14 More tips to optimize your WordPress website – Issue no. 5

Freshen up your WordPress blog. Update photos & featured images

Photos and graphics make a huge impact on the overall aesthetic of your blog. A blog post can take on new life simply by replacing the images included in the post or the featured images you use. No one says you can’t go back and update photos and featured images from old posts.

You can freshen up the entire look of your blog simply by adding new, modern photography to previous posts, or by making featured images more consistent in style or color scheme.

Live sites are not for development work

I could say this a thousand times. Never use production (live) sites for development work!

Form design best practices: Less is more (remove form fields)

Every field you ask users to fill out increases friction. The best thing you can do to improve form completions is to get rid of as many fields as possible.

Use your keywords

Google won’t rank your site for a keyword if that keyword isn’t on your website. It’s as simple as that.

Improve mediocre post titles

To be honest. Coming up with epic titles for blog posts can be a little tricky at times. Maybe in the past, you ended up settling for less than stellar titles. A good way to make use of 30 minutes is to look over your posts to identify any titles that could use improvement.

Use hyphens between words in image file names

Always include hyphens between words in the image file names. For example, if you were to name it wordpress_seo.jpg or wordpressseo.jpg Google won’t be able to read this. Google reads files with hyphens as individual words, so you will want to name it wordpress-seo.jpg.

Online branding: Be prepared to spend some money

If you want to make money, you need to spend money. A cliché, but it’s true. When it comes to online marketing that means investing in AdWords, social media campaigns, and content creation tools, among others.

Use photos of people using your product

One of the things we tell our customers is to use photos of people using the product. Or the product in use. It doesn’t matter if you sell coffee machines or dresses. If you add people, your product will look friendlier and people will see themselves using your products.

ALL CAPS

All caps text is like a spice, you don’t want to overuse it.

Create evergreen content

Evergreen content is content that is always relevant. It continues to be useful and informative no matter when your audience reads it.

Make use of headlines

The fact is most people don’t read your content, no matter how good it is. What they do is read the headline.
Around 80-85% of people will read headlines, while only about 20% will read the actual article.

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are sooooo old school

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are more often than not used by gray hat sites trying to eke out tiny bits of SEO. So, we suggest you turn them off completely.

Site speed is important. Especially since Google factors it into your SEO ranking.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. — Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Use white space

White space is essential to good design. White space makes your content more legible while also enabling the user to focus on the elements surrounding the text.