wooShop HostingSEO is a set of site optimization strategies that would make your site more accessible to search engines. The strategy involves optimizing the code, content and formatting of the site to make it more search engine friendly. And, it is also about maintaining user friendly content that helps users find what they are looking for easily. Some of the important aspects on your site that makes a difference in terms of SEO are good quality content, site performance, url structure, titles, descriptions, sitemaps and images. Let’s look into some of these terms in more detail to understand them better.
Site performance
How fast your site loads is an important aspect of SEO. If users click a button on your site, and it takes a bit longer to load, there are chances that they will leave your site immediately. This is especially relevant to eCommerce sites, as the customer wouldn’t have the patience to wait. According to statistics, a one second delay can impact your conversions by 7%, and customer satisfaction by 16%. Site performance is an important criteria that search engines consider for your page ranking as well. So it is important to look for any issues with site performance, and immediately fix those.
You can use tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix to understand the performance of your site. Some of the determinants of page load speed are your hosting service, the number of plugins, external code on the site, page size, etc. You need to consistently test these aspects to optimize the performance of your site.
URL structure
The blog posts on your site are accessed by users through their permalinks, which is automatically set by WordPress when you create a post. You may have noticed this while creating a blog post. The below screenshot shows a permalink:
Now, this permalink structure plays a big part in SEO. Let’s know what all ways you can optimize this.
The structure of the permalink should not be very technical or complicated. It should have a user friendly format where users can get an idea on what the post is about. Keeping the permalink structure simple with the title of your article (post name) is a good practice. And if you have a category structure on your site, you can also set it up with the category name and post name. You can change the permalink structure from the navigation panel (Settings > Permalinks).
You can select a suitable permalink structure for your site. For example, you can choose post name as below:
Or, choose a custom structure with category and post name. You can select the field ‘Custom Structure’ and then use the available tags for category and post name.