Guide to Optimizing Your Website With WordPress SEO

SEO, How To

You and your customers probably have one very important thing in common, and that is your regular use of search engines. No matter what product they’re looking for, the odds are very good that your customers are using a search engine to find it.

Ranking high on the search engine results page is like saying “Here I am! Pick me!” to your customer’s search queries. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a way to put your website and brand where a paying customer’s eyes are most likely to see you. 

As one of the most popular website development and maintenance tools in the marketplace, WordPress comes packed with a host of SEO tools and plugins to help online businesses succeed on their platform. In fact, WordPress SEO is so powerful that beginners often find it hard to know where to start. That’s why Single Origin has put together this guide to give you an idea of what to expect when improving your search engine rankings with WordPress. 

SEO Success With WordPress Themes

A website’s theme will always be one of the first things your audience notices about it. Most of our clients here at Single Origin use themes to give themselves and their websites unified design and branding, making themselves more recognizable and memorable in the eyes of their customers. 

But a beautiful theme isn’t always all that it’s cracked up to be. It can introduce a number of unforeseen problems in your website’s operation and usability, which, if you aren’t careful, can actually backfire on your SEO rankings. 

Nothing tanks a site’s SEO rankings faster than a slow, unresponsive site caused by a poor choice of theme. This is why you should pick themes that are: 

  • Lightweight: They should load fast, create minimal interruption in the user experience, and be reasonably pleasant to look at.
  • Efficiently Coded: WordPress themes often have more going on under the hood than you may think. Bad coding can repel, rather than attract, search engine crawlers, which defeats the purpose of the theme in the first place. Find a WordPress theme with code optimized for website performance. 
  • Compatible With Common SEO Plugins: Choosing a theme compatible with some of the most common (and useful) SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO, reduces the effort and time required for SEO success. 
  • Schema Support: Many would-be website designers accidentally use themes that search engines can’t read. A good theme has an intelligible data structure that reveals something valuable about the informational content or context of a website. Crawlers can interact with the theme at this level to rank the site more easily, but not if you’ve installed an unproductive theme.

As you can see, the importance of WordPress themes goes far beyond aesthetics and loading times. Focusing on aesthetic appeal without considering SEO technicalities is a common mistake businesses make when picking website themes. The expert hand of an experienced SEO agency like Single Origin can help you avoid needless mistakes in theme selection, and we can do it without leaving your sense of taste at the door.

Get a Free Website Performance Audit

Find out how your website stacks up with our complimentary website grading tool. Simply enter your website and email and see the areas of your website that need the most help – Performance, SEO, and Usability included.

Content Creation for WordPress SEO 

There was once a dark age of keyword spamming when Google algorithms weren’t yet optimized for relevance and value. Back then, a business could simply manipulate SEO rankings by injecting its site with as many contextually irrelevant, inorganic, absolutely nonsensical keywords as it could. No one could find anything, and it was miserable for everyone but the spammers. 

Google then used algorithms that prioritize relevance and value to fix this, even more so when artificial intelligence (AI) entered the picture. The need for relevance, value, and even personalization has dramatically escalated. 

More than 80% of the sites ranked highest for SEO were written by human beings, showing that SEO algorithms favor content that connects brands with their audiences on a human level. It’s not that AI content is intrinsically disregarded as spam but that the algorithm actively penalizes low-effort content. 

The effort needed for SEO content continues to: 

  • Emphasize quality instead of quantity. Google’s algorithmic experts have integrated the E-E-A-T principles into its framework, standing for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. All four of these principles aim to make the content especially relevant and of very high value for users.
  • Focus on user experience. It’s necessary before strategizing content to put oneself into the mind of the audience and understand what they’re looking for. What motivates someone to read over your website’s blog posts? Single Origin arranges all of our content marketing and optimization strategies around asking and answering this very question for our clients.
  • Incorporate proven SEO strategies. More than just keyword optimization, successful WordPress SEO will often require schema markups implemented into the site’s data structure and multiple series of blog posts dedicated to one specific topic, known as topic clustering. The aim must always be to raise a brand’s visibility and reputation within its chosen sector.
  • Demand highly original and unique content. No one becomes a “thought leader” simply by regurgitating the thoughts of others, and this is the crucial element still missing from many content marketing strategies. Just as you must have a unique selling proposition to set yourself apart verbally, so must you also set yourself apart in all aspects of your company’s messaging.

The development, propagation, and cultivation of high-quality content — which places the customer’s need and interest first — can and does have marked improvements on WordPress SEO. 

A photo of a lawyer, reviewing their SEO performance report on a tablet.

Optimizing WordPress Content for SEO Rankings

The technical aspects of SEO are also necessary for effective content creation. Your content marketing must be relevant and valuable, but it must also fulfill your site’s technical goals and fall within a structural framework amenable to search engine crawlers. This process begins in the earliest stages of keyword selection and continues right on to publication. 

For instance, you can frame content marketing calendars around your SEO goals. Start with researching the most relevant target keywords for your industry using a tool like Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner. From this, you can develop a list of topics, touching upon each of these keywords organically, and then populate your calendar with content that meets your optimization goals. 

Improving On-Page Optimization for WordPress SEO

Many of Single Origin’s clients have found great success with their WordPress SEO simply through optimization. The titles, headers, and meta descriptions of your page are much more than landmarks for a reader’s eye. They serve as magnets for SEO crawlers. If you’re going to incorporate keywords anywhere, it should be here. 

Refining Your Website Navigation

Search engines value websites that value user experience. Your site can elevate its user experience through its linking structure, making it easy and intuitive to navigate for newcomers. Visualize yourself in a visitor’s shoes and try to arrange the layout of your website in a way that makes sense to them. 

Creating Contextually Relevant Multimedia

It makes sense to integrate a variety of multimedia into your SEO content — whether in the form of infographics, videos, or whatever else works — but only if it meets your audience’s goals. Media content for media’s content sake is often indistinguishable from spam, and your audience will likely discern the difference easily. 

Using Snippets to Improve Your SEO for WordPress

Snippets, as the name implies, are extractions of website content for display on the search engine results page (SERP). You’ve surely noticed them in your own browsing, and your website should take advantage of them for their manifest SEO benefits. Leveraging the power of snippets for WordPress SEO is also one of our favorite optimization strategies here at Single Origin.

Performance Optimization and WordPress SEO

A seamless user experience is paramount for SEO rankings. Put yourself in the shoes of an average user and think about what you’d do upon clicking on an unresponsive or slow website. You simply back-click and go to another site, right? This is a pain point afflicting many otherwise promising websites, and it’s positively fatal to your place on the search engine results page. 

This is exactly why Single Origin puts so much emphasis on speed and performance enhancement when working with a client. Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights can help generate reliable speed reports to identify major issues with different aspects of the website. But it often happens that some pages are less optimized than others, or that fixing one part of the website causes an unexpected performance or linking issue in another. Speed reports customized to your website are a great way to isolate those issues. 

Of course, there are a number of other tools in the performance optimization toolbox. During site audits of client websites, Single Origin will often take a close look at a page’s: 

  • Image Optimization: You’d be amazed how many performance problems are caused by oversized images. You can use plugins to compress the images down to a smaller resolution without sacrificing their visibility on the page.
  • Use of Caching Plugins: Caching is an optimization strategy built around serving website visitors stable, or cached, versions of your website. Archiving and loading your own store of cache pages can significantly improve the site’s loading speed and performance at the user level.
  • Minifying Side Code: JavaScript, HTML, and other coding languages have their own performance impact you need to account for in WordPress SEO. Think of minifying as taking a great red pen to the site’s codebase. It’s possible to strike out excess or unused text to raise the website’s overall performance.

It’s a great idea to test your site under several load capacities and user sessions to see how well it manages. Remember, SEO is all about the user experience, with sites that offer better performance unquestionably ranking higher than competitors that don’t.

Turn SEO Into Sustainable Growth With Single Origin

WordPress is a spectacular resource for SEO. It’s an eminently accessible platform with a massive user base and a host of powerful SEO tools at your disposal. But the very same thing that makes it compelling can also impede your progress if the learning curve is too great. SEO is a high-effort activity with a huge time commitment, and many business owners have neither the time nor the mental resources to devote to it.  

Partnering with an experienced and expert team like Single Origin can help you overcome this challenge by giving your website immediate access to our knowledge and talent pool. We can help you conduct a professional SEO audit and outline a short- and long-term strategy for maximizing your business’s SEO potential. To learn more about our offerings, contact us

Schedule a Complimentary Consultation

Are you, or your team, looking for ways to improve your website, digital marketing, and overall ROI from paid channels? Single Origin provides complimentary consultations to help your team understand areas of improvement. Schedule yours now!

The process begins with downloading one of several popular WordPress SEO plugins such as SEOPress, Yoast SEO, SemRush, and more. Some of these are more suitable for certain kinds of websites and businesses than others, so it’s a good idea to consult about this with Single Origin while doing your SEO strategy. 

With the right SEO plugin, you can start working on your site speed, navigation, and content optimization strategies. Many plugins come with their own tools for tracking and analyzing SEO performance as well. 

WordPress is one of the most highly regarded website development platforms. It has a massive user base behind it, with tons of SEO-friendly guides and tools to help you get started. The only thing you might lack as a business owner is the time to learn it all, which is where partnering with an already knowledgeable team like Single Origin can work wonders. 

There are several free SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or All In One SEO. Despite their (lack of) price point, these plugins offer a host of tools for getting started on optimizing your site with higher-quality content and SEO audits

Simple: Open your WordPress dashboard and navigate to “Plugins,” where you’ll see an “Add New” link. Click on it, search for SEO, and pick the plugin from the available options. 

Contact

You and your customers probably have one very important thing in common, and that is your regular use of search engines. No matter what product they’re looking for, the odds are very good that your customers are using a search engine to find it.

Ranking high on the search engine results page is like saying “Here I am! Pick me!” to your customer’s search queries. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a way to put your website and brand where a paying customer’s eyes are most likely to see you. 

As one of the most popular website development and maintenance tools in the marketplace, WordPress comes packed with a host of SEO tools and plugins to help online businesses succeed on their platform. In fact, WordPress SEO is so powerful that beginners often find it hard to know where to start. That’s why Single Origin has put together this guide to give you an idea of what to expect when improving your search engine rankings with WordPress. 

SEO Success With WordPress Themes

A website’s theme will always be one of the first things your audience notices about it. Most of our clients here at Single Origin use themes to give themselves and their websites unified design and branding, making themselves more recognizable and memorable in the eyes of their customers. 

But a beautiful theme isn’t always all that it’s cracked up to be. It can introduce a number of unforeseen problems in your website’s operation and usability, which, if you aren’t careful, can actually backfire on your SEO rankings. 

Nothing tanks a site’s SEO rankings faster than a slow, unresponsive site caused by a poor choice of theme. This is why you should pick themes that are: 

  • Lightweight: They should load fast, create minimal interruption in the user experience, and be reasonably pleasant to look at.
  • Efficiently Coded: WordPress themes often have more going on under the hood than you may think. Bad coding can repel, rather than attract, search engine crawlers, which defeats the purpose of the theme in the first place. Find a WordPress theme with code optimized for website performance. 
  • Compatible With Common SEO Plugins: Choosing a theme compatible with some of the most common (and useful) SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO, reduces the effort and time required for SEO success. 
  • Schema Support: Many would-be website designers accidentally use themes that search engines can’t read. A good theme has an intelligible data structure that reveals something valuable about the informational content or context of a website. Crawlers can interact with the theme at this level to rank the site more easily, but not if you’ve installed an unproductive theme.

As you can see, the importance of WordPress themes goes far beyond aesthetics and loading times. Focusing on aesthetic appeal without considering SEO technicalities is a common mistake businesses make when picking website themes. The expert hand of an experienced SEO agency like Single Origin can help you avoid needless mistakes in theme selection, and we can do it without leaving your sense of taste at the door.

Get a Free Website Performance Audit

Find out how your website stacks up with our complimentary website grading tool. Simply enter your website and email and see the areas of your website that need the most help – Performance, SEO, and Usability included.

Content Creation for WordPress SEO 

There was once a dark age of keyword spamming when Google algorithms weren’t yet optimized for relevance and value. Back then, a business could simply manipulate SEO rankings by injecting its site with as many contextually irrelevant, inorganic, absolutely nonsensical keywords as it could. No one could find anything, and it was miserable for everyone but the spammers. 

Google then used algorithms that prioritize relevance and value to fix this, even more so when artificial intelligence (AI) entered the picture. The need for relevance, value, and even personalization has dramatically escalated. 

More than 80% of the sites ranked highest for SEO were written by human beings, showing that SEO algorithms favor content that connects brands with their audiences on a human level. It’s not that AI content is intrinsically disregarded as spam but that the algorithm actively penalizes low-effort content. 

The effort needed for SEO content continues to: 

  • Emphasize quality instead of quantity. Google’s algorithmic experts have integrated the E-E-A-T principles into its framework, standing for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. All four of these principles aim to make the content especially relevant and of very high value for users.
  • Focus on user experience. It’s necessary before strategizing content to put oneself into the mind of the audience and understand what they’re looking for. What motivates someone to read over your website’s blog posts? Single Origin arranges all of our content marketing and optimization strategies around asking and answering this very question for our clients.
  • Incorporate proven SEO strategies. More than just keyword optimization, successful WordPress SEO will often require schema markups implemented into the site’s data structure and multiple series of blog posts dedicated to one specific topic, known as topic clustering. The aim must always be to raise a brand’s visibility and reputation within its chosen sector.
  • Demand highly original and unique content. No one becomes a “thought leader” simply by regurgitating the thoughts of others, and this is the crucial element still missing from many content marketing strategies. Just as you must have a unique selling proposition to set yourself apart verbally, so must you also set yourself apart in all aspects of your company’s messaging.

The development, propagation, and cultivation of high-quality content — which places the customer’s need and interest first — can and does have marked improvements on WordPress SEO. 

A photo of a lawyer, reviewing their SEO performance report on a tablet.

Optimizing WordPress Content for SEO Rankings

The technical aspects of SEO are also necessary for effective content creation. Your content marketing must be relevant and valuable, but it must also fulfill your site’s technical goals and fall within a structural framework amenable to search engine crawlers. This process begins in the earliest stages of keyword selection and continues right on to publication. 

For instance, you can frame content marketing calendars around your SEO goals. Start with researching the most relevant target keywords for your industry using a tool like Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner. From this, you can develop a list of topics, touching upon each of these keywords organically, and then populate your calendar with content that meets your optimization goals. 

Improving On-Page Optimization for WordPress SEO

Many of Single Origin’s clients have found great success with their WordPress SEO simply through optimization. The titles, headers, and meta descriptions of your page are much more than landmarks for a reader’s eye. They serve as magnets for SEO crawlers. If you’re going to incorporate keywords anywhere, it should be here. 

Refining Your Website Navigation

Search engines value websites that value user experience. Your site can elevate its user experience through its linking structure, making it easy and intuitive to navigate for newcomers. Visualize yourself in a visitor’s shoes and try to arrange the layout of your website in a way that makes sense to them. 

Creating Contextually Relevant Multimedia

It makes sense to integrate a variety of multimedia into your SEO content — whether in the form of infographics, videos, or whatever else works — but only if it meets your audience’s goals. Media content for media’s content sake is often indistinguishable from spam, and your audience will likely discern the difference easily. 

Using Snippets to Improve Your SEO for WordPress

Snippets, as the name implies, are extractions of website content for display on the search engine results page (SERP). You’ve surely noticed them in your own browsing, and your website should take advantage of them for their manifest SEO benefits. Leveraging the power of snippets for WordPress SEO is also one of our favorite optimization strategies here at Single Origin.

Performance Optimization and WordPress SEO

A seamless user experience is paramount for SEO rankings. Put yourself in the shoes of an average user and think about what you’d do upon clicking on an unresponsive or slow website. You simply back-click and go to another site, right? This is a pain point afflicting many otherwise promising websites, and it’s positively fatal to your place on the search engine results page. 

This is exactly why Single Origin puts so much emphasis on speed and performance enhancement when working with a client. Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights can help generate reliable speed reports to identify major issues with different aspects of the website. But it often happens that some pages are less optimized than others, or that fixing one part of the website causes an unexpected performance or linking issue in another. Speed reports customized to your website are a great way to isolate those issues. 

Of course, there are a number of other tools in the performance optimization toolbox. During site audits of client websites, Single Origin will often take a close look at a page’s: 

  • Image Optimization: You’d be amazed how many performance problems are caused by oversized images. You can use plugins to compress the images down to a smaller resolution without sacrificing their visibility on the page.
  • Use of Caching Plugins: Caching is an optimization strategy built around serving website visitors stable, or cached, versions of your website. Archiving and loading your own store of cache pages can significantly improve the site’s loading speed and performance at the user level.
  • Minifying Side Code: JavaScript, HTML, and other coding languages have their own performance impact you need to account for in WordPress SEO. Think of minifying as taking a great red pen to the site’s codebase. It’s possible to strike out excess or unused text to raise the website’s overall performance.

It’s a great idea to test your site under several load capacities and user sessions to see how well it manages. Remember, SEO is all about the user experience, with sites that offer better performance unquestionably ranking higher than competitors that don’t.

Turn SEO Into Sustainable Growth With Single Origin

WordPress is a spectacular resource for SEO. It’s an eminently accessible platform with a massive user base and a host of powerful SEO tools at your disposal. But the very same thing that makes it compelling can also impede your progress if the learning curve is too great. SEO is a high-effort activity with a huge time commitment, and many business owners have neither the time nor the mental resources to devote to it.  

Partnering with an experienced and expert team like Single Origin can help you overcome this challenge by giving your website immediate access to our knowledge and talent pool. We can help you conduct a professional SEO audit and outline a short- and long-term strategy for maximizing your business’s SEO potential. To learn more about our offerings, contact us

Schedule a Complimentary Consultation

Are you, or your team, looking for ways to improve your website, digital marketing, and overall ROI from paid channels? Single Origin provides complimentary consultations to help your team understand areas of improvement. Schedule yours now!

The process begins with downloading one of several popular WordPress SEO plugins such as SEOPress, Yoast SEO, SemRush, and more. Some of these are more suitable for certain kinds of websites and businesses than others, so it’s a good idea to consult about this with Single Origin while doing your SEO strategy. 

With the right SEO plugin, you can start working on your site speed, navigation, and content optimization strategies. Many plugins come with their own tools for tracking and analyzing SEO performance as well. 

WordPress is one of the most highly regarded website development platforms. It has a massive user base behind it, with tons of SEO-friendly guides and tools to help you get started. The only thing you might lack as a business owner is the time to learn it all, which is where partnering with an already knowledgeable team like Single Origin can work wonders. 

There are several free SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or All In One SEO. Despite their (lack of) price point, these plugins offer a host of tools for getting started on optimizing your site with higher-quality content and SEO audits

Simple: Open your WordPress dashboard and navigate to “Plugins,” where you’ll see an “Add New” link. Click on it, search for SEO, and pick the plugin from the available options. 

Let’s grow your business, together.

Let’s talk about how Single Origin can help take your digital marketing to the next level.