidence, so we don’t publish on our blog as regularly, but obviously, we have these GSDdailies and they start at 10:00 AM every morning, sometimes a couple of minutes late, sometimes a couple of minutes early. But every day, at 10 o’clock. People kind of has come to expect me to do this life. And then the blog posts, starting a couple of weeks ago, we started making sure that that video was then emailed out. So that has been the regular schedule, has been something that people have relied on. And then I have relied on to create content, to share, to answer some questions, to all of that stuff.

You want to make sure to publish regularly and have a calendar. Maybe Monday you do a certain, like a Q & A post, Wednesday, you do a video post and then Friday you do a tutorial post or something. Stay engaged, be interested in doing something and write content that you research first and then you have a game plan for. Even these, one of the reasons I like doing the weekly themes is it lets me think about how I’m going to deliver a piece of content.

This weekend, I didn’t, but I usually schedule these the previous week or on Saturday. And then I figure out what I’m going to talk about, what is ranking, what needs to be optimized? What I haven’t talked about a whole lot yet, because we are in episode 91, I think. So I have 90 episodes, each 20, 25 minutes of content that I didn’t script. And I just haven’t done an SEO week yet. So this makes a lot of sense to do this week. But so publish regularly.

6. You also want to say hello to Google RankBrain

There’s a fantastic guide here that you can go check out. So the Definitive Guide on Google RankBrain. You can go ahead and click through that. You want to get some backlinks, of course.

7. Get some backlinks

Backlinks are important, not as important as they used to be. So you want to make sure that your backlinks are from authority websites. So we’re not looking to do article marketing and social posting and all that other kind of crazy stuff and start and have a thousand backlinks to your website. That’s spammy. But what you are and should be doing is getting one backlink from one good site once a month or once a week. And you can do that with guest posting. You can do it just by reaching out.

Every once in a while, I’ll grant somebody as I’ve done for you. I’ll put a link on an old blog post that they find, but how I would do that is make it as simple, and easy for them as possible. Like, say, “This is the blog post that I would like the rank, here’s the link that I would have like to have and here’s the keyword phrase that I would like to have. And then once you place it, let me know.” And I’ll place a link back on a different site. Something that is… You don’t want to do reciprocal links, back and forth. Or just have them pay for it, like PayPal or whatever. So get some backlinks that way. You can pay for backlinks too, from PayPal. Nobody’s going to know.

8. Curated Content

We really, really like curating content, although even curating content takes more time than we invest.  Curating content is great when you want to aggregate a bunch of types of content and put it together in a blog post. But you still want to start with that keyword focus. You want to start with WordPress SEO tools or whatever. And then you want to curate content about WordPress and SEO into a blog post. It might be a list post or whatever. And then from there, you would post it.

The content that we have been creating starts from video then gets transcribed. And we’re going to go through that process this week, but we start with video and then move to with text-based content. And then we post that thing and then it goes out to podcasts and stuff. So there’s just a different way that… You just want to have something that works for you. And I have a lot of clients that they love curated content. They love curating content where they find the best of each and then they put it together into a list post or a blog post. And that is the post that they put out there into the world. Takes two or three hours to put together a 2000 word blog post curated, a curated blog post.

If you write it from scratch, you’re looking at, I don’t know, six, seven hours to write a 2000 word blog post. If you’re doing it like this, where you record a video and get it transcribed, that takes about 45 minutes. So it just depends on how perfect you want your blog post to be. Because our transcribed blog posts are definitely not perfect, but they’re effective. And most people would rather watch the video or watch sound bites, listen to sound bites from the video than they would be to actually read, but you still want the transcript to get ranked in Google. So there’s a lot of different ways that you can go about creating content. And those are the 8 SEO tips that you can use inside your WordPress sites to get ranked in Google.

For Questions and Guide

Now, so this week is like I said, is SEO week. We’re going to be talking about SEO, content marketing, and all of that kind of stuff. If there’s anything that we can do to help you put together a content marketing strategy, a paid traffic strategy, a website funnel, any of that kind of stuff, go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little form. And we will take a look at everything you got, from blog posts to traffic to sales funnels to advertorials or whatever. Whatever was in kind of the marketing mix. And we’ll put together an action plan for you. And we’ll talk to you soon. All right. Thanks. Bye.