WordPress currently powers over 40% of all of the websites on the internet. Its high popularity is due to it’s highly flexible nature and the popularity will rise drastically in the coming years.
I have already written a guide on how to boost WordPress ranking on search engines. But, this guide will help you to improve some other aspects of your website which will help you to rank higher search engines.
1) Improve your Site Speed
It’s now more important than ever to improve your site speed due to the Core Web Vitals update in Google Search. The main points to focus on are:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
- FID (First Input Delay)
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
Contrary to popular belief, Google doesn’t reward fast sites – instead they penalize slow ones. So, if your site performs poorly in any one or more of the above points, your site will lose ranking due to the Google penalty.
The best way to measure these three factors is GTMetrix or Google Page Insights. Ignore the scores because the most focus should be on improving the LCP, FID and CLS.
So, how to improve these things? Here are some tips:
- Enable caching on your site. Here is a great guide for that
- Resize and compress images either before uploading or by using a plugin
- Change your hosting provider. Here is a list of the best ones
2) Delete Thin Content
By definition, thin content is any page on your site that’s under 300 words long and doesn’t provide concrete value to the reader.
Thin content is basically useless in ranking. Have you ever seen any website’s contact page rank? No right. That’s because that page doesn’t add any value to most of the readers.
Here is a good article on how you can find thin content and fix it – WTF Is Thin Content? (And How Do You Fix It?) (searchenginejournal.com).
3) Add Alt Text to Every Image
Alt tags are essential in order for search engines to correctly index the images. Alt tags will associate the images with a post. This will help you to rank up.
To add alt tags, open any image in the WordPress gallery and enter the image name in the Alternative Text box.
To find which images don’t have any alt texts, use Ubersuggest. You can sign up for the free 7 day trial for even in-depth scanning of your site’s contents.
4) Use Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is one of the best SEO analysis tools available on the internet. It has many features like organic traffic of a site over a certain period of time, keywords a particular site ranks for, keyword difficulty, and many more.
I would highly recommend you to upgrade to their pro plan because it will unlock more features like keyword rank tracking, competitor rank tracking etc.
5) Add Internal and External Links
A good site structure is critical for ranking higher on Google. This is because Google wants to show those sites to users which are easier to navigate so that users have a really good experience.
To improve the site structure, make sure you have the main site menu filled with meaningful links. You can link the less visited and less sought for pages (like the privacy policy, terms and condition etc. pages) in the footer menu.
Also, make sure you have some internal links. This will help users to navigate to the relevant articles which is referred in the article that they are currently reading.
Also, make sure to add some external links in your articles wherever possible. This will tell Google that the article has at least one good source from which the author has researched from.
Verdict
Here are some more tips to increase your website ranking on search engines. Improving the Core Web Vitals of your website is really important after the Google Search update.
I hope that this tutorial has helped to further improve you site’s ranking. If you have any queries or suggestions, then please let me know in the comments down below.
