If you are looking to drive traffic to your website, then you have various different options available. You might be using the paid methods or the unpaid ones depending upon your marketing objectives. Amongst these methods, SEO or search engine optimization is the most effective one. SEO is a collection of strategies and techniques aimed at helping your pages rank  search engines results. It, in turn, results in higher traffic to your website. There are some ways to boost SEO on WordPress website. We are going to discuss them here.

1. Pick a Theme That’s Optimized for Search Engines

The selection of the right theme can boost SEO on WordPress website significantly. Why? Because the theme determines the layout and appearance of any website. Moreover, the functionality can also be adjusted through the choice of the theme. A clean code gives your site the best chance in SERPs.

While choosing the theme from WordPress dashboard, you need to keep in mind the elements of SEO and the ways through which the theme will boost SEO on the WordPress website. For easy reference, you can call them as SEO friendly themes. Handing and tag options can be some of the other aspects that you might look for in-built in the theme. Although, these specifications are a bit too much,but you can easily find the theme, which is SEO friendly.

2. Use of SEO Plugin

Now, the first question here is what is plugin? Plugins are the software, which can be made the part of the website. Each of the plugin supports a specific function for your website. Why are plugins installed? Because they can help you in providing ease to boost the SEO for your WordPress website. One of the specific plugins for boosting the SEO is Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO can provide you with essential elements to consider while writing content for your website.

3. Modify ‘Permalink’

The permanent links to your content or each specific page or post are known as permalinks. They play an important role to boost the SEO for WordPress website because these links are used as the backlinks. This is why the structure of these links is important.

Some of the properties of these links include clear and descriptive links, so that the search engine can get to know about your post directly. These permalinks are also important for the ranking of the website. Simply using numbers in the permalinks is not advisable as numbers won’t be revealing much information about the post.

Changing your permalink structure is not difficult. You need to go to the settings of your website and open permalink tab. Here you can add a manual permalink or adjust it according to the posts.

4. Creation of ‘Sitemap’

If you are the owner of a website, you’ll probably know what a site map is? It provides you with the list and order of all pages that you have in your post. It is available in the website to provide a quick view of all the elements of a website. A site map communicates with the search engine bots and provides it the necessary information. to rank your website. Thus, it is an important part to boost SEO on WordPress website.

5. Use of Heading Tags Is a Must:

Heading tags are the must-haves in order to boost the SEO for WordPress. The headings are important for the readers as well as the search engine. For the readers, the use of H1 and H2 tags help them in identifying the logical sequence of the content. For the search engines, the sitemap discussed above does not form randomly, rather these Heading tags are used for the creation of the sitemap.

You can modify the style and size of the heading tags quite easily. Once you’ll select a particular size for each of the heading tag, from that point onwards, just selecting the tag icon would serve your purpose.

6. Write Keywords Centric Content:

Writing keyword centric content is utmost need for managing the SEO for WordPress website. The keywords can enable your content to be more relevant for your audience and the search engine. The search engine tracks the keywords and ranks your data according to your chosen keyword.

The search engine does not get to know about the search engine on its own. Rather the multiple time usage of the keyword and incorporation of plugins such as Yoast could make it easier for the search engine to recognize a particular keyword. You must use the keyword with medium to lesser competition as it would make the ranking of your website easier.

However, while using keywords make sure that you don’t go for excessive usage of keywords. This excessive usage of keywords is Keyword Stuffing. And you must avoid that at all costs. Otherwise your content will be marked as spammy and search engine will not give you the higher ranking. There are chances that search engines would penalize you too.

7. Add Useful Internal and External Links

You can’t expect your website to grow by existing alone. This is because Google will not consider your website as an authentic content, if it won’t be supported by other links. So, to have internal and external links is important. Internal links include the use of the existing pages or posts to be referred into the new content. The external links are links to other websites or blogs.

One of the important thing here is the credibility of the source with which you are linking your page. Make sure there is some linkage of an obvious kind between the linking pages, otherwise Google will recognize it as a spammy effort to manipulate the results of Google.

8. Optimize Your Images

Visual appeal in the form of images can attract more users. Moreover, the images can also extend the time that your audience would spend on your website. This is the scenario for the traffic who can evaluate what your image is about and how is it relevant to the content that you have written.

But the spiders and crawlers cannot analyse the image by viewing it. They need some signals to know what the picture is about. So here comes your role, you need to provide the search engines with clear description of the picture.

you can add alt tags in the picture to boost SEO for WordPress website. It will give the image its own identity for the search engine as well

9. Long Content Is The Best

While analyzing the short content and long content, the search engine gives preference to the long content. This becomes one of the important factors to boost SEO for WordPress website.

That doesn’t mean that the shorter content is not ranked at all. It can be ranked at a higher level, but the chances are that when the other things are similar, the length of the content would provide you the edge.

However, you must not go irrelevant while going for long lengths. You must be creative enough to avoid any sort of duplication. Moreover, copying from other sources is severely prohibited. It will create negative impact on your ranking, so avoid it completely and go for original content.

Longer content can also help users in a better way. The users can find all the information at a particular website. This can ease their problems or provide solution to their queries and they’ll come to your website next time for other relevant queries.

10. Update Your Posts Frequently

You can’t be expecting to use the old content for ranking on the search engine. Old content is important but so is new and the fresh content. You need to add new content continuously to ensure that the search engines know that you are here and updating all your content regularly.

Without regular updates, search engines would consider your website obsolete. same is the case with the audience, if they won’t get the latest content, they’ll switch instantly.

11. Focus on Quality Content

There is nothing more important than the quality of the content of your website. It can boost the SEO for WordPress websites instantly. How? The audience is the best judge of the quality. IF they’ll feel that your content is not quality based. They will switch from your website within seconds and search engines usually guess the instant switching as the lack of quality control. If such a situation would persist, the chances are that your website would get lower ranks. So, if you don’t want such a situation to impact you and the SEO for the WordPress website. Then, you must give high importance to quality.