WordPress is a widely used CMS, especially for blogging. You can also create a nice elegant business website in WordPress. But what is the use of an elegant website when it drives absolutely no traffic? The ultimate aim of owning a website is to make money out of it, by driving more traffic to your website. SEO is the only choice to bring organic traffic to your website.
Search engines does not care about your website design or quality of photos and video in your website. They like websites which loads quick, easy to navigate and well optimized.
Some of the important things to consider while optimizing your wordpress website for search engines.
1) Install Sitemap plugin.
An XML sitemap file will help the search engines to find all the pages of your website. There are several plugins available to create an XML sitemap in WordPress. Install a good XML Sitemap plugin for your WordPress website. Sitemap plugin will create an XML file with all the links in your pages. Search engines can easily crawl and index all the pages of your website.
2) Optimize each post with proper titles. Highlight important content with H1, H2 heading tags. Keep all your important key word in these heading tags. Make sure you use these tags in proper hierarchy, H1, H2, H3 etc. A page can have only one H1 tag and any number of other tags H2, H3 etc.
3) Optimize your images. Use only optimized images while uploading to WordPress. Optimizing your images by compressing will reduce the bytes of the images to a great extent. This will improving page page loading speed. If you have already uploaded the images to WordPress, then use any image optimization plugins to optimize images.
Make sure you add proper alt tags to images and give descriptive name while naming the images.
4) Integrate social media sharing buttons in all your posts so that the visitors can share your posts to their friends on social media. It is a kind of free advertisement for your website and posts. But remember that people like and share only good quality, unique contents. There are lot of social media plugins available for WordPress.