Even though this guide is especially written to SEO Optimize Your City Directory built with GeoPlaces or any other WordPress themes, these are the beginners tips for optimizing almost any kind of WordPress websites.
You want to start your website, but you are not yet ready to invest for SEO, or don’t have enough time to learn it. Than here are some of the basic things, you can do – to make your site better.
Note that, this guide is for absolute beginners. To help them know what can actually make a difference in their SEO rankings. You can browse the internet and follow the SEO experts for advanced SEO optimization of your website. In this article, I have mentioned the very basic facts that can help make your directory website SEO frienly.
Optimize the images on your website
Images make your website beautiful, but they also add extra load to your site. If you use optimized images on your website, it can make your site much slower.
Optimized images make your website much better. Because to remove/reduce images on your website is never a good idea. Images add meaning to your content, are easy to process by the visitors, etc. Therefore, you must use – multiple, meaningful and optimized images on your website.
Thankfully, there are many WordPress plugins that can help you with this. If you already have a website with lot of unoptimized images – you can still use one of these plugins to auto-optimize the existing images on your directory website.
Browse the Image optimization plugins for WordPress
Keyword optimize your listings (pages)
SEO optimization should be done at page level. You should make sure that each page on your site follows the SEO rules so that it ranks well.
On your directory website, you will have a lot of content in form of the listings, and than you will also have the static pages – service description pages, about page, contact page or any other page you create on your site.
Besides, if you are maintaining blogs – each blog needs to follow the SEO copywriting rules for a better results. Well, how can you optimize each page of your site.
Simple – use one of the WordPress SEO plugins. These SEO plugins operate at page level and helps you with onpage SEO. These plugins can be used by anyone, an author a web designer, etc. , anyone – who is not an SEO expert.
Browse all the WordPress SEO plugins
We use the Yoast SEO Premium Plugin & recommend you to use it for optimizing your pages & listings on your directory website.
Speed optimize
A website is better when it is faster. The pages that the visitors want to access on your website should load quickly. This helps the user experience and ultimately, Google ranks.
The speed of your website can be affected by many different factors and a slow website is the easiest & quickest way to disappoint your visitors.
Any visitor – would love your website even more if he reaches the listing of his interest without having to wait, quick and easy. Therefore, specially pay attention to your page load times. Google Page speed insights can help you detect speed problems on your site.
Work on user experience
At the end of the day, what matters the most is the user experience!
If the users on your website find your site interesting to browse, informative and beautiful enough – they will spend more time on your site and even come back again.
And the search engine will detect the user experience based on many factors – lower exit rates, reduced bounce rates, speed of your site, etc.
Now, the user experience does not just depend on a single factor. Therefore – it is a combined result of many qualities like a smooth navigation, strategic placement of the content elements, search and filter options, quick access buttons, etc.
Link building
When different websites recommend you, (or one of your site pages/blog) Google considers it as a positive sign to rank you better. This is why link building is such an important part of any SEO campaign.
However, while building links for your website, keep in mind that Google considers “value of the link”, rather than the “quantity” of the links. Which clearly means, more is not better when it comes to backlinks.
There are many ways to build link. It a deep and wide subject to discuss. For now, it’s important for you to know that some backlinks from good websites can help you a lot to improve your search engine positions.
At initial stage, you can reach out some websites with good SEO and ask them if they are willing to link back to your site. Or there are many other ways – Guest posting, email outreach, etc.
Here is a very useful guide on Link-building you should follow.
Responsive & mobile friendly
Do you like a website that won’t look good and perform well in mobile devices?
No one does. Google, especially, likes websites that are responsive and has a good mobile view.
Modern websites must be designed for modern audience that like to use the internet through mobile devices in their busy lifestyles. Therefore, you must take care of the responsiveness of your directory website.
Also, websites that don’t look great on mobile devices, means increased bounce & exit rates. This will make a bad impression on Google and risk your ranks.
Use blogs for content marketing
Blogs on your directory websites are more important than they seem to you. There are multiple advantages of maintaining blogs on your website.
They are also a source of fresh, new & relevant content on your website, which surely helps the ranks of your site. Besides, it is a wonderful way to keep your visitors engaged. Through blogs you can write about different subjects concerning your directory niche, can promote a brand, can convey a message to the readers, etc.
Using the blogs you can also run content marketing campaigns to target a specific market with relevant keywords. This is one of the easiest way to build the authority of your website in your domain area..
Google Analytics
There are plenty of tools out there that you can use to analyse and optimize your website for SEO. Google Analytics is one such tool from Google itself, that helps you track the numbers associated with your website.
It provides you with actual statistics on the total number of visitors on a given day, or specified period, the performance of individual pages of your website, reports on the location of your visitors, conversions on your website, etc.
These details can help you frame your future strategies. The insights provided by Google Analytics are not only precise but a lot helpful for finding out the source of your traffic, the performance of different pages on your website, the demographics, location and age group of the visitors, etc.
When used all these details properly, you can work on the weaker areas and get an idea on what works the best for you.
Here is a complete article on how to use Google Analytics for your WordPress website.
Wrap Up
The tips on this page are for the beginners. They are for those directory owners with a new directory website, absolutely busy with website setup and management, having no idea on what to do for SEO.
These basic tips are more like a way to construct your site – so that it’s SEO friendly. And the good thing is – you don’t have to be an SEO expert to follow them.
Just start where you are. You can employ SEO campaigns with advanced optimization techniques in the future, but to start with – these tips will surely help you a lot.