Here’s a fact: good SEO is not only about links and anchor texts. Of course, you can improve your site’s rankings by only doing link building, but if you want to experience the maximum impact SEO can have on your rankings, you need to focus on your own affiliate site as well.
This post is about on-page SEO, or more accurately – on how to optimize the source code of your site.
Proper HTML and CSS
Depending on your level of HTML and CSS proficiency you might want to tweak this yourself or not. No matter what your story is, the easiest path to take is to simply get a quality WordPress theme and leave all the HTML and CSS issues to the professionals.
Here’s why HTML and CSS is important. Google sees your site differently than you do. Google doesn’t see images, social media buttons, and so on. They only see various HTML tags. Proper HTML is when Google can read the content of your site without any interruptions and difficult code structures.
The art of simplicity in HTML and CSS is usually something a web developer learns over time, that’s why it’s crucial to work with professionals.
SEO Plugins
There are myriads of SEO plugins for WordPress available. However, we don’t advise you to get every single one of them. Actually, the less plugins you have the better.
In case of SEO, you only need one – it’s WordPress SEO by Yoast. Things you can do with the plugin:
- Set default titles and meta descriptions.
- Configure the indexation settings.
- Create custom robots.txt and .htaccessfiles.
- Clean up your backlinks.
- Create XML sitemaps.
- Clean up the <HEAD> section of your blog.
- Set individual SEO parameters for each post and page.
Site Caching
Caching is a clever technique of improving your site’s speed. Basically, it works by fetching your site’s data from the database, and then storing it in the cache. Whenever a reader visits your site the data is served from the cache instead of the database.
This process is a lot faster and can improve user experience greatly. And this is exactly what’s important to Google. If your site loads fast with no glitches, you’re on your way to higher rankings.
Try the W3 Total Cache plugin to have this done.
Optimized Database
Every database can be optimized by hand if you just happen to know the exact SQL command that does this. But, as always, it’s much easier to do it with a plugin. This time it’s WP-Optimize. You don’t even have to have the plugin enabled at all times. Just launch it once a month to optimize your site, and then deactivate it again.
Lastly, we have to admit that both sides of SEO are equally as important. If you want to build some quality rankings you need to take care of on-page SEO as well as off-page SEO.
What are your thoughts on code optimization for SEO?