The world of freelancing and content writing is not only a very lucrative industry to be in, it’s also one of the most competitive as well. One of the best ways to compete and demand higher premiums on your writing, is to make sure you have a domain name and website of your own. This ultimately helps with allowing more clients to find your work, ranking in the search results, and also building a personal brand for yourself in the process.
One of the most common obstacles in this process however, is that most writers are site designers or bloggers. The good news, is that WordPress makes this process a whole lot easier. In short, there are pretty much zero technical and design skills required to have a site of your own.
This is all done through the power of WordPress, which is a free software solution that can give you the ease to create your own website with all the features of an completely custom site, but without the headaches. It is the most popular platform for blogging as well. In fact, WordPress has helped in the hosting or creation of more than 60% of the websites present on the Google search engine.
In this article, today you will learn about the many benefits of using WordPress to power your site and grow your freelance writing business, while also learning more about tools, tips, and tricks for when it comes to using WordPress plugins to rank higher in the search results.
Why and How to Get the Most Out of WordPress
As covered, WordPress makes the process of site management and content creation extremely easy. All you need to do is pick a domain name, set up your web hosting, and start using WordPress to create content for your site. If you don’t already have a website of your own, be sure to read through these VPS hosting reviews and you can learn more about the different options, rates, and hosting plans out there to choose from. If you’d like to see what’s possible through the use of WordPress, follow that link and see what a customized site with a lot of reviews and a custom theme in place looks like. FreelanceWritingGigs is also running off WordPress as well.
WordPress themes and plugins will also come in handy during this process, as they are the little bits of software that are added to your sites to enhance it’s functionality. WP plugins are written in PHP and you can create your plugin in WordPress that suits your requirement. They are very important in improving Google rankings.
How are WP Plugins Used to Improve Google Rankings?
As freelance writers, you are probably already familiar with the concept of writing content for a site — and then having the client use that content for their site, and also in hopes to rank it in Google. In order for content to rank in Google, it actually comes down to a number of factors. Featuring the best visual and amazing website is worthless unless you add the quality content and the other most important things that are necessary to rank your website in Google search engine. Some of the most common ones are:
- Focus and length of content
- Age and domain rankings for the publishing site
- Backlinks and social shares to an individual article
As important as these are, on-site SEO improvements can help as well. This is where WordPress plugins and settings come into play.
Default interface of WordPress is not very user-friendly, so you need to optimize that according to your desire. Similarly, as you change the setting on your laptop and phone to make it more comfortable to use.
Now here are a few tips that can improve your Google search ranking.
The setting of permalinks.
Permalinks are the URLs of your website that are searched and referred by the users or another website to give a reference to your site. Initially, your URLs are very short in forms and they are not supposed to have any keywords that are searched most commonly on Google. But you can edit the settings of permalinks easily. You just need to be careful that your permalink contains the keyword that you want to be searched. It is the first step that can improve your Google ranking.
Impressive title tags.
The beginning title of your site must be attractive and comprehensive as well. The title depicts the content and moreover, it is the hook impression of your site. It must be 50-60 characters long. You can take a guide from headline analyzer to improve the impact of your title tag. Add the most searched keywords from Google to make it appear in the top sites.
Give a sitemap for your website.
WordPress introduces plugins called GOOGLE XML SITEMAP. This sitemap help to index the number of pages you are having on your website. This XML sitemap is very easy to use. Just by using this plugin, Google can reach the right index of your site. It can help Google to improve your site ranking.
Google analytics.
This very helpful tool in analyzing the source of your traffic, the behavior of your audience, and to examine the basic attributes. This tool is offered free by Google and moreover, this tool helps in improving and targeting your source audience. Google analytics gives a brief discussion on your traffic and their behavior’s. It can help to improve your ranking as well. All you need is to observe your strategies more carefully by getting the analysis from Google. This can help you in locating error 404 and examining the behavior of your audience.
Use of optimized content.
1 – Using appropriate tags.
You can add a media file to grab the attention of your readers. But before adding the media file just be careful to add at least one keyword in the image title. Images are the most important tool that helps to attract the reader but it can help you more if you use them in the right way.
2 – Proper use of HTML readings.
Proper use of HTML readings can enhance the impression of your content. Yoast can give you better examples of using headings in the most appropriate way. Using H1 for the main heading then secondly, H2 for subheadings and use H3 for the subheadings of H2. Keep the headings in order to keep the content flow in order.
3 – Linking with high ranked sites.
Linking to higher ranked authorities can improve your rank in the search engine. It casts a positive effect on the search engine. Outbound links are very helpful in upgrading your rank in search engine.
4 – Linking to the internal links.
Well if you will provide the internal links of your pages on the top of your site then it will prevent the bounce off rate. This is just to provide ease to your targeted audience.
5 – Length of content.
Most of the high ranked content is of least 1500 words. You should be careful to use the least count of 1500 words in your article. It can help your site to reach the high ranks in the search engine of Google. Most of the blogger have opposite reviews on this; they say that quality is better than quantity. Summarizing this means that short reading stuff is more attractive but the results of Google search shows that high ranked sites are contained up with least of 1500 words.
6 – Social media sharing buttons.
Creating social media sharing buttons on your website can give the opportunity of sharing the relevant stuff on audience profile as well. It helps to attract traffic more. These buttons can give a fascinating look of your site as well.
Use of optimized theme.
Now there is a large variety of themes on WordPress but you are in need to put the one, which is more optimized for search engine. The best-practiced SEO theme is far better than the beautiful appealing theme. Always chose the one, which goes best with your search engine requirement. Here are some crucial factors that are needed to be discussed. (as referenced here)
- Open graph meta tag incorporation to improve social media sharing
- Appropriate use of meta title tags and heading
- A neat and clean structure that employs valid and proper HTML.
- Correct use of the canonical URL meta tag.
Use SEO plugins.
There is a variety of SEO plugins provided by WordPress. You can select the one for yourself. Yoast SEO, ALL-IN-ONE so, and many more are there to use. They give you ease to introduce Meta title, Meta description, Meta tags, and most searched keywords. They provide all the solution for SEO in WordPress.
These plugins can help to generate an XML sitemap for your site. These plugins can help to add more functionality in your site to give it best look.
Google page speed insights
These are the tools to insight the page loading speed of your site. It is considerable fact on the Google ranking. You can view the loading speed of your pages on the Google page speed insights. They provide you the ease to enhance that as well. All you need is to stay updated with your work and its progress.
Responsive design.
There are a large number of people who access the website through their mobile phones. Recent research shows that the responsive design of your site attracts more. You can view that from the browser’s viewport. If you are using WordPress then your website has the most responsive design already. While making it more responsive, just give it an overlook from your phone as well.
High quality is written content.
High-quality content must have a number of qualities but the most helpful one are uniqueness, shareable, informative and helpful. Google is really strict if someone steals the content of the other site, and in worse cases, a site can be completely penalized and dropped from their search rankings altogether.
With this in mind, always be original in writing your own content. Use your creative skills to create unique content for your site. It’s also a good idea to quote references of any case studies or stats you are writing about, as this will help with improving the overall quality of your content as well.
Google is helpful in providing you’re the concepts but it never allows copying the efforts of others. Make sure that content is unique. Then it must be informative and it must fulfill the initiative of the writing. If the audience will not find it informative then they will never search you back again. Always keep in mind that you must provide information to your targeted audience. Just keep focusing on the quality by adding more of the research work. You can also add more facts and figures that actually depict the high informative content.
Now the last important fact is to make your content shareable. When a person can share your content with his friends and followers, it will give a heap to your site. It can be effective in publicity of your content even more. People can make the reference of your site in their content also. So be sure that you are facilitating the audience with the sharing options.
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