WordPress website design is one of the most popular ways of designing websites in the world. Therefore it’s not uncommon to find people learning WordPress SEO in Nigeria in order to boost traffic to their websites to achieve their blog goals.
This post will explain about 40 ways to use SEO to get traffic to your WordPress blog in Nigeria. Since blogging is one of the best ways to make money online in Nigeria, learning and applying all or some of these tips will go a long way in helping you.
Without traffic, your blog will be almost useless, because you are blogging people to add value to people and also to make money, however, if people can’t find you online when they make queries on search engines, you will lose a lot of traffic.
And since SEO helps to bring organic traffic, learning it’s basic principles will do your blog a lot of good. Applying some of these SEO principles will distinguish your blog from that of other bloggers in Nigeria.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Literally, it refers to search engine optimization.
We may state that SEO refers to improving your website for search engines as optimising is to make anything better.
Everything you do to increase traffic (people) to your website or blog organically is called SEO (without paying Search Engines).
Despite the name “search engine optimization,” it’s crucial to underline that “SEO” is really more about people than search engines.
Why is SEO important?
SEO has the ability to be the “monster traffic generator” to your blog if you take it seriously.
Apart from SEO, other channels that can bring traffic to your blog are Social Media Marketing (SMM), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay per click (PPC), etc.
SEM is when you pay search engines to bring traffic to your blog. When someone searches for content you have, Google will make it appear first before other organic results.
It is important because it can generate organic traffic that can last for many years.
Types of SEO
SEO is broadly divided into three
- On page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
On-page SEO is all the SEO practices done while creating content to make the page appeal to people and search engines.
Off-page “SEO” is SEO practices done outside of a website. Examples are link building, Social media marketing etc.
Finally, technical SEO is SEO practices that are a bit techy, like understanding CSS, HTML, and Java and using them to improve a website’s performance.
PS – Please bear in mind that there are plugins to help you with most of the technical SEO, you just need to know the right ones to use.
How to optimise your WordPress website in Nigeria
1 Full page Vs Excerpts
The display of your blog posts can be set to full text or excerpts. The choice you make is based on your preference, because it doesn’t have much SEO implication per say. But many blogs Choose to set theirs to Excerpts.
Excerpts will display just the introduction of your content while Full text will display the complete post.
2. Website Visibility
There is a way to discourage search engines from indexing your blog. This is useful when you are still designing the website and don’t want People to visit your blog yet. But when you are done designing, it is possible for you to forget to remove the settings.
However, experts explain that you shouldn’t check the box even while designing because your blog may end up not getting indexed even when you later uncheck the box.
WordPress>Settings>reading
Follow the above to verify if the box is checked or unchecked.
3. Permalinks
Permalinks are the way your website pages and post’s URLs appear. It’s advisable for you to use a URL that is easy to understand so that both search engines and people will understand the purpose by just seeing the permalinks.
The option from the dashboard settings that will easily make users identify a blog post is the post name option chosen above.
But note that if your blog is already live and you should change the settings, people with the old links won’t be able to access the website, so you should use redirect settings.
Failure to redirect the changed links will affect your WordPress SEO in Nigeria negatively.
4. www or no www
You can use www or not in your website address, either way, it’s okay, however, it’s important that you remain consistent. If you decide to use www, then use it all through. It has a way of affecting your WordPress SEO in Nigeria.
To include the address in your WordPress dashboard, go to settings>General on your WordPress dashboard.
5. Enable bread crumbs
Bread crumbs are a feature that allows users to know their location on your blog, this helps them to navigate your website easily. You can enable it on your AIO SEO plug-in
6. Data structure
Structured data is a format for providing information and classifying the page content. It makes it easier for your website to appear in the snippet section and also helps search engines understand the purpose of your WordPress blog.
You can do this using the AIO SEO premium plugin.
Go to AIOSEO>Search appearance>content type to activate it
7. Optimize your comment
Don’t leave your comments section open for everyone to post whatever they like. Go to the settings and enable manual approval for comments so that you will be able to monitor the comments.
Spammers can post malicious links in your comment section that can harm your WordPress SEO in Nigeria, therefore try to check them manually before approving them.
While screening your comments, consider the site links, username and message content.
If the user is linking to sites you don’t trust or approve of, don’t accept it, if the username of the commenter is having random numbers and has an anchor text linking to his or her website, don’t approve it.
Finally, if the content of the comment doesn’t correlate with the blog content or if it’s abusive it derogatory, don’t approve it.
On-page SEO best practices to get traffic to your WordPress blog in Nigeria
8. H tags
Heading tags or H tags help to give your website a hierarchy and make your content more organized.
Using H tags properly is confusing for many newbies but don’t worry, it will be explained to you in detail in subsequent paragraphs.
H1 ought to be used only once in a blog post, it should be used as the title of the blog post. Your targeted keywords should be included in the H1 of your blog post because it is what will appear in the search engine result pages ( SERPS) as the blue link.
H2 should be the main subheading in a blog post followed by the H3. H1, H2 and H3 are the heading tags with the most SEO relevance, H4 to H6 will help to make your blog post more user-friendly.
While using H4 to H6, bolden them so they can appear visible to users.
9. Internal links
Links are clickable texts that link users to another website page. Most times links are blue but sometimes the website designer can change the colour of the links to another colour based on the brand colour.
Internal links are links leading to web pages or blog posts within a website. It is important to link your website to other relevant content within your website.
When you do this, Google will find your website valuable since it has other related and relevant content. Therefore, try not to forget to link your website blog posts while writing.
One mistake most bloggers make is not linking old content to new content. When they write new content, they can easily link the old ones but they don’t go back to the old ones to link to the new ways. Always try to update your old blog posts.
10. External links
Don’t be afraid to link your blog post to other websites if they have relevant content. There’s a popular saying in Nigeria ” No man is an island of himself”, which means no man knows it all.
Google doesn’t expect you to know everything or own all the information on your website, so they even expect you to link to other websites to prove that your content is comprehensive and relevant to the readers.
Remember, your blog posts are supposed to do one thing: “help your readers”.
So linking to other websites makes your website even more relevant to the users and not the other way.
11. Alt tags
Adding images to your blog posts are among the top WordPress SEO practices in Nigeria because it makes your blog posts user-friendly and more precise.
How does it make it more precise? Adding an alt tag is what will do the magic. When you add an alt tag or alt tag ( alt means alternative) to your image it will help Search to know the purpose of the image and even blog posts as a whole.
So try to add alt text to all your images except the ones for beautification. When an image search is being made on Google, it also uses alt tags to bring out results for users.
12. LSI keyword
Latent Semantic Indexing ( LSI ) is Keywords that are related to the target Keywords in a blog post. There are a lot of arguments over the usage of LSI by Google to determine the relevance of a blog post to a particular keyword.
It is argued that Google does not directly use it for ranking, however, if you are writing a blog post that’s in-depth, LSI keywords will be part of the content.
Using LSI keywords gives your blog posts more flesh and context.
For example, if you are writing a blog post on “how to start a company”, words like business, business plan, capital, risk, entrepreneurs, grants, etc are the LSI keywords that are expected to be seen in the blog posts.
13. Sitemap
A site map is the map of your WordPress blog, it is like the map that shows Search engines how to follow your website to find your content. When you submit your website sitemap to Google it will easily update its data with your new content whenever you make an update.
You can submit your sitemap manually through your Google Search Console or you can use SEO plugins to do so.
14. Anchor texts
Anchor texts are the texts you use while linking your blog posts to other blog posts, it is the text you use in your links.
Experts advise that you don’t use “click here” in your anchor, instead use the purpose of the blog posts. Doing that will help search engines to know the purpose of the blog posts, which helps Google know that you are linking to other relevant content within your blog posts or to other blog posts.
15. Meta Description
A meta description is content that is directly under the title tag in SERPs. The meta description section is an opportunity to sell your blog post to your potential.
While writing it, you need to make sure you include your target keywords, so that people will know the purpose of your writing before they click on it.
Writing a good meta description will increase the click-through rate of your content. However, note that Google is not obligated to use your meta description, it can decide to select any part of your blog posts it dims fit for the search made on Google.
16. Title tag
The title tag is the title of your blog post that appears as the blue links on Search engine result pages. You need to optimise your blog post title with words that will attract internet searchers to click on your blog posts.
The blue link above is the Title tag of the page in Google SERPS
17. Keywords
Keywords are words discovered from research that show what people are searching frequently for online. After performing keyword research, it’s important that you use your target keywords properly within your content.
Experts advise that you use the keywords in the title tag, first 100 words, in your H2, H3, within the blog posts ( where relevant ) and in the content.
Don’t use the keywords too much in the blog posts, if you do so, you will be penalised for it. Too much usage of keywords in a blog post is called keyword stuffing.
Keyword research
This is the act of discovering the right content in your blog niche that answers questions your target audience is asking
Knowing these contents helps you create an intentional content plan that will help you achieve your blog goals which could make more sales create brand awareness etc.
The greatest mistake you can ever make is creating random content and just hoping that people will one day somehow searches for it
With the available tools at your disposal, doing that will be foolish. You need to know why it’s important to do keyword research so that you will take it seriously in order not to be among the 90.6% mentioned above.
Research has shown that when a user searches for information they always have an intent for it, that is to say, every search have a reason
There is a reason for every search made on Google or any other search engine – this is called user search intent
There are lots of user search intent but we will discuss only the major once
- Informational query
- Transactional query
- Navigational query
- Commercial query
- Local query
1. Informational query
The reason for this type of search is just to get information
For example if the user just wants to answer assignment questions on the meaning of water, he or she may just type “what is water”, copy that information and then find his or her way
2. Transactional query
The user wants to perform a transaction
For example, he or she is ready to buy a particular model of phone. The user may type in “Samsung Galaxy S21”. The most likely user has a debit atm card ready to make the purchase
3. Navigational query
This type of search occurs when the user is trying to go somewhere specific on the internet
For example, a JAMB candidate wants to check his or her result. The user may type in “JAMB result checker”. The user will be directed to the JAMB portal to check the result
4. Commercial query
This type of search involves making inquiries with the intent of a purchase
For example, the user may be contemplating buying one of two models of cars, let’s say a Toyota and a Mercedes. The user may type ” Mercedes and Toyota which is the best”
5. Local query
Search with the intention of locating a place locally
For example, a user that is looking for the closest restaurant to his or her location may type in “restaurants in Lugbe Abuja”
Knowing user intent is very important, your inability to detect user intent will make you write amiss
Just imagine a student that is searching for the meaning of water getting content on the cost of water instead, what do you think? you thought well- the student will sharply click on the back button and go straight to the next available blog
18. Add video content
They improve your WordPress SEO in Nigeria by making it more appealing to your target audience and it can also lead people to your website if you optimise your videos well.
19. Noindex SEO irrelevant content
Not all content on your WordPress blog is supposed to rank, you will need some to be kept confidential. Examples of some content that you should not index are login Pages, date archives, templates and tag pages.
20. Use Google tools to improve your WordPress SEO in Nigeria
Google has provided tools that help people to gain insight into the activities going on on their websites. The good news is that these tools are free to use.
Create a Google search console (GSC) account
Google search console is defined by Google as a tool from Google that can help anyone with a website to understand how they are performing on Google Search, and what they can do to improve their appearance on a search to bring more relevant traffic to their websites.
It helps you to know the contents on your blog that have been crawled, indexed and are ranking for certain keywords.
This insight helps you to make more calculated decisions.
Create a Google Analytics account
Google Analytics is a tool by Google that helps to analyze data related to your website and business
Egaiodigital explained the benefits of Google analytics in their post
The benefits are listed below
- Track Online Traffic
- Understand User Behavior
- Offline to Online Tracking
- Data Reports And Customization
- Improve Online Advertising With Marketing Analytics
- Improve Search Engine Optimization And Content Marketing
- Google Analytics Conversion Tracking
- Find Your Target Audience
- Google Analytics Cost
- Google Analytics Improves Websites
- Getting Started Is Easy
- New Ideas For Business
- eCommerce Performance
In a nutshell, you need data to know how your website is performing and that is what Google analytics helps you to achieve.
Google trend
Google Trends is a website by Google that analyses the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries (search requests) over time as defined by Wikipedia
It is a tool that shows top and rising searches across regions and also related queries.
21. Cannibalisation
This occurs when you have a lot of pages or blog posts competing for the same keyword. Cannibalisation water downs the value of your website, therefore try to avoid it.
When you map out your site architecture, it will help you avoid cannibalisation and also help your posts to have unique keywords.
22. Install WordPress SEO Plugin
WordPress SEO Plugins will take care of a lot of your WordPress SEO in Nigeria basic needs. It will perform tasks like submitting sitemaps to search engines, optimizing your website images and the like.
Some popular free SEO plugins are Yoast, All in One SEO and Rank Math.
23. Use tag and category properly
The tag and category section in WordPress can help you to categorise and tag your blog post well. When your blog posts are categorised, it helps users navigate your blog easily and it also helps them with search.
Search engines also use tags and categories to understand the purpose of a website.
You can add categories to your blog when going to Posts>Category
24. Use SSL
SSL (secure socket layer) is a security technology that prevents unauthorized parties from accessing sensitive information on a website, it does this by encrypting the connection between a website and a browser.
Google has made SSL one of the requirements for ranking, and some browsers warn users from accessing a website if it doesn’t have SSL installed. This has a negative impact on your WordPress SEO.
Websites with SSL certification have the padlock icon next to the browser and secondly, their address starts with HTTPS:// instead of HTTP :/
25. Optimise your website for speed to improve your WordPress SEO in Nigeria
The performance of your website has a great impact on the bounce rate of your blog. There’s a correlation between your website speed and bounce rate.
If your website is delayed for more than 3 secs it is considered to be slow and it will lead to a great loss of traffic. This factor is so important that it is considered to be a ranking factor by Google.
There are plugins you can use to increase the speed of your website. In addition, to increase your website performance you can
- Make your website easy for visitors to navigate
- Optimise your website images and videos
- Use a responsive WordPress theme
- Optimise your website ads
26. Optimise images
It is common knowledge that images make people a better understanding of your points, however, having a lot of pictures on your website will affect the performance of your website by slowing it down.
How can you solve this matter? Compressing your website images to keep your website light.
27. Organise the hierarchy of your website
Your blog should be easy to navigate so users will be able to access pages and posts on your website without stress. A good rule to follow is that no page or post should take more than three clicks to reach from the homepage.
28. Update your website plugins and themes
When you use your website themes and plugins, after a while, you will need to update the themes and plugins to the latest version so as to keep up to date.
Failure to do that can affect your website negatively, therefore, you need to update your resources as soon as you get a notification to go do so.
29. Delete dormant themes and plugins
When you use themes and plugins on your WordPress website and you decide to deactivate the theme or plugin, don’t leave it installed on your website, try to delete it.
Leaving dormant themes and plugins on your website can slow down your website, which is bad for your WordPress website SEO.
Off-Page SEO best practices to get traffic to your WordPress blog in Nigeria
30. Look for backlinks opportunities
Links are clickable URLs leading to website pages while backlinks are links directed to a website page or another website. One of the things you ought to target is getting backlinks, mind you we are not talking about any type of backlinks, it should be quality backlinks.
What determines if a backlink has quality? It is the domain authority of the website. Does the website have quality backlinks too?
The type of website sending you backlinks matters
Another important factor to consider while seeking backlinks is the content of the website, Getting backlinks from a food blog meanwhile, you run a fashion blog won’t do you much good.
Firstly, Google won’t consider it as a quality link and secondly, you won’t get traffic from that link because the audience of that blog is not in your target niche.
In link building, there are two types of links
- Earned editorial links
- Sought-after editorial links
Earned editorial backlinks
Editorial links are links located in the body of a web page or post. It has more quality than when it’s located in the footer or comment section.
Earned editorial links are backlinks you get just for having content worth referencing, they occur naturally. There are specific types of content that have been observed to attract natural backlinks. More on that in the next lecture.
Sought-after editorial backlinks
These are backlinks you get by tactically seeking for it from people you know can give you quality backlinks.
Journalists, bloggers and influencers are examples of people you are to reach out to to get backlinks and also build relationships.
There are still some types of links you need to know about while seeking backlinks.
No-follow links
No-follow links are links that don’t have authority. It has a tag that is telling search engines not to count the backlink as a vote of confidence from you.
To tell search engines that the link is not a vote of confidence, just add the rel =no follow to the link.
It could be that you are not sure of the content of the blog you are referencing, in that case, make it a no follow the link. Most links in the comment section are no follow links.
Even though no-follow links do not help in terms of SEO, it is not useless.
If you should get a no-follow backlink from a relevant authority website, it can still help you in terms of traffic. There are chances that many visitors to that website will click on the link to visit your website.
So you see, no follow links are not useless.
31. Look for website linking opportunities from your competitors
Yes, search for topics related to your niche using the topics you got from your keyword research.
Visit the blogs to find out the people behind the blogs.
By now you should have gotten a list of people you want to reach out to.
How do you get their contacts?
Check the footer and header
To contact them, you will need to check the header or footer where you locate their “contact us or contact me page”
Then you will send them a message via email or whatever means provided
Check their Social Media accounts
Social media is a good place to search for the people on your list, and try to find a way to contact them, people most times list how they can be contacted in their bio
There is also a way to get anyone’s email, check this practical guide to find anyone’s email
32. Write guest posts
Guest posting or blogging is the act of writing posts on other blogs to get backlinks, attract traffic and create brand awareness.
It is a well-known tactic among bloggers that proves to be effective.
Adam Enfroy is an advocate for aggressive Guest posting.
The former head of Google’s web spam team in 2014 talked about guest blogging, he said “it is done for”.
Despite what he said, experts still say guest blogging is effective to date.
Most sites that accept guest posts may add a “no follow” tag to them.
Guest blogging is a good way to get your voice out there.
Ryan Robinson has prepared a comprehensive guide on Guest blogging.
Read How to Guest blog in 2021 here
33. Use Social media
Create social media accounts for your blog to promote your blog and blog posts. You can choose from the various social media platforms available today.
Since blogging has to do with people and people can be found on Social media, it is common sense for you to engage with them.
Use social media to educate, socialize and engage with people to find out what they need and how you can create better blog posts.
34. Create an Email list
An email list is a list of email addresses you can acquire from people voluntarily on your blog or any other platform. This enables you to send emails occasionally to your audience to build beneficial relationships.
You can get your target audience’s email by simply asking them for it, offering freebies, promising them you will send helpful content etc.
If they are the right audience for your blog, they will willingly give you their emails.
You may be wondering how you can send emails to many subscribers at a time. There are many email marketing tools out there that you can use to automate emails. Examples of such tools are autoresponder, convertkit, Mailchimp, AWeber and lots of others.
These tools have technology that will make creating and sending emails easy.
35. High-quality content
Creating high quality content is not limited to only WordPress but all websites. You will be able to attract a high number of traffic if you pay attention to comprehensive content creation.
Choose a quality Hosting provider
The hosting provider you choose also has a lot to do with your WordPress website performance, a quality Hosting provider will offer you high speed, good customer care service, and other top-tier technology features.
There are many Hosting providers in Nigeria, however, Truehost offers quality services at affordable prices that can’t be compared to other Hosting providers in Nigeria.
We recommend Truehost for your web hosting needs.
Conclusion
The SEO tips outlined above are not the only tactics available to attract traffic to your WordPress blog in Nigeria, however, when you apply most of these tips, you will see a change in your WordPress SEO performance.
You will be able to attract and maintain the right audience for many years. If you are yet to have a blog, read our post on how to start a blog business in Nigeria.
I couldn’t agree more! Hosting plays a crucial role in website performance, and Truehost’s quality and affordability make it a top choice.
Social media can be a great way to promote your blog and build backlinks.