There are multiple ways to improve On-Page SEO with Wordpress, if you can do this it will improve organic search engine ranking leading to better organic results, getting more leads and converting leads to buying customers and clients.

This guide is ideal for new websites and existing websites.

To find out more about On-Page SEO click here.

How to Improve WordPress On-Page SEO

1. Make website secure
2. Install Yoast SEO Plugin
3. Research page title (keywords)
4. Improve website speed
5. Write awesome content

1. Make Website Secure

Would you feel good to see the ‘Not Secure’ text beside domain name during website visit?

Or you would prefer to see a safety lock beside the domain?

We would feel more comfortable and secure with the website that is secure. I am still surprised to see a lot of websites that don’t use SSL certificates, probably because they are not aware of the benefits or it’s too complicated to install Ssl Certificate.

To be honest, I would not stay too long on a website that’s not secure, probably nothing wrong with the website if it doesn’t require you to enter any sensitive information or doesn’t require to enter bank details to purchase a service or a product, but still, it gives a bad first impression.

Google has announced that having an installed SSL certificate will boost SEO ranking, it makes users trust the website.

By installing an SSL certificate it will create an encrypted connection between you and the website making the website more secure.

How to install SSL certificate on SiteGround:

Any good hosting provider will offer a SSL certificate for free.

If you have SiteGround hosting, then it’s going to be easy to install free SSL certificate.

1. Login to your account on SiteGround
2. Head over to Websites
3. On your website domain click Site Tools
4. Click Security
5. Click SSL Manager
6. Select SSL ‘Let’s Encrypt Wildcard’
7. Click Get
8. Wait for the installation to be done

It may still show that’s it’s not secure, but if you click ‘Not Secure’ beside your domain it will show that the SSL certificate is Valid. For the ‘Not Secure’ text to disappear, it can take up to a few days or by clearing the website cache.

We also need to make sure that the website is always redirected to secure domain link which is https://www.yourdamin.ie/ and doesn’t start with http://www… this is possible to enable on SiteGround account in SiteTools > Security > HTTPS Enforce.

WordPress website also by default has http:// and it needs to be changed manually.

1. Head over to WordPress Admin
2. Click Settings

In the WordPress Address (URL) & Site Address (URL) add extra S after http://yourdomain.ie so it should be changed to this https://yourdomain.ie and then Save Changes.

You will have to login again for access as you’ve just redirected your WordPress website to secure website link.

2. Install Yoast SEO Plugin in WordPress

Page and post content needs to be useful and beneficial for users, and if it, then users will mention website pages or blog posts on their websites, blogs and social networks, then this is going to build website reputation and can improve organic search results. It’s like word of mouth but in an online form.

To make great content you can use Yoast SEO Plugin, it’s is probably the best SEO plugin for WordPress out there and it’s free, you can get the paid version but it’s not recommended. High-quality outcomes can be achieved with the free version.

How to Install Yoast SEO Plugin in WordPress

1. Head over to WordPress Admin
2. Click Plugins
3. On the top click Add New
4. In the ‘Search Plugins…’ search for Yoast SEO
5. Beside Yoast SEO click Install Now
6. Once installed, click Activate
7. Refresh page

In left admin menu click on SEO and run configuration wizard.

From this point onwards when creating a page or a post you will get live analyses on your content, and it also has readability addon which helps to write content that can be read easily by the user.

You can also copy and paste text into hemingway editor and get additional readability analysis.

3. Research Page Title (Keywords)

Pointless to write a page title that’s not being searched on the web, except if the website is releasing a new product into the market and has a large amount of traffic or plans to promote the page with paid ads.

I found the best tools to research keywords is SEMrush, there are also more tools that can be used:

1. SEMrush (7 Day Free Trial)
2. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer (Paid)
3. Moz Keyword Explorer (10 Free queries per month)
4. Google Keyword Planner (Free)

For example, I’ve used SEMrush to research the ‘WordPress On-Page SEO’ keyword for this blog post, I could see that people search for that phrase in Ireland 40 times a month and there is no or low competition in Ireland for the same key phrase.

I could of went with ‘SEO’ keyword as a title, it’s searched by users about 3000 times a month, but the competitions is large for that specific keyword and also users could be typing in SEO and searching for:

• Off-Page SEO
• On-Page SEO Service
• Careers in SEO
• SEO Tools
• SEO meaning
• And so on…

When the user is searching for a specific topic, they will try and type in the phrase as specific as possible into the search engine and if you phrase matches the exact phrase they were searching for and that website is on the first page they will click on to that link with no doubt, they found the exact match.

SEO Keyword tools are helpful but don’t believe them entirely if something feels very natural for people to be searching for and the tools show that no one is searching for those keywords, tools can be incorrect sometimes.

4. Improve Website Speed

Google released new speed algorithm in 2020 that looks at page loading speed, and if the website is loading more than 3 seconds then they say that clients and customers are less likely to come back to that website to buy further products or services.

Google will reward websites by improving their google ranking for those that have better website.

WordPress will always be a slower website by default with the PHP coding than a custom build website from scratch that can be more speed optimised, but WordPress does offer amazing SEO and functionality other than speed.

Below I’ve compared two websites, www.destiny.ie which has lots of images and content, and it loads much faster than www.ddireland.ie which was newly created with a low amount of content and it is very slow, so imagine what will happen if more images added to www.ddireland.ie?

I would recommend to perform a test on GTMetrix website to find out how the website is performing.

How to improve website speed

To improve the website speed we can reduce the image size, and then it’s mostly about the website code such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP.

When developers write website code they use a lot of white space so the code can be written and read easier which makes sense with websites over hundred and thousand of lines in code, but this creates more time to load those lines of code.

Don’t worry, we don’t have to go and edit all the code, instead you can use a plugin that will do it for you.

Improve Website Speed with SG Optimizer plugin

If your hosting is with SiteGround by default your WordPress will already have the SG Optimizer plugin installed, you can also download the SG Optimizer plugin from here for free and install it.

If you are using SiteGround hosting head over on your SiteGround account and in your domain go to SiteTools > Speed > Catching > Memached and enable it.

To configure the SG Optimizer, go to WordPress admin panel and click on SG Otpimzer

Let’s brake down now the configurations:

Supercacher Settings

Enable Memcached and keep everything else on default.

Environment Optimization

Enable HTTPS

Enable WordPress Heartbeat Optimization

Everything else can stay as default.

Frontend Optimization

This will help to remove unnecessary code and remove the white space between code giving the website better performance.

Enable all of them, but do be careful with Minify JavaScript Files, Combine JavaScript Files and Defer render-blocking JS – if your website uses a lot of plugins it may cause them not to work correctly. Check full website functionality after enabling.

Media Optimisation

By enabling New Images Optimization it will reduce the image size on every upload.

I would also highly recommend to enable Generate WebP Copies of New Images, this will reduce image size by a lot with changing images to new modern format! But it will not work properly if the website is using CloudFlare.

Lazy load images helps the user, this loads the images on the webpage after all the text has loaded, so the user can start reading and see images with a delay.

If you already got loads of images on the website you can optimise existing images and bulk generate WebP files (images).

After all complete, click Purge SG Cache in the top of the WordPress admin panel.

Our result now should look like this.

Amazon predicted if their website slows down by 1 second it will cost amazon 1.6 Billion US Dollars in revenue! Website speed does matter for the users and search engines to rank your website higher.

5. Write Awesome Content

Most important is to write awesome content that the audience will love.

When awesome content is provided to the users, they will read it and share it.

This is going to improve On-page SEO in WordPress and will also improve Off-Page SEO, which is outside the website with people sharing your content on social networks, their website or blog and Google can see that your creating public relations online and will reward the website page or post with a higher ranking.

So if you have installed Yoast SEO, ensure to follow the guidelines that it gives in WordPress to help with improving On-Page SEO.

Some tips given by industry exports to have awesome On-Page SEO content in WordPress:

1. Have a catchy page title or post title
2. Include title key phrases in the first paragraph – doesn’t have to be the exact words
3. Include key phrases in some headings – It will keep your topic on point!
4. Have a website structure – helps users to read easier
   1. H1 – Main Title
   2. H2 – Important Headings
   3. H3 – Sub Headings
   4. And so on…
5. Write Page or Blog over 900 words
6. Use visuals like images, ensure to rename images to what they are before uploading and write an alt

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