Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Publish more than a few posts without keeping on top of your on-page SEO and before you know it, you've got a whole pile of work that needs to be done. If you've avoided on-page SEO so far, now is as good a time as any to start getting up to date.

Resources

• 12 WordPress Maintenance Tasks to Perform in Your Downtime
• Google SEO Starter Guide
• Myths & Misconceptions about SEO
• No more meta keywords
• Siteimprove Quality Assuarance

Tips

Writing high quality content is the key to get higher ranking. There’s no universal process to measure a content quality score. Each website, publisher, or platform has its own definition and standards for quality content.
Google’s focus is to provide genuine value to searchers. To be prioritized by Google, your content must help users achieve their objectives. While ensuring a positive and safe online experience.

WordPress makes it easy to keep your website SEO friendly so when you have some spare time on your hands, take a few minutes to run through 5-10 pages/posts making sure the following are in order:

• Usability studies have shown that a good page title length is about seven or eight words long and fewer than 64 total characters.
• Page titles should be descriptive and concise.
• Google prefers shorter URLs that are between 50 and 60 characters long. However, clarity, relevance, and readability are more important than strict character counts.
• Avoid keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is considered as webspam or spamdexing, in which a web page is loaded with keywords in an attempt to gain an unfair rank advantage in search engine.

WordPress generates URL from the page title automatically, so you may not need these tips, but you may need to update URL manually when you change the page title. After a page is published, the URL will not be updated.

• Use your keyword in the URL if possible but above all, you're URL should be human friendly.
• Make URLs as simple as possible
• Use hyphens instead of underscores

• Only your title is wrapped in an H1 tag (make sure for any headings or subheadings, you're using H2, H3, H4). Although it doesn’t seem like that using heading tags make a big difference, Google still recommends to use them to emphasize important text for SEO.
• If your page or post has a specific topic, make sure the keyword is used once in the first 75-100 words.
• Add an appropriate meta description to each page and post.
• Add outbound links to relevant sources or references.
• Make sure you are using optimized images including both file size and titles.

• Name your image descriptively and in plain English. Try to use keywords within your image file names.
• Optimize your alt tags. Adding appropriate alt tags to the images is important.
• File size is the factor that can slow your website way down. Don't use bigger images than what you need.

• Provide concise summaries of page content to improve search result snippets.
  Note: We currently pull the first 30 words of the content. If you'd like to avoid manual entry, make sure your introduction is compelling and stays within the set character limit (55-75 characters).

Updated 20250307