9. Add Meta Titles And Meta Descriptions

For each page and article, you should define a ‘Meta title’ and a ‘Meta description’. This ‘meta’ text is then displayed in search results in the search engines: not only will doing this improve your rankings, it will also provide a preview of the page for potential visitors.

In Google, the Meta title is displayed at the top of the search result in blue. It’s limited to 50 to 60 characters in length. Longer titles are automatically shortened. Under the title, each search result contains the green-colored URL, and the Meta description is displayed. This is limited to approximately 156 characters and is also automatically shortened by Google.

When writing your Meta title and meta description, you want to both encourage the potential visitor to click on your link and also ensure its relevant to your page. Otherwise, if the searcher does click through, doesn’t find what they were searching for, they’ll exit your website, which can have a negative effect on ranking in the search results.

In WordPress, you can use plug-ins to set the Meta information for each individual page. For example, the WP Meta SEO or Yoast SEO plug-ins are very useful, because they show you how your article or page is displayed in Google search results.

10. Track Analytics And Refine Your Site

To measure and evaluate important data about how visitors use your website, you should use analysis software. This is not a direct SEO measure, but it’s vital in helping you understand whether any SEO measures you’ve employed have actually worked. Google provides free services, Google Analytics and Google Search Console for this purpose.

To use them, you need a Google Account with Google Analytics. After you’ve included Google Analytics in your website, you can sign in to your Google Account with Search Console and add your site. You can then use your Google Analytics account to track visitor sessions and other data. After setting up Search Console, you should submit a Sitemap for your website.

This helps Google to comprehensively capture your site’s structure and contents and encourage Google to crawl and evaluate your site. For new websites, which have not yet been linked from other websites, this is enormously important, somehow, Google must first learn that your website exists at all.

In addition to submitting a sitemap, you can also use Google Search Console to fine-tune aspects of your site to improve its SEO performance. Search Console is a powerful collection of tools and reports which can help you to improve your site’s structure and code to make your site index better, to manage URLs displayed in search results and to invalidate harmful backlinks. Used together with analytics data, you can harness Search Console’s capabilities for a positive effect on your rankings and your visitor numbers.