The Business Exchange Swindon & Wiltshire Edition 43: June/July 2019 | Page 24

TECHNOLOGY Making WordPress work for you A definitive guide to WordPress & SEO by Boson Web Boson Web designed our very own Techies website. In this two-part article Boson provide their top tips to getting the most from your website. With its robust, user friendly content management system (CMS), WordPress allows you to easily add content to your website to keep it regularly updated. It is important for WordPress users to understand and utilise Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques. Here we give you our simple guide to ‘best practice’, giving you a better chance of appearing higher on the list of results returned by search engines like Google. How does Google find my website? Google constantly searches for new pages and adds them to its list of known pages. Once a page is discovered, Google tries to understand what the page is about. The process is called indexing. Google analyses the content of the page which helps to determine its Google ranking. When a user types a query, Google tries to find the most relevant answer from its index. Where do I start? Choosing your keywords Keyword optimisation or research is the starting point for anyone wanting to focus on SEO and improve their Google rankings. This is the process of researching, analysing and selecting the best keywords to drive traffic from search engines to your website. Keyword optimisation is critical – if you do a bad job selecting your target keywords, all your subsequent efforts will be in vain. As a starting point for keyword research, you should think about the core values behind your website and what your website visitors might be searching for. For example: • What products or services do you offer? • What search terms might your visitors/ customers use? • Try brainstorming a list of broad topics related to your organisation and use keyword tool websites to find specific keywords within your topics • Look at your competitors and the keywords they’re targeting Your keyword strategy will be based upon your findings from your keyword research and will inform how you target your keywords now and in the future. Choose your title A title tag is essentially the title or heading of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages as the clickable headline for a given result. They are important for usability, SEO and social sharing. The title tag of a web page should be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content and should include your keywords. This is the most important piece of content on your website to help Google point people in your direction. Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag so make sure your heading isn’t too long as some of your keywords may not be displayed on search result pages. WordPress SEO techniques are good practice, but there are many factors which can affect search ranking. This information gives you a good foundation, but it doesn’t guarantee your website will be on the first page of Google search results. Think about your links When adding content via WordPress it is important to consider your links and how to incorporate your keywords into them. Links, sometimes known as anchor text, are the elements of clickable text on a website. On WordPress you can highlight parts of your text and add a hyperlink to direct readers to another URL. As part of the indexing process, Google crawls websites by following links, internal and external. Where possible try to make sure your clickable text contains your keywords and avoid using generic terms such as ‘click here’. There are five main types of link: 1) Internal Links – An internal link will send visitors from one place to another within your website. Google uses these links to crawl your website and index your content. 2) Inbound Links – An outbound link (also referred to as a back link) is a hyperlink on a third-party web page that points to a web page on your site. 3) Breadcrumb Links – Breadcrumbs are hyperlinks appearing as a navigation tool as part of the website’s design. Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally neat the top of a page, providing links back through the page hierarchy. 4) Navigational Links – Navigational links are the internal links on your website which help your visitors to find what they’re looking for. Become the office hero today! Unitii is the cloud-based intranet service that allows your team to collaborate, communicate and get stuff done. For more information call us on 01225 614 814 or visit the Unitii site at unitiintranet.com 24 THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2019 5) External Links – These take your visitors to other websites. When you place an external link on your page, be sure to click ‘Open Link in a New Window box’. That way, when users click on a link, they won’t be navigated away from your site. Read the August/September edition of The Business Exchange Swindon & Wiltshire to find out about optimising your website images and using the WordPress Plugin, Yoast. For more info: www.bosonweb.net [email protected] 01225 309690