Table of Contents
26- Build quality backlinks
Backlinks are very important in SEO. The more backlinks you have from reputable websites, the more credibility you have. As the amount of backlinks given to your website increases over time, the number of links to your site will increase exponentially. Research conducted by Brian Dean on the number of backlinks and site credibility shows that the more backlinks a site has, the higher its ranking in Google.
Another research was done by Matthew Barbee, during which about one million URLs were examined and the result was that backlinks have a direct relationship with site rank. This research showed that the sites that rank 1 and 2 have an average of 38% more backlinks than other Google first-page rankings. One of the backlink management tools is ahrefs, where there are the total number of backlinks of the site, the number of reference domains, organic keywords, etc. and you can manage them.
**Tip: When people give you a link, try reposting it, this will help boost their social signal and increase the credibility of their site. How does this help you?
The more authoritative the domain of the site that links to you is, it will add to the authority of your domain and help your SEO, so it’s completely a win-win deal. Don’t be afraid after publishing content that is related to you, it will be completely in your favor.
27- Install an SSL certificate
Google has officially said that HTTPS is one of the most effective factors in ranking, and this is not a new issue. To use HTTPS, you need to install an SSL certificate on your site. This factor may not be as effective in ranking as other factors, but it is not a reason not to use it, anyway, you have to keep up with your competitors. In addition, Google insists on having HTTPS, which shows that this factor will play an even more effective role in the future than today.
During the research conducted by Matthew Barbee, about 1 million URLs were examined, and it was found that 33% of the sites that rank 1-3 in Google use HTTPS. If you haven’t thought about migrating to HTTPS, you better start thinking about it today.
28- Use schema
You may have heard the name Schema more or less. A schema is a piece of extra code that helps the search engine deliver more and better data to the visitor. You must have seen the ratings that are placed next to the site and are displayed with yellow stars. This privilege happens precisely because of having a schema. Having a star makes you shine more in Google and as a result your click rate increases.
CXL Institute conducted a study during which it was found that having a star rating helps a lot in increasing organic traffic and websites that use this rating have 35% more traffic. Many WordPress themes have schema code in them, but many do not have this feature. You can test the presence of schema on your website with tools such as Google Structured data testing.
In general, if the right column is empty in this tool, it means that you do not have a schema on your website. If you plan to add schema, it is recommended to use plugins like Schema. This plugin automatically adds the necessary codes to the site.
29- Use social markup
You’ve probably seen little Facebook and Twitter thumbnails when you publish a blog post on your WordPress site. These thumbnails are called social markups, which are usually displayed as Profiles when someone searches for you on Google, and by clicking on any of these thumbnails, the user can enter your profile on that particular social network.
Fortunately, the Yoast SEO plugin has this feature and can add the necessary social markups for you. Of course, the direct impact of social markup on SEO is not exactly clear, but it can establish a good relationship with the user. Our recommendation is to enter any social network you have in the Yoast SEO plugin fields.
From the settings section, you can choose which social networks should be shown to the user when your post wants to be published, and you can even specify the type of thumbnail, small and large.
30- Produce evergreen content
Evergreen content plays a colorful role when it comes to SEO and long-term organic traffic. Evergreen content refers to content that is not dependent on time and creates added value for the audience whenever it is read in the long term. However, you should always keep an eye on evergreen content and update it with any changes in the industry. Another advantage of evergreen content is that you can publish it many times and attract backlinks and social signals through it.
31- Try to enter the Google Knowledge panel (Google Knowledge Graph).
Maybe you have ever seen a box with descriptions on the first page of results when searching. This box is called a knowledge panel or feature snippet. If you can enter this box, you will guarantee your organic traffic many times over.
But the question is how to enter this box.
Unfortunately, there is no 100% specific version to bring the content to this level, but according to experience, having a schema, using titles, and bullet lists can have a good effect on reaching the feature snippet. However, always try to have an orderly and separate content structure to increase your chances of entering FeatureSnippet.
32- Be careful of negative SEO!
Negative SEO is one of the most sensitive issues that you must pay attention to. Normally, getting backlinks is a positive thing and increases the credibility of your site. But the opposite also exists and malicious backlinks can give a bad blow to your website. That’s why you should always monitor your backlinks profile to make sure no one is doing negative SEO against your website.
For example, in one of the known cases, there was a website that was attacked by 200,000 malicious backlinks, and it took about 2 years to correct the results and effects of this attack.
To prevent malicious backlinks, Google has a tool called Disavow, which allows you to create a list of malicious and suspicious domains that you don’t want, so Google bans these domains for you and they can’t give you backlinks. This will protect the domain’s credibility and keep it healthy.
33- Make your brand’s social networks official
After you have launched your website, it is better to make your main social networks official. This helps a lot with SEO because these links are no-follows, but in return, they can bring you a lot of traffic. In addition, official social pages are quickly ranked in Google and this issue has a very positive impact on branding. In this case, when the user searches for your brand name in Google, your social networks will also be listed for him, which will make it easier for you to get organic traffic.
34- Don’t neglect local SEO techniques
Local SEO is one of the most important parts of SEO, especially for small businesses. Local SEO techniques are so vast that it is beyond the scope of this article and here is just a pointer to give you more research. However, the first step you should take is to create a Google My Business and Bing Places account. Both of these tools are free and help you get found in local searches.
35- Index images when using CDN
The traffic that comes to the website through images is very helpful and therefore indexing them is very important. According to Jumpshot’s research, in 2018, search through images accounted for about 22% of all searches, which is a significant number. If you are using a content distribution network (CDN), make sure that the images are indexed.
If you don’t do this, your photos will not be indexed and it will mean that you will lose all the benefits of Google photo search. In 2018, when Google changed its photo algorithm, it said the following three things:
- Photos are prioritized by most recent date
- Photos that are placed higher on the page are ranked better
- Validity is a very important subject
36- Do not index the attached photo page
When you upload a photo to a page or post in WordPress, a separate page is created where the photo is attached. If you are not careful, Google will index these separate pages that only have one image, and this is not good at all. The reason this is harmful is that the person who comes through image search and clicks on your photo enters a page where only the photo is placed and there is no other text or content, which causes the user to leave the page and Your bounce rate will increase.
If you are using the Yoast SEO plugin, there is a direct option to fix this problem. To activate it, you need to enter the Yoast SEO plugin from the menu and click on the Media tab after the Search Appearance section. Now just activate the Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself option.
37- Have a multilingual website
Adding another language to the site can have a significant impact on increasing traffic. Of course, this issue is not true for every business and it completely depends on your service area. For example, Neil Patel, a famous Indian digital marketer, attracted about 47% more traffic after adding 82 more languages to his website.
In terms of SEO, due to the existence of hreflang and canonical tags, Google does not penalize you for having the same content, and, with these tags, it understands the original language and its translation. There are many plugins like Weglot that you can use to translate your content. But don’t forget, that machine translation can never replace a live translator, so if the quality of the content is important to you, make sure to use human resources.
38- Improve website speed
One of the most important SEO issues is website speed. From ten years ago until now, Google has officially announced that website speed has a direct impact on SEO.
The following points make it clear to you the importance of website speed:
- If a website takes more than 4 seconds to open, one in four people will leave.
- 46% of users will stop visiting that website if they experience low speed.
- The website owner has only 5 seconds to hold the user for the site to load.
- 74% of mobile users wait only 5 seconds for the site to load.
- For big businesses like Amazon, every second of delay in site loading costs $6 billion in lost revenue every year.
Your host plays a very important role in the speed of the site, so be sure to set aside a good budget for the host and choose the best one.
39- Fix broken links
Nobody likes broken links and Google is no exception. There are several ways to fix broken links on a WordPress website. The first thing you need to do is to find broken links through Google Search Console. To find broken links in Google Search Console, you need to go to the Coverage section. In this section, you will see a report of all site failures, errors, and warnings.
Click on the error box and scroll down to reach the Details section. Here you will see a list of all the problems that Google has encountered while crawling your site. 404 errors that show broken links can also be seen in this section.
Google Search Console will tell you exactly where these broken links are located, so you can go to the same place and replace it with a healthy link. Of course, there are WordPress plugins for detecting broken links, which it is recommended not to use because they can affect the overall performance and speed of the site. If you prefer to use third-party tools, there are websites like Online Broken Link Checker that report all broken links on a site with a single scan.
40- Evaluate the site’s SEO performance
One of the ways you can measure the performance of your WordPress site is to evaluate it through available tools. One such free tool that reports your SEO position is SeoSiteCheckup, which uses 50 metrics to measure your site’s SEO. Another good tool in this field is Varvy, which checks a variety of parameters such as Google bots’ access to your site, page speed, mobile SEO, site security, etc. Maybe these tools seem a bit simple, but if there is a bug in one of these simple topics, it can target your entire SEO.
41- Make sure the site is mobile-responsive
In 2016, Google presented its first algorithm on how pages are indexed on mobile. The responsiveness or interactiveness of the site on the mobile page is one of the most important issues that Google considers, and by the way, it is very serious about it.
If your site is not mobile responsive, put it down and go to it immediately. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly tool to see the current display status of your site on mobile. Another way to check the display on mobile is to use Google Analytics. Pay attention to the traffic that enters your site from mobile phones. If this amount is not significant, it means that your site is probably not responsive.
42- Index the category of posts
This strategy is optional and it is not necessary to do it, but indexing the categories in Google will increase the relevance of your content with the site, and as a result, it will affect your ranking and bring you more organic traffic.
You can perform category indexing using the following steps:
- Enable category indexing in the Yoast SEO plugin
In the WordPress dashboard, enter the SEO plugin from the menu and click on the Taxonomies tab in the Search Appearance section. After that, you can make sure that the index is activated in the Show Categories in the search results section.
- Specify category description
Now go to Posts and click on Edit from the Category section. Finally, in the Description section, you can write the description of the specific category you want to index. And finally, press the Update button to apply the changes.
43- Don’t ignore Google Analytics
The best way to show the performance of your website with statistics is to use the Google Analytics tool. The first thing you need to do is connect Search Console to Analytics. For this, you must select Search console settings from the Property section and enter the process of connecting these two tools.
With this, a search console section will be added to your analytics account, from where you can see searched terms, the best landing pages, etc. Another section that you should pay attention to is the Channels section, which can be accessed from the Acquisition menu. In this section, you can see all the channels from which traffic enters your website (such as organic input).
When you click on the term Organic Search, you will see the traffic details from search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. When you pay attention to these areas that represent your organic traffic inflow, you can understand where your SEO is and whether your SEO efforts are paying off.
44- Pay attention to the rank of keywords
One of the best strategies is to monitor the keywords for which your site is ranked on the second page of results. You should try to spend more time on these keywords. Write better content for them, build more backlinks, and do everything else we mentioned in this article to improve SEO. This will gradually increase the ranking of your site for those keywords and get you to the first page of the results. One of the good tools with which you can see the performance of your keywords and manage them is Accuranker.
45- Use high-quality images
Before this, in this same article, we emphasized the importance of searching through images and we saw that significant traffic can enter our site through images. Visual content such as photos, graphs, screenshots, etc. help to enrich the content.
In other words, adding an image to your content brings you the following benefits:
- Your images will rank in Google search and bring you more organic traffic.
- Your images will help Google’s crawlers better understand the relevance of your content.
- Images make your content more interesting and friendly to the audience.
- Google supports high-quality images and this is the best opportunity for you to use visual content well.
46- Increase user dwell time
Dwell time is the time a searcher or a user who finds your site from a search engine spends on your website. This factor is one of the most important ranking criteria for Google. So your content must be such that the user coming from the search engine wants to spend more time on your website.
If you are among the newbies, try to put important information above the fold. Fold is a part of the page that the user can view without having to pull down the page, and it is a very important and strategic area. Try to have a menu and a call to action button in this section. In this section, avoid features that annoy the user, for example, experience has shown that pop-ups that open quickly or videos that play automatically are two things that quickly return the user to the search engine and leave your page.
47- Update old contents
As we have mentioned several times in this article, updating old content is one of the musts of SEO. Google cares a lot about the newness of the content when ranking, so you should always try to keep an eye on the content and update it so you don’t fall behind. Yoast SEO plugin helps to identify old content that you may want to update. The important articles that you have specified under the title Corner stone or cornerstone content if they have not been updated in the last 6 months, will be displayed in the Stale Corner Stone Content section of the Yoast SEO plugin.
If you don’t have a Yoast SEO premium plugin, you can use additional tools like Animalz Revive. Just type your URL in the box and allow this tool to access Google Analytics. In this way, this tool will introduce you to the contents that need to be updated to improve SEO.
48- Make a content shaker
Shrinking content means pruning the content. That is, delete content that is outdated and no longer functional and cannot be updated from your content circle. Of course, you may not want to do this because you have spent time and money on the content. But anyway, having little quality content is better than having a lot of low-quality content that brings you aimless traffic. In this case, your crawl budget will be saved and Google can index your high-quality content in a certain period.
Content marketing is more of an art than a strategy and you must do it carefully. Do not forget, if you decide to remove the content, make sure to create a 301 redirect for it so that the visitor does not get lost on the site.
49- De-index duplicate content
Having two copies of the same content doesn’t seem wise to Google, but it can happen to you too. Unfortunately, having duplicate content and indexing both versions can be problematic for SEO. Google has not directly penalized this issue, but it seriously affects your ranking. The problem here is that when Google comes across two completely similar posts, it doesn’t distinguish the main content from the secondary content, and it doesn’t know which one to rank higher. This will affect your ranking.
The easiest solution to this problem is to de-index the duplicate page. In WordPress, you can easily do this through the Staging site. Just go to the settings section and activate the Discourage search engines from indexing this site option from the Reading tab.
50- Optimize content for Google Discover
Google Discover is an Android content recommendation tool that shows the user a feed of content it thinks the user might be interested in. As we mentioned earlier, mobile usage is increasing day by day, so optimizing posts for mobile applications should be part of your SEO strategy.
Since Google Discover isn’t search-based, keywords won’t help, but there are several ways to show up on the service that will help:
- Create quality content
- Use photos and videos in posts
- Produce evergreen content
- Translate your content
When it comes to photos in the post, it’s best to enable the large photos feature in Google Discover. Experience has shown that large images lead to higher click-through rates and longer viewing times, resulting in increased user satisfaction.
51- Create a professional footer for the site
If you scroll down to the end of your website page, you may see some words that you didn’t write yourself, for example, “Powered by WordPress”, which is usually found on every WordPress website.
Although these writings do not create any negative features, they make the site look unprofessional. In addition, links have a significant impact on SEO, so removing unnecessary links can be a positive action. Copyrights granted to the developer can be removed through the personalization settings. In addition, these links can be edited through the footer.php file of your site template and you can remove them from that section.
52- Use anchor links in long content
You have probably seen on some websites that when an article is long, there are links at the beginning of the text that you can use to go to any part of the text based on the title. These links are called anchors. Anchor links have a very positive effect on the user experience because in this case, the user does not waste time and finds the desired topic faster.
In addition, when your content is displayed on the Google results page, the title of your anchor links will be displayed below the text, which will increase the click-through rate and attract more organic traffic to you.
53- Make your domain short and brandable
Your website address is like the name on your birth certificate and you are supposed to be called by the same name until the end. The name of your website makes the first impression on the audience and it is very important to choose it wisely.
- Preferably choose a short name that is easy to remember.
- Preferably use the main keyword in it.
- Choose your domain name so that it sounds like a brand name.
- Avoid exact match domains.
The last thing that was said is especially effective in SEO. Exact match domains are domains that exactly match the phrase or keyword that the website wants to rank for. This problem used to be used as an SEO strategy, but usually, websites with the name of exact matching had poor quality content, so Google changed its algorithm and today it shows many sensitivities on these types of domains.
54- Reduce the bounce rate
Bounce is the time when a user enters your site but quickly leaves the site without taking any action. A high bounce rate is considered a negative factor and means that your website is not attractive enough for users. You can see the bounce rate using the Google Analytics tool from the Behavior menu.
Of course, you should note that bounce rate is not considered a direct factor in search engine ranking and SEO as a whole. The reason is that the bounce rate is completely dependent on the type of industry you are in. For example, news sites have the highest bounce rate, and this is normal. But in general, a high bounce rate indicates problems on the site that can directly or indirectly affect your SEO, so they must be investigated. Various reasons may be effective in the bounce rate, such as confusing site menus, misleading links or titles, slow loading speed, etc.
55- The most important pages in the site menu
The last thing, which is not a measure for SEO, but is very important in the user experience, is having key pages in the site menu. There are some basic pages that every website should have and they are considered as a kind of site credibility.
About Us: This page usually contains basic information about your brand. If your brand has a story, if you have a mission statement, it belongs on this page. Try to communicate with the audience and give them a sense of trust so that they can understand the personality behind this website.
Contact us: Put any type of communication that the user can have with you, including physical address, contact number, email, address on Google Maps, etc., in this section so that the user can communicate with you more easily.
Terms and Conditions: These pages are mostly required by big brands that have somewhat more formal rules. If you want to collect information from the user (such as a cookie), you must make it clear to him on this page. If you have a cooperation program in sales, it is on this page. If you have rules for selling and referring products, mention them all on this page so that there is no ambiguity for the user.