Content Marketing

How to SEO a WordPress Website in Nigeria

March 21, 2017
5 minutes to read

Chukwudi Nwokike

Chukwudi Nwokike has worked with brands from different sectors of the economy such as: University of Nigeria, Afrinvest, Meristem, Bi-Courtney Aviation and dRaX ARTS. His clientele usually end up with a healthy web presence that is capable of generating revenue for their business.He works with WSI,one of the largest digital marketing agencies in the world with over 1,000 offices in 81 countries. WSI Axon is the Lagos Office that helps business improve their digital presence and become profitable on the internet.

Chukwudi Nwokike

SEO in Nigeria is extremely important towards growing your brand online. People are searching for your products and keywords that are used within your industry. It’s important to optimise your website to appear when people search for you with various terms.

It’s important to note that SEO involves ensuring your site is sound technically, creating content hubs, on page optimisation, off page optimisation and backlink creation. This article shows you how to go about that optimisation to grow your brand.

Technical Issues To Strengthen Your SEO

Google Webmaster tools

Google provides a number of tools for your SEO arsenal. The most obvious is Google Analytics, which offers an in-depth analytics suite to help even the most basic user understand and improve traffic to their website. But Google Webmaster Tools gives the advanced search expert another perspective on planning and evaluating his or her search efforts.

Google’s Webmaster Tools are essential for any strong SEO effort. To understand their full potential, it’s helpful to think about what Google Webmaster Tools’ role is for webmasters: it helps you see your website as Google sees it. The toolset gives you insights into what pages have been indexed on your site, what links are pointing to it, your most popular keywords, and much more.

First step is to register your website on google webmasters, this gives you a better chance of your website to become fully indexed and ranking well.

Here are couple of things to check on your webmaster:

Check your dashboard for any issues or errors
Under Crawl section, heck if there are any security issues on your website
Check for any errors in the crawl section
Also check for any broken links
Simple 301 redirect links plugin for wordpress can be used to correct broken links and click mark as fixed

Google Analytics

Thankfully, one of the best tools for measuring SEO is freely available, and probably already installed on your website, google analytics.

If it’s not installed yet, contact your web developer to help you with the installation on your website, or you can use the yoast seo plugin to input your code for google analytics.

Check the incoming links into your website, this way you can keep track of your backlinks. Backlinks are very important towards growing your SEO results.

Other technical issues include checking your your robots.txt.file on your website to ensure no bad errors. go to www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt.

Install SEO Plugin to check your sitemap settings on your website, if you haven’t submitted your sitemap to google, you can do it through google webmasters. Download your sitemap from yoast and submit to webmasters.

Use webpagetest.org to test the speed of your website. Slow load time on website pages contributes to a low SEO presence and bad results.

Our Policy for creating content

Keyword Research. Use tools such as keyword planner to create a content calendar. You can use gogle keyword planner to get search terms people are using within your industry.
Write descriptive headlines. Make sure your article headline would make sense to the average reader when written on a blank sheet of paper. That headline might show up out of context in an RSS reader, a search result or who-knows-what. So the headline alone must tell the reader what to expect. And, of course, the headline will likely become your article’s title tag, which is key to SEO.
Write descriptive links. In a sentence like ‘Lurie went to prison for 10 years,’ don’t add a ‘click here’ at the end for more information. Make ‘Lurie went to prison,’ or something similar, the link itself. You can also have click here, if you want. Just make sure there’s a descriptive link in place.
Mention the primary person/topic/event in the article headline. Seems obvious, doesn’t it. Apparently it isn’t. If your article is about BP Oil, make sure BP Oil is in the headline.
Mention the primary subject in the first paragraph. Again, duh. Yet I see lots of articles that don’t have the name of the person, the description of the key event or whatever else in the first freaking paragraph. Why oh why?
Resize images in an image editor. I know you’re in a hurry to get that story uploaded. But take the time to resize images properly, using an image editor. Don’t resize them using the content management system or HTML. Image crawlers want to ‘see’ an image file that matches the size and shape of the displayed image.
Write ALT tags for images. Write an alternate tag for your image that fully describes the image. I guarantee your content management system has a field for the ‘alt’ tag, or uses another field for it. The right ALT tag can help you get that image indexed, and help rank the text around it.
If you write a related story, link to it. If you write a story about squirrel infestations in the New York subway system, and wrote a related story a year ago, link back to it. By connecting the stories, you create a cluster of relevant content.
Use full names. The first or second time you mention a person or company, use the full name. Not ‘Mr. Victor’ but “Folarin Victor”. Not ‘NDP’, but ‘Niger Delta Petroleum’. That will give search engines and searchers who look for the full name a better shot at finding you.