How To Best Optimize Your WordPress Blog For Search Engines

WordPress has certainly matured over the years. It has turned out to be the most popular website software in the world. It is highly customizable and easily extendable using plug-ins. In fact, there is very little that cannot be done using WordPress. Most of us already know this. In its basic form, WP is already search engine friendly. However, it will perform best on WordPress web hosting. With that said, below are useful tips on how to best optimize your WordPress blog for search engines.

Do Your Own Homework

Website optimization is an ever-evolving process of trial and error. In a way, it is best to do your homework and then deploy your strategy. The reason is that only you know how your content is organized. Only you understand how your category and tag structure is laid out. Therefore, doing your homework and keeping up with the latest trends in SEO can pay off in the end.

Keeping Up With The Most Recent SEO Trends Is Vital

Most webmasters are focusing on the latest and greatest Google update to Panda 4.2 and rightfully so. Panda is still a relevant topic for search engine optimization. However, website owners should also be focusing on Google’s new artificial intelligence algorithm lovingly called RankBrain.

It is excellent to see that Google is now fully in the machine learning business. We will see a big push towards research and development in this area over the coming years. Google has already deployed RankBrain, and it is performing quite well according to its development team. What comes next is a shift in the kind of keywords we use for SEO.

Learn Now How To Develop Long-Tail Keywords For Natural Speech

Artificial intelligence will be the next big wave in search engine optimization. Voice queries, or queries made using smart agents and digital assistants, are already on the rise. In other words, voice translation software like Cortana, Siri, and Google-Now are becoming more popular as the handheld market explodes.

This trend will only increase over the next few decades. In fact, the handheld market is expected to overtake the PC and laptop market by the end of 2017. Most handhelds use some brand of voice recognition software.

Spoken queries are quite different from typed questions. That means the use of long-tail keywords will be rapidly changing. Combining machine learning with semantic search has been a topic of interest for many webmasters over the years. The big question has always been how machine learning will affect SEO. We now know the answer to that question. Webmasters everywhere will have to develop long-tail keywords for natural speech instead of for how people type. According to Google, there is a clear distinction and that is why they developed RankBrain.

Take Advantage Of Meta-Tags And Title Tags

The best feature of WordPress is its media manager. It can help to organize your images and even resize them. Most webmasters already know this. However, they should also optimize their images using the meta box on the right. In this box, the webmaster can insert things like a title, a description, and alternate text. Doing this can be an extremely useful way to help the search engines categorize your images. Despite differences of opinions, it is always wise to use of meta-tags for pictures. Using proper meta-tags is one way to optimize your images for search. Remember to think how people will speak when filling out the description.

Learn Deep Linking And Mobile Apps

As part of a similar effort to move toward machine learning, Google has been indexing applications for quite some time now. It was part of their shift toward the growing mobile user market. Google gets an A+ for long-range planning.

Likewise, website owners should be thinking ahead. We have always used deep linking on our websites. However, as the PC and laptop market shrinks it will become more important to have deep links to our mobile applications. Application optimization will become just as important as website optimization shortly.

If your business does not own a mobile app, you should consider creating one now. It can help form an important part of any company’s future SEO strategy. For example, if your customer is searching for transportation and you own a transportation company Google can return your app on their result page if it is properly deep-linked. It can mean more sales for your business.

Assess How You Are Indexed In Your Local Market

Instead of defining your business by a city and state there will soon be a big push towards indexing local markets. Again, this is all geared towards helping machines precisely identify what people are looking for while using voice recognition software and mobile devices. Moreover, wearable devices such as the Apple watch combined with semantic search is going to demand that we change the way we categorize our websites for SEO purposes. Websites should have a physical street address and phone number so machines can more easily identify the local market.

That may make good sense for brick and mortar businesses. However, this has the potential to hurt virtual companies. They often operate in many cities, states, and countries at the same time. At this point, having a mobile application written specifically for your virtual business with deep linking can help.

Our final tip and take home message are to plan any future SEO strategies based on mobile applications that use voice recognition and semantic search. RankBrain is going to be the future of SEO, and we should be preparing for it right now. As sales from websites decline, we can make up for them in the rapidly emerging mobile market.

These are some recommendations on how to best optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. Another final recommendation is to use WordPress web hosting for greater speed. It is better to do some homework now than to be in crisis mode later. All indications say the mobile market will drive the future of SEO. Consequently, this is where we should place our focus.