{"id":210,"date":"2021-01-21T01:21:07","date_gmt":"2021-01-21T01:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totalwpdemos.wpenginepowered.com\/square-media\/?p=210"},"modified":"2024-06-21T03:03:32","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T03:03:32","slug":"everything-you-need-to-know-about-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/everything-you-need-to-know-about-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything You Need to Know About SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You have a website &#8211; great! But that&#8217;s just the beginning. Now you need to create great content that ranks in search engines to build traffic. And that&#8217;s what we&#8217;ll be covering today. Learn everything you need to know about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wpexplorer.com\/wordpress-seo\/\">WordPress SEO<\/a> so your website ranks in search engines.<\/p>\n<h2>Use a Great WordPress Theme<\/h2>\n<p>First things first &#8211; get yourself a great WordPress theme. For example &#8211; the <a href=\"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/\">Total theme<\/a>. Nt only is this theme full of powerful site building features (drag and drop page builder, parallax backgrounds, header styles, bbPress &amp; WooCommerce support, fully responsive design, and more) but it&#8217;s also coded for speed. Total uses semantic and vlid code, built-in schema support and offers custom options within the themes panel to easily disable features you&#8217;re not using with a click. Just run the demo through your favorite <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wpexplorer.com\/testing-wordpress-performance-speed\/\">WordPress speed test tool<\/a> too see for yourself.<\/p>\n<h2>Optimize Your Content<\/h2>\n<p>When writing posts, keep SEO in mind. This includes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Make sure to use <strong>proper headings<\/strong> (H1 for your post title, H2 for sub headings in your post, then H3, H4, etc.)<\/li>\n<li>Use internal <strong>links<\/strong> to your own posts and well as external links, outbound to authority third party websites<\/li>\n<li>Add your <strong>keyword<\/strong> naturally throughout your content, in your post title and in image titles<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You can take advantage of an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO to help optimize your content.<\/p>\n<h2>Speed Up Your Website<\/h2>\n<p>Site speed is of the utmost importance, for your real readers and for search engines like Google. There&#8217;s a lot involved, but these are 3 quick ways to speed up your site fast.<\/p>\n<h3>1. Great Hosting<\/h3>\n<p>Your hosting can make or break your site speed. It&#8217;s important to take the time to find the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wpexplorer.com\/wordpress-hosting\/\">best WordPress hosting<\/a> for your site&#8217;s needs. We recommend a managed hosting plan from WP Engine to keep your site blazing fast. Of course, affordable hosting such as Bluehost (which starts at just $2.95\/month) are still a good option if that&#8217;s what fits your budget &#8211; but you just can&#8217;t bet the speed that comes with a managed hosting plan.<\/p>\n<h3>2. Use a CDN<\/h3>\n<p>Cache your site with a CDN to speed things up. A CDN (content delivery network) essentially stores a copy of your website at different data center locations (for example in Los Angeles, New York and London) then displays your website to visitors based on which data center they&#8217;re closest to. So if a person in New Jersey visits your site it would be via the CDN located in New York.<\/p>\n<p>Best of all you don&#8217;t have to spend a ton of money &#8211; using a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wpexplorer.com\/free-cdn-services-for-wordpress\/\">free CDN<\/a> works great. In fact, we recommend using Cloudflare to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wpexplorer.com\/how-to-speed-up-wordpress\/\">speed up WordPress<\/a> sites.<\/p>\n<h3>3. Optimize Images<\/h3>\n<p>Big images can really slow down your website. Instead of uploading a giant 3000px wide 8MB image, edit your image to be the size you need (if your site width is 980px, then a 1000px image is great) and compress it (a lossless compression can reduce a file size by up to 50%). If you don&#8217;t want to pay for a service, there are plenty of free services and plugins to compress and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wpexplorer.com\/optimize-images-wordpress-guide\/\">optimize images<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Or consider using one of these <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wpexplorer.com\/lazy-load-plugins-wordpress\/\">lazy load plugins<\/a> to optimize how images are loaded on your WordPress site. With lazy load, images and other resource heavy on page elements will be loaded after your quick loading text.<\/p>\n<h2>Use Google Analytics to Track Your Stats<\/h2>\n<p>Optimizing your site is great, but it means nothing if you don&#8217;t have statistics to keep track of. There are plenty of tools you can use to see your site stats but the most popular (by far) is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wpexplorer.com\/google-analytics-wordpress\/\">Google Analytics for WordPress<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The easiest way to integrate Google&#8217;s services with your WordPress site is with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wpexplorer.com\/google-site-kit-wordpress\/\">Google Site Kit<\/a>. With this plugin you can access all of your Google tools (Analytics, PageSpeed, Adsense, Tag Manager, etc) right from WordPress &#8211; to staying on top of your traffic and SEO is quick and easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You have a website &#8211; great! But that&#8217;s just the beginning. Now you need to create great content that ranks in search engines to build traffic. And that&#8217;s what we&#8217;ll be covering today. Learn everything you need to know about WordPress SEO so your website ranks in search engines. Use a Great WordPress Theme First&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"post_series":[],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guides","entry","has-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totalwpthemedemo.com\/biz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_series?post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}