Introduction
Setup Time: 15 minutes
Starting a website and want to know how to increase the visitors on your website?
To make sure your website is a success, it’s crucial to learn how to gain more visitors. After all, the more people visit your site, the faster it grows.
In this article, we’ll show you how to increase website traffic using AIOSEO WordPress Plugin with basic SEO techniques. Let’s get Started!
How to use AIOSEO to increase your Website Visitors
Complete a WordPress Site Audit
Analyse your entire WordPress site to detect important issues, recommended improvements and get actionable insights to boost SEO and gain more visitors.
- Head over to the Dashboard on the All In One SEO Plugin on your WordPress Dashboard.
- Click “Complete Site Audit Checklist” (This will now scan your website for any issues).
Identify any important issues and recommended SEO improvements
Once your website has been scanned for any important issues, AIOSEO will now recommended ways to improve your SEO. It’ll highlight critical issues, so you can fix them right away.
As you can see with the screenshot below, my website has 8 important issues requiring me to fix these asap. Follow this step by step guide to improve your SEO.
- No meta description was found for your page.
- Some images on your page have no alt attribute.
- For issues relating to JavaScript / CSS files needing to be minified.
Some JavaScript / CSS files don't seem to be minified.
Minifying your WordPress JavaScript and CSS files removes whitespace and comments to reduce the file size, making them load faster and speed up your WordPress site.
Always make a backup of your website before making any changes.
- Head over to your cache plugin for example Breeze, this is an excellent caching plugin pre-installed with Cloudways.
- Click File Optimization.
- Find CSS Minify & JavaScript Minify and click these so the button is swiped to the right.
- Save Changes Below.
As you can see we have now achieved an 81 Site Audit score by just minifying the JavaScript & CSS files. Now its time to improve this more by heading over to edit your meta descriptions and image attributes (alt tags).
No meta description was found for your page.
When a meta description is not provided for a page, search engines may automatically generate a snippet. However, this can sometimes lead to an inaccurate or irrelevant summary of the page’s content. It is best to provide a meta description in a natural way and write with human readers in mind. Remember to summarize the content and describe the topics your page discusses.
Always make a backup of your website before making any changes.
- Head over to your Page/Post or Product within your WordPress Dashboard. In this case it is our Homepage that needs fixing.
- Once you open the Homepage you will see the following options below (AIOSEO Settings).
- Find the Meta Description and enter up to 160 characters, try to keep it around the 160 mark for a better score.
- Now you will see your page score on the top right, in my case it is 88/100.
Some images on your page have no alt attribute
It’s essential to ensure that all images on your page have a descriptive alt attribute. This attribute provides a text description of the image, search engines use alt text to understand the content of the image, which can improve your website’s search engine ranking.
Now to add the alt attributes to your images you must head over to your media library within your WordPress dashboard, on my website, there are 13 images without any alt attributes so these must be added now.
Always make a backup of your website before making any changes.
- Head over to your Media Library within your WordPress Dashboard.
- Click an image and choose a description to add to the Alt Text on the right side as seen below.
- It will save automatically.
Tips to reduce Image file size to improve website speed
Performance Labs
Performance Lab is a very handy tool if you want to maximize website performance. This plugin is made by the official WordPress team, and the entire point of it is to beta test new release features before they are incorporated into the core WordPress files.
- Download the Performance Labs plugin from your WordPress Dashboard.
- Head over to Settings > Performance.
- Activate “Modern Image Formats” This converts images to a more modern format such as WebP or AVIF during upload.
- Now go to Settings > Media and find Modern Image Formats down below and choose your Image output format, i have chosen WebP for smoother uploads.
Conclusion
Site speed is an increasingly important ranking factor. If you’re a blogger or small business owner, you might prefer the free version of AIOSEO. However, I think the Pro version is worth the upgrade. It provides addons that you need to optimise your SEO and start ranking at the top of search results.
We hope this AIOSEO guide helped you decide if it’s the right SEO plugin for your needs!
