Ten principles to follow to promote the SEO of a site powered by WordPress.

1. Regularly crawl your site

First tip: regularly analyze your site like Google would using crawl tools like OnCrawl or Screaming Frog. These reports are very instructive and allow you to know your site. Thanks to regular crawls, you identify the optimizations to be made and the errors to be corrected by placing yourself from an “external” point of view, which mimics the functioning of the Googlebot.

2. Hunt unnecessary content

During crawls, we often discover many unsuspected pages, the interest of which must be questioned. Hunting for unnecessary content saves crawl budget and thus refocuses popularity, and therefore the attention of the Google bot on the content interests you. If the visualizations offered by the crawl tools are not enough for you, you can test Gephy to visualize these orphan pages in the structure of your site. You can also use Google Analytics to identify pages that do not or little Traffic and study the interest of action on these pages: should they be updated, should they be deleted …

3. Design rich content

A web page must meet a need expressed by the user. Quality in the sense of the user and the engine’s sense are two different notions, but you should succeed in positioning your pages if they correspond to the users’ expectations. Enriching pages with visual elements can be very effective: Daniel Roch takes the example of the test pages of the LesNumeriques site, which are often very high placed when you are looking for information on a product. They contain complete and technical descriptions, photos, opinions, videos, comments… These pages attract natural links. To know what it would be good to offer, it is advisable to make your target query on Google and look at the content of pages that are well referenced:

4. Write real content

Many accessible techniques allow you to grab content from one location, transform it and publish it on your site automatically. These spinning methods are often effective in the short term, which can attract web professionals. On the other hand, this content has less potential in the longer term, and the user interest is very often close to nothing. Instead, focus on the design of real content to attract and convince Internet users.

5. Know your products

On many requests, we come across well-referenced articles written by SEOs. It’s hardly more interesting than the spinning content. The themes are very varied, and very often, affiliate links make it possible to monetize the efforts made to access these highly sought-after positions. The interest is often limited for the user because the contents were written by people who do not know the topic – they use very effective tools to find the expressions to please Google. The engine still overvalues ​​that content a lot – but if you can easily spot content written by an SEO, that means quality raters can see it too.

These sites can be penalized manually or undergo updates to more general algorithms, making it possible to tend towards a more qualitative web. For your site, use the expertise that surrounds you, do not entrust the writing to an SEO (the SEO advises, the writer writes based on his expertise), and get to know your products well: this is the best option for a long term strategy.

6. Optimize performance

Google highly encourages websites to be fast, and everybody gains when a site gets faster. A client who is satisfied with the outcome of his/her experience; the website, which gets higher conversions; and Google, which would use fewer resources to crawl websites. Concretely, Be like Usain Bolt in the sport of running, whose website takes more than 10 seconds to load … There is enough time to complete the 100-meter sprint.

On WordPress, to improve your performance, it is advisable to set up a cache system (with WP Rocket, for example), compress the images (many plugins also exist), never use an extension like Divi or Elementor to build its website (it’s simpler, but it generates lines of code or even completely useless pages that can degrade the performance of your site) and to optimize the PHP code of its website and remove any superfluous element.

7. Improve accessibility

Improving the accessibility of your site makes it possible to meet the needs of people with visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive disabilities. In doing so, you will also meet the needs of Google, which is blind, deaf, which has no hand (it does not manually click on links, it follows links as they appear in the DOM), and who cognitively speaking does not understand much of what you are writing. Actions in favor of accessibility always have a positive SEO impact.

Think about alternative texts, description of videos, navigation paths, explain as much as possible, check how your site works without JavaScript, take a good look at your Hn markup, remove unnecessary links, simplify your design as much as possible, and offer a site too accessible on mobile than on PC. These elements should be understood by developers and writers who write articles on your site (especially for alt texts and descriptions of videos).

8. Guarantee security

Securing your site is important: this allows you to protect yourself, as best as possible, against pirates who could replace your content or add links to unsavory sites … Some do not hide and are easily spotted; others do cloaking to hide the malicious links they inject into hacked sites.

When we talk about securing our site, it is not simply using the HTTPS protocol. It is above all: to carry out regular backups (to recover its contents easily in the event of an attack); properly configure your access and wp-config.php file; control its accommodation; keep your CMS up to date; use security extensions (like SecuPress or Wordfence, Daniel Roch preferring the first to the second); and carefully manage the rights granted to users.

9. Obey the law

This is just evident and not true as many places do not follow the rules. What is shown should be dealt with carefully. We cannot stress enough that under French law, sponsored content must be identified as such. Otherwise, you risk prosecution; that Google asks to put the links inserted in these articles in rel = sponsored; That allows people to buy links, which violates Google policy, you risk being penalized… purchase links from the website. GDPR has implemented a variety of restrictions on entities that are manipulating EU citizens’ data.

Depending on your market, your sector, the products you sell, the content you offer, check the legal principles to be respected. And never forget that just because it can be done doesn’t mean it’s legal. Two legal decisions related to SEO deserve to be known: Saveur Bière (unfair competition) and Rue du commerce (trademark infringement).

10. Get links

The links made between web pages constitute a fundamental element of SEO. These web links help Google crawl pages, understand their relationships, and assess pages’ popularity. Link Farms are commonly used to improve the domain visibility of Websites.

In the long run, manually placed links won’t allow your site to outperform the competition. These natural connections are acquired with third parties because they believe in doing so. You can contact sites that cite you without a backlink to get a link that seems relevant, but you should especially focus on your content. Creating good content, original, relevant, appreciated, which resonates with a community or the media, will always be the best way to get perfectly natural links from many authoritative sites. This advice applies to all sites, regardless of their technology.

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