SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a one of the most important topic that every blogger must learn to improve the visibility of his/her website in search engines. In this article, I will be guiding you do SEO for a website from scratch so that you can create a SEO friendly website in 2020.
Creating a website on WordPress is just like fun. But if you are not aware about these most important SEO factors from the beginning, then you can’t take your blog to the top of SERPs. If you are struggling to make your site from unseen to seen results on SERPs, You have to stick yourself till the last of this article.
The Most Important SEO Ranking Factors
SEO is something that can help you to get some hot sales. Because when someone searches something through the search engine they intend to buy the things.
Very few people visit the second page of SERPs. So, to get sales you have to keep your content on the first page. You can rank on the first page only when you have a well-optimized site.
That means a well-optimized site will help you to get more traffic and more traffic means more lead and eventually more sales. We all know that there are more than 200 SEO Ranking Factors to consider while creating a web page.
I found this interesting picture from uptimiser.com.hk, which is clearly telling various areas in SEO where one must put efforts to create a quality website. In this article, I will mostly highlight the Infrastructure or website structure SEO related points which mostly people avoid as a beginner.
How To Create SEO Friendly Website in 2020
SEO doesn’t always mean creating a high quality article or creating authority backlinks. If your website structure is not optimized as per the expectations from search engines, then your website will not rank on top even if you have good content and a solid backlink profile. So, the first priority is to create an SEO friendly website structure.
1.Ensure A Secured Website (HTTPS is Must)
When people say that they are offering a secured website for their visitors they mean they have Secured Sockets Layout (SSL) on their website. Make sure your site is SSL encrypted. Choose a host for you that offers SSL certificates to make your readers feel safe.
Image Source: https://www.robustgroup.com/
Few of the good recommended hosting companies with FREE SSL Certificates are:
- SiteGround (Get 70% Discount)
- A2 Hosting (Get 60% Discount)
- Bluehost + Free Domain (Get 63% Discount)
SSL certificate plays a vital role in establishing a secure connection between your hosting server and the visitor’s device. If your website has an SSL certificate that will access through HTTPS protocol and denotes your visitors that the data transferred between your visitors and your website is private and safe.
No hacker can steal the information of your visitors from your website. This is a very crucial part of any website having an SSL certificate. Google has also confirmed that the website with SSL certificate has a more positive impact than the sites without SSL certificate. Though the SSL certificate is not the only thing that is responsible for ranking. There are many other factors that also determine the ranking of any pages.
2.Page Speed
Page-Speed is a very important website SEO factor as well SEO Ranking factors in 2020. Yes, if your website speed is very bad it will impact your user experience. And further it will increase your bounce rate and further drop in search ranking.
For example, you have landed on a page that is taking 10 seconds to load. Will you wait to see what happens or leave? If I would be the visitor, I would leave the page and check for another site. Here is an interesting chart explaining the user retention time on a page.
That means low page speed will make you suffer a lot that can lose your traffic and eventually your sales. Try to make sure your site doesn’t take more than two seconds to load. Try to ensure the following requirements to have an amazing high speed site.
- Choose a fast WordPress hosting for your blog. This blog is hosted on SiteGround GoGeek plan which is the #1 Fastest Hosting for WordPress. Just read this detailed SiteGround Hosting review to find out why SiteGround is best.
- Optimize your images before uploading
- Use CDN like Cloudflare to speed up your website
- Use less WordPress Plugins to increase page speed
Run site tests frequently to check where you need to make an improvement on your site. There are more than 23 website speed optimization tips you can follow to improve your website speed and create a very fast loading website in 2020.
3.Mobile Friendliness
Mobile-friendliness defines how smoothly your site is loaded on smartphones or tablets. The websites or blogs that are mobile-friendly gets more attention than non-mobile friendly websites.
If you are dreaming of ranking on the top, must ensure a mobile-friendly website. Otherwise, your dream will not become true. You can consider the following the to have a mobile-friendly website:
You have to make sure you are using a mobile responsive theme
- Concentrate on fonts size that is easily readable from a mobile device. Check these amazing popular Google fonts to use on your blog.
- Make sure your menus are easy to navigate
- Don’t put any ads that can hide your contents
You can check here if your site is mobile-friendly or not.
4. Install A Responsive & SEO optimized Theme
The best way to create a mobile SEO optimized website is by choosing a premium WordPress theme. There are plenty of premium WordPress themes, but pick the most popular, SEO friendly, fast loading theme which not only give your website a website design, it will also improve the readability.
These days, almost every website is focusing on improving their user interface with the help of page builders or theme builders. The reason is obvious that with an attractive design you can attract more readers, provide good reading experience and grow as a trust worthy of source of information.
This website is created with the help of Thrive Theme Builder, which is one of the best WordPress Themes builders in 2020. You can use any theme & page builder and create such amazing website which loads fast, SEO optimized and also highly secure from online treats.
5.Create SEO Optimized Content
Keyword Optimized Content is one of the important SEO factors that you should not ignore. When you are writing content make sure you are putting your keywords everywhere in your Post Title URL, Heading, Subheading, meta description and all over the body.
To work on perfect keyword optimization, you have to learn some keyword research skills.
Another one of the important SEO factors is giving your audience a fresh copy. If you are using any content that you are using on any other page. Let them google it by using Canonical URL. By using canonical URLs you can let Google know which page they should rank first.
Use LSI Keywords To Optimize Your Content
If you are thinking SEO is about the main keyword. You are wrong. It’s also important to incorporate terms associated with the most terms people are attempting to find.
These are called LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords. They supply a sort of online word association to assist Google to know which ends up to indicate.
For example, if you search for a keyword “mini” you will Google and show you many relevant pages like cars and other products. If you search for “mini skirt” your visitors can get their desired product on first surfing.
It’s worth noting that as more people search by voice, content optimization includes optimizing for questions and tongue searches. which means some LSI keywords are going to be longer because people tend to talk differently than they type.
Think about it: Let’s say you are the owner of a hotel. And 1/2 your customers type the phrase “best hotel near me.” Then again people also seek for “what’s the cheapest hotel in Delhi” when searching by voice.
Even though both questions are targeting the same type of thing, Google’s result may show up differently in SERPs. Using LSI keywords would be a method of constructing sure your hotel ranks for both sets of questions.
The more advantage you can add to google to understand your article, the more chance to rank on the top you will get. Here’s a crucial point, though: keyword stuffing is outlawed because it’ll lead to poor quality sites and can hurt your SEO ranking.
Also Read How To Find High Adsense CPC Keywords
Understand Search Intent
Try to understand what keyword people are typing when they are looking for any products. The keyword people use to find a product is called search intent.
You can easily understand your user search intent. Open a Google search in your in-private browser and sort in your keyword. See which ends are currently ranking and determine whether or not your content would be a decent fit. If not, you would like to restart your keyword research.
If so, take this chance to determine why certain pages are ranking. Try to avoid keyword cannibalization. Because keyword cannibalization can hamper your SEO. You can do a competitive analysis of the highest 10 ends up in the SERP to determine how you’ll be able to make your content even better!
Then you’ll be able to fully optimize your content by making it an improvement over this search results
Write Long Content
Google hates low-quality content. Try to publish depth in content. It is not advisable to write only long content. Write depth in content when the topic needs depth.
This is not mandatory to write a depth in content but it increases the chances to rank on the top. Most of the top-ranking articles contain 2000 words. So, it’s wise to write something around 2000 words.
Use FAQs To Get More Clicks
Add FAQs to your article. It increases the chances to get ranked on the “People Also Ask’’ Section. You can use Ultimate Blocks to easily add FAQs to your content. This is a free plugin.
You can easily get the question from the “People Also Section” just enter your keyword and search. There are some other free sources from where you can get your FAQs. You can use Quora and Answer The Public to get your desired questions that you can add into your FAQs section. Both of them are free to use.
Use Related Video In Content
Nowadays almost 79% of audiences prefer watching videos rather than reading blogs. Videos get more shared and links and provide social signals that can boost your SEO. Start adding videos to optimize your content greatly.
Use Header Tags
The H tag is not only for styling your article. You can use this tag to navigate your content for adding an extra advantage for your readers. It helps to understand the search engine better about your content structure. An H1 tag used as the headline of a content. This is the most crucial part of any article. Every page should have only one H1 tag. If you wanna drive organic traffic to any page insert an H1 tag to that page. H2 tags work as the divider. It helps to divide your page into many sections. If you want perfection for tagging optimized subheading, use the H3 tag. But make sure your H tags maintain H tag procedure. Don’t put the H3 tag directly under the H1 tag. Use H2 under H1 and use H3 under H2 section and if you need H4 use that under H3 section not directly H2 section.
6. Internal Linking For SEO
Link building is a crucial part of SEO. And when we talk about link building, mostly people understand about off-page link building technique. Do you know that you can also boost your website ranking by doing proper internal linking of your blog posts?
Internal links help to make your content more valuable to your users as well as Google. It insanely increases page engagement from one page to another and also increases some page authority.
How To Do Internal Linking For SEO
Bonus Tip:
Focus On Quality Rather Than The Quantity
Don’t try to write for Google. Write for your audience. If you are writing something that is for making Google happy but your users are not loving your article, you are going to lose your ranking.
For example, You have written just Google-friendly content. You are ranking on the top. Thousands of traffic are visiting your site every day. But they quickly leave your site as they don’t find the article user friendly or they are not getting their desired solution.
The sudden leave will increase your bounce rate and increased bounce rate will hamper your SEO.
Increase Social Signal
Google ensures that Twitter and Facebook share is not counted as better as the share on another authoritative site. Social shares do not influence ranking factors directly.
But the more social share your article will get, the more traffic you will receive. More traffic can increase some backlinks.
Eventually, it can help you to rank on the top. As we see that the top-performing articles have huge social shares.
Faqs Related To SEO For Website
What is SEO and how it works?
Every need to follow a certain structure so that every search engine can read the website pages properly and rank them accordingly. Those rules are called SEO. That means, you have to follow certain rules while creating a website so that your website can be crawled by Google easily and rank on top.
Does SEO Still Work?
SEO is a complex & continuous process. Even if you follow all SEO checklist, that doesn’t mean that your website will rank on top of Google. There are many changes happening in the world of SEO, you have to learn and implement them gradually and be patient as SEO takes time to give results.
How can I learn SEO in 2020?
The best way to learn SEO is by following the industry SEO Experts, Top Bloggers who are sharing their practical learning through case studies.
How do beginners do SEO?
As a beginner, just focus on creating quality content by following all basic on-page SEO factors. Make sure to create the website structure as SEO friendly as per this article.
Wrapping Up
Try to make sure every mentioned step you are following to boost your SEO. These are the most important SEO factors you should not ignore. But you will be ranked overnight. It will take some time and afford. You should note that 60% of the content that is ranking on the top has a domain of two or three years old. The more time your domain will pass, the more authority you will achieve. So, my suggestion to you is just make sure you are doing the above basic steps and keep publishing your content consistently. You will rank higher. These are few of the important website SEO factors that you must consider while creating a blog on WordPress. Don’t compromise them, invest in blogging right from the beginning after a good hosting, good theme and all essential products which will help you to create a conversion focused website. Feel free to write a comment below and share your experience, feedback or if you have any questions.
Note: This is a guest post by Sayem Ibn Kashem (Founder of FacileWay), further edited by Santanu Debnath.
Note: This beautiful inforgraphic is shared by Piyush Yadav of Exactblogging.com