You will be better off and gain a better WordPress SEO if you can only ensure that your site is safe and secure not only for the users to use but most importantly to the search engine algorithms. One of the most significant ways to do that is by managing both your internal as well as the external links to your site, follow or no-follow.
As you may know, links are very helpful for SEO results and these help the search engines to decide which pages are valuable and responding well and rank them accordingly. When you link your page to a website you are actually passing a portion of the SEO score of your site to that link. This SEO score is most often called the ‘link juice.’
In order to have a better SEO and good search rankings you need to make sure that:
- You are getting more link juice from other websites and
- You are giving away less of it to others.
To do that, you will need to use the ‘nofollow’ attribute to the external links, that is the links to the websites that you do not own. This will instruct the search engines that they should not follow those links. This will help you to save a lot of ‘link juice.’
Concept of external links
Any normal external link will be a HTML code and will look like this:
<a href=”http://example.com”>Example Website</a>
However, if you add the nofollow attribute to the external link it will look like this:
<a href=”http://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Example Website</a>
In addition to that, you can also add rel=”nofollow” checkbox so that you insert a link popup. This feature will allow you to add nofollow attribute to the external links more easily.
Full posts versus excerpts
When you consider the posts, you may wonder whether to use a full post or summarize it to use excerpts from it. Usually, WordPress will display and link to your posts from a number of different pages such as:
- The home pages
- The category archives
- The tag archives
- The date archives
- The author pages and others.
In all these cases, it will show the full length of the articles and its contents on each of these pages by default. This will do more harm than good for your SEO in different ways such as:
- This will affect the SEO of your site because the search engines may consider these to be duplicate contents.
- When full articles are shown it will also slow down the loading ability of the archive pages, which once again will affect your SEO negatively.
Your page views will also be affected negatively when full articles are shown everywhere because the users subscribing to your RSS feed will now be able to read the whole article in their feed reader and for that they will not have to visit your website, ever.
The easiest way to resolve this issue is by using summaries or excerpts instead of showing the entire full articles. You can do this by going to Settings, clicking on Reading and selecting summary. This will help you to customize WordPress excerpts without requiring any coding.
Speed and security
Irrespective of the fact that you follow the best WordPress SEO practices and tips, it is important to make sure that the site is not slow or is vulnerable to be hacked easily. If so, then your site will be ranked lower by the search engine.
If you do not want to take such a hit in your rankings, you must follow the ways to make your WordPress site safe and secure. These steps will ensure:
- Better and faster performance of your site
- No lax in security
- Increased traffic and engagement and therefore
- Higher rank and better SEO results.
Site speed is an important factor to consider for its enhanced performance because research has shown that in this age of the internet, the average human attention span is very little. It will not be any exaggeration if it is said that it is much less than that of a goldfish! You can run a server speed test on https://www.bitcatcha.co.id.
Importance of site speed
Ideally, the web usability experts and others like such as ChicagoSEO.company believe that the users decide within a matter of a few seconds whether or not they want to stay with a site or leave it. That means that you as a website owner will only have these many seconds to do a lot of things such as to:
- Convey your message
- Present your content as well as
- Engage your users.
It will be unwise and a loss on your part to waste this valuable time by making your users wait as your site take seemingly endless time to load. Even search engines like Google and others admit that they rank sites according to their loading times: faster websites have a higher rank than the slower websites.
Therefore, make sure that you improve the speed of your site in order to expedite WordPress SEO and boost the performance of your site.
When you consider the speed of your site you should also consider the contents that you want to put in it. Typically, putting in more images and graphics in your WordPress site will reduce the speed and affect the SEO in its way. Yes, it is true that images are more engaging as compared to texts but that does not mean you will put is loads of it in your site pages. Rather you should:
- Be selective about the images that you want to put in
- Focus on the need and relevance of it with respect to the content and the textual subject
- Care for the image sizes and quality so that these do not slow down your website.
That means, you will need to make sure that every image that you put in your site is highly optimized to load faster and ensure better SEO results. You may also optimize your images by using descriptive title and alt tags that will help the search engines understand what the image is about.
