Visibility matters most to get a toehold in online marketing, but success depends on proper optimization of websites. This is true for WordPress websites too, which are SEO friendly right from birth.  Choosing WordPress for creating websites does not only result in stunning sites but also allow marketers to leverage it for maximum SEO gains. While you could create a site on your own by using WordPress, relying on a trained and experienced web developer gives better results. How much you could leverage WordPress websites for marketing gains depends on the level of optimization. Every WordPress website has some SEO capabilities built into it, but the features are limited. To make the website work for SEO in the way you have to make it friendlier to SEO and make it perform functions that help to realize your business goals.

How to earn higher ranks is the ultimate objective of all the optimization measures you take. With WordPress, you can straight away implement SEO by using its essential features, which is one of the reasons for the popularity of the CMS. While optimization is something technical and enhances your efforts in marketing, the real gains come from publishing quality content that creates better user engagement and leads to user satisfaction.  Blogs are highly effective content for marketing, and any marketer is well aware of it.  The way to succeed in marketing with your WordPress website would become apparent on reading this article.

Customize your permalink URLs

The web pages remain hidden under permalinks, which are nothing but the URLs of those pages. The content of the page relates to the page with the help of URL, which is actually a web address. The structure of permanent links would appear the same.  However, if you keep permanent links in its default state, your purpose of using the content would get defeated. Could you make out anything about what the link indicates? Surely, because nothing is clear from what you see. Just as you cannot decipher the link, the search bots that crawl websites for indexing content also are unable to understand what the link means.  There is a need for more clarity on the link.

To make things clear for search engines as well as users, it is necessary to add the description of the page to the link. Luckily, WordPress allows you to customize the permalink URLs.  By using the feature, you can not only add page description to URLs but also include keywords in it.

Create unique Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are brief descriptions of the content that appear just above the link in the SERP. The description is useful for both bots and humans, to understand what the content contains. By looking at the Meta description, users decide whether to click on the link or not.  Therefore, it is critically important to create impressive Meta descriptions that create the initial attraction of the content and encourages users to click the link for consuming it. Good Meta descriptions can increase the chances of clicking on the link, and you must pay complete attention to it for improving SEO prospects. While the WordPress default features have provision for customizing URLs for better results you can use some SEO plugins, too.

Use SEO friendly title tags

Title tags or the title of the blog or article is critical from the SEO perspective because it influences search rankings.  The title tags not only reveal about the page contents to search engines but also create the most vital first impression about the content when viewers look at it in the search result listing.   Besides creating attractive title tags, you have to keep the aspect of optimization in mind so that it appeals to search engines. Adding keywords to title tags and placing at the beginning is one of the best practices in optimizing title tags. Search engines give a lot of emphasis to the title tags. By inserting keywords at appropriate places, you increase its attraction to search engines and improve the prospects of better ranking.

Categories and tags

Providing the best user experience must be topmost in your mind when you optimize your WordPress websites for SEO. You just cannot load content on your site and leave users to hunt for it. Assisting users to find your content easily is the way you can provide them a better experience.  Arranging the content by adhering to a well thought out layout and providing a proper list of content together with an indexing feature is an easy way to help users find out content easily.  Create categories that act as the table of contents and tags become the index that guides search engines to interpret the content quickly. Categories and tags create the proper structure for presenting content that improves chances of indexing by search engines.

Use optimized images

Images add to the attraction of websites, but it could also be detrimental if not optimized properly. Images that occupy too much space can slow down sites and drive away viewers, as they have to wait too long for pages to open. If a web page takes longer than 2 seconds to open it could frustrate viewers who lose interest in the website. Moreover, website speed is also a ranking factor for Google.

To ensure that web pages open fast, use only optimized images without compromising on the quality. The method of image optimization comprises of compressing images to make it occupy much lesser space without affecting its resolution. Either you can use images already optimized, or you can optimize it after uploading on the website. 

The real attraction of WordPress is simple and clean codes that go a long way in encouraging the search engine spiders to crawl and index the web pages with ease. Moreover, there is a constant upgrade of the security features of WordPress websites that receive a steady and continuous dose of enrichment from the contributions of developers. Similar improvement in functionalities gives more strength to the CMS that translates into high performing websites.