How To Build An Ideal WordPress Website For High SEO Rankings

Today in AuroraVisibility’s blog we will teach you how to build a website using WordPress in an ideal way which will ensure that your SEO ranking will be high. We hope you enjoy reading this article.

Learn to build an email list.

Whether you are a blogger or a big eCommerce site, you lose a lot if you don`t build subscribers’ email lists.

Why?

Because most email subscribers are permanent, if you do not spam and abuse them, you can get attention to your new articles/products/social profiles, converting into sales, traffic, and social shares. If you ever decide to sell your project, any serious market like Empire Flippers will ask if you have a list of email subscribers, which will count very much towards the listing price.

How?

The most powerful yet simple, classic way to captivate the user’s attention is to build a free eBook/tutorial/course and make a pop-up subscribe form, and that is it. You will see with time your list growing.

Example –

This is an eCommerce site of one of our customers who agreed to let us build a list for him. The number of subscribers is still small as it has only been 2 months. If you look at 5 and 6 December, when we send the first email blast to his customers with a new product, you will see a spike of 23-25% growth in traffic.

Remember, this is a laser target email; imagine if you own a niche blog with reviews, tips, and so on after 1-2 years of building lists like this one.

How To Build An Ideal WordPress Website For High SEO Rankings

Easy Complete SEO On-Page via SEOPress

Our favorite SEO plugin for WordPress remains SEOPress Premium; it is cheap, unlimited, white-label, and the most advanced on the market.

We will not explain to your basic things how you should set them, but we will explain to you important ones which people avoid or make mistakes.

Titles and meta –

Be sure you set up a no-index for not important pages.

We also set no-index from Archive sub-menu, including author archives, to avoid duplicates and taxonomies tags.

Do not enable sitemaps, as new WordPress has sitemap build-in core.

Social networks –

We strongly recommend making important social networks and links to your site as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Advanced –

We check all, it deletes many unnecessary code lines from WordPress core and cleans the source code as it is best.

PRO –

From the PRO tab, be sure you enable Dublin Core; the rest are according to your specific project.

Schema –

If you write casual blog posts, select your data type, pick Articles.

Other great SEO plugins

  • WP Rocket
  • ShortPixel
  • AMP
  • Table of Contents Plus


UX/UI

Lately, anyone building WordPress sites via Elementor/DIVI or similar. We advise you to stop doing this because your WordPress source code will be bloated with hundreds of useless lines of code. More than that, if your audience is not focusing on desktop users, the most basic WordPress themes will work perfectly on Mobile.

We prefer Astra as a theme, but you can also use: Contentberg, ReHub, MyThemeShop themes, or even basic WordPress themes. With a few tweaks and AMP transitional, you will be simply fine. Remember, build your site with mobile-first in mind and AMP. Sooner or later, it will count more than anything else.

Never add unnecessary 3rd party plugins, external scripts, and whatever it is extra; conflicts may appear on any update. Also, it makes your site load slower.

Final note: Keep it as simple as possible, plain, centered. If you think we are wrong, just check all big media websites. If you block their ads, you will find a plain text site; Google loves structured content but does not love at all fancy graphics lately.

Cache and Delivery

Lately, Google talks more and more about the speed and delivery of the sites, everyone knows that, but not many people understand how to optimize their projects at their best. As we mentioned earlier, WP Rocket can help you with ¾ of the work.

If you use ShortPixel as we recommend, you will see they also offer free CDN; I strongly advise you not to use it because it is pretty low quality from my point of view. If you are on the budget, just use JetPack; it serves your images from WordPress.org, or if you want to go more professional yet friendly, just use Closte.com’s WordPress dedicated Google Cloud hosting; it’s all in one.

We tend to think once my sites are Google servers, it gets indexed and recrawled more easily, but this is just a our personal feeling, Frankly, we never did a case study on it.

Security

If your WordPress project very rarely need to be updated, we recommend deploying static once you finish it. Example: https://wp2static.com/, this way, nobody can hack you as it will be plain HTML, and you do not even need a cache plugin. It is the fastest and secure way for your WordPress with zero headaches. we use static for a few of my sites, which are portfolio sites. The same for some customers with 5-10 pages only; if you have, we recommend going static and skip any cache/security tips we shared.

If your WordPress is continuously updating as new blog posts every few days, yes, you have no other clean option than to secure your site and use a cache plugin. we use iThemes Security Pro. We find it the most complex yet friendly plugin for this purpose; you have a solution at your fingers in a few clicks.

We also recommend using Really Simple SSL Pro, not just for security. Still, it is also good for SEO because it easily helps you pass https://hstspreload.org/, which most of the normal bloggers have no idea even what it is. Have a look at their site, and you will understand easier why it helps so much.

Best Ads Positions

If you build your site for Ads, be sure you follow this structure:

  • Content boxed 70%
  • Sidebar right 30%
  • Best ads are: Responsive.

Best ads positions are:
– Before the title.
– After 2nd paragraph.
– After 4th paragraph.

Use only responsive ads. Most of the Ad companies will give you responsive ads by default now. But just in case, you need to know.

Never miss followings to rank for years.

  • Be active on Twitter, post custom news, information about your project; Google loves it.
  • Build your brand, make people search DOMAIN NAME on Google.
  • Write for readers, not for search engines.
  • Use Google Analytics; it is the standard, even if it is not the best if you decide to prove to someone your traffic, only Google Analytics counts.
  • Make real giveaways on social networks, with less than 300 USD divided into a few prizes, vouchers; you can earn more followers/likes than you will spending 1000 USD on paid ads.
  • Offer rewards, discounts, bonuses to your loyal people.
  • Build a community if possible once you get some traffic.
  • Build connections with people from the same niche; even if they are your competitors, it can help.
  • Offer real value to the readers; otherwise, do not write articles at all.
  • Be patient, SEO it is not a sprint, but a marathon! The same applies to branding.


How to Rank on Bing

Lately, for our customers and our partners, we also focus strongly on Bing rankings for the following reasons:

Bing users are the most novice on the internet. Usually, they are people over 35 years old who use the internet just for casual stuff, and we found this to be a gold mine that is not exploited yet, and at its best.

Why?

Because Windows comes by default with Internet Explorer + Bing as homepage, most users do not know to change the homepage or main search engine.

If they are casual internet users, they will not use Adblocker either.

If the age of the person is above 35 years old (after our research), it means they have money to spend, and they have the potential to buy, click ads or affiliate links, and convert better.

Once you rank in Bing, you rarely get de-ranked as their updates are soft. Usually, you get outranked naturally by competitors if you do not care about your site. We have a site that ranks in the same positions for more than 2 years, just target exact match keywords, and you will have success.

Remember, Bing is not just Bing.com, but also Yahoo, AOL, etc. There are not as big as Google, but there is money to be made.

All in one:
One of our sites with 8-10k UV a day from Bing makes more money from ads than all other sources, which are 20-30k a UV a day. So, 1/3 of traffic from Bing does more than 2/3 of the others, which, of course, most is Google organic.

How to rank on Bing?

Our favorite way is via an expired domain for big sites only. Find an expired domain with links for authorities, especially .EDU and .GOV, to keep building links to them.

Another way for people in eCommerce is exact match domains; yes, it is working flawlessly. If you want to build a brand on Google and social networks, you can make a mirror site with the exact match domain, just change the text, and are ready to go, and you can make cross-sales easily. If you use this technique, put 60-70% of the backlinks on the homepage with variations of the domain name.

The only small issue in Bing is not all backlinks will index. Try to get links just from big authorities, magazines, etc. Do not use diversity links as they will not count at all.

You can apply this technique for affiliates, rank, and rent, and many more.

Example –

If your brand sells gaming keyboards, but your domain name is: SolidGamers.com, it is perfect for branding, Google, social networks, and stability.

But, if you want to rank on Bing, buy an exact match domain like BuyGamingKeyboards.org and start building links with more aggressive anchors, including the exact match keyword in the domain name.

If you apply this technique, you will see even if you get way less more visits than in Google, the percent of conversion will be higher.

That’s all for today. We hope you have learned new things. And do not forget, if you want someone to do all the hard work for you – you are more than welcome to contact us.