Divi SEO: Step By Step Guide To Optimize Your Divi Built Sites
Gone are the days when you can easily game the algorithm by stuffing your content with keywords and still rank on search engines. Today, everything from your site structure, site load speed and how mobile friendly your site is have a significant impact on the level of visibility your site will enjoy on search engines like Google.
If you’re using a WordPress site built with Divi, you might be wondering what SEO looks like using the tool, and SEO best practice you can implement to get your business to the first page of Google. In this article, you will learn how to do SEO specifically for Divi sites.
Divi SEO: How Exactly Does It Work?
Divi is one of the most powerful and dynamic WordPress page builders and themes. The tool offers you multi-layered options for customization to improve the appearance and feel of your website. Depending on how familiar you’re with the theme, you can make multiple changes to the theme to personalize your website.
Divi gives you a high degree of control of your digital property and makes it pretty easy to manage your website. If your site is built with Divi, there are certain things you need to do to optimize it for SEO so you can increase your chances of claiming the top spots in the SERPs for your target keywords and drive free, organic traffic to your site.
Now let’s get down to brass tacks…
How Can You Improve SEO On Your Divi Built Site?
1. Use The Right Title Tags
Please note that Divi Builder does not automatically pull in the image title or alt text from the media library. As a result, you will need to enter the title and alt text in the module setting when adding an image with the Image module. When naming your image, ensure that you include important keywords to boost your chances of image ranking on search engines.
To ensure that your image has the proper alt text, hover over to your image modules and click the “Advanced” tab of the module settings to populate your ALT text attribute.
2. Change <H1> Tags In The Blog Comments Template
Your heading 1’s are arguably the most important headings on your page as they let search engines and human readers understand what your page’s content is about. Many SEO experts agree that you shouldn’t have more than one h1 (for the title) on each page or blog. Having multiple h1s on a single page can confuse the search engine and hurt your ranking.
However, the comments section of every blog post on Divi has a <h1> tag by default. Fortunately, you can easily change it under the Comments Template in your WordPress dashboard. Divi’s latest version has made it possible and pretty easy for you to edit every single element of your website, including the page and blog templates using layouts or custom code. That is, you can create a single template and apply it to every single blog post on your website.
To change your <h1> tag in the comment section, log in to your WordPress dashboard and hover to Divi > Theme Builder and then create a new comment template that you will use on all posts. Select “Add Custom Body”, choose “All Posts” and proceed into building your page with Divi. Add the Post Content module (including your comment section) and populate the section with content from your blog post.
You can change the heading level in the design tab. The element is named Comment Count Text and it’s set to <h1> by default. You can easily change it to
Editing Comment.php In A Divi Child Theme
If you’re not editing your website with the theme builder, you can easily change the heading level of comments by editing the comments.php file. However, you need to ensure that you’re editing the child themes as editing the parent themes may cause you to lose all your changes when your theme is updated.
To locate your comments.php file, go to Appearance > Theme Editor and then locate the comments.php file. If you’re accessing the file for the first time, follow the warning prompts that pop up and continue. On the file, navigate to line 13 and simply change <h1> to <h2> or <h3> as the case may be and save your data.
3. Improve The Speed Of Your Divi Site
Google and other search engines ranking algorithms place serious emphasis on site load as one of the ranking signals. However, most WordPress sites are typically slower than traditional HTML sites. Divi comes with a suite of design options that can add up to the size of your site.
Fortunately, Divi has been continually updating its builder and the latest standard Divi websites only take an average of 2-3MB in size, which is considerably fine. Additionally page size can be drastically reduced by optimizing your images (max of 100kb) and reducing the number of plugins.
There are also some plugins you can install to speed up your Divi website. They include Hummingbird (gzip compression + page cache, browser caching + database cleanup + general optimisation) and Fast Velocity Minify (HTML, CSS & JS optimisation).
4. Disable The Pagination Of The Divi Blog Module
Divi Blog module is a feature that allows you to customize how your blog posts are displayed on your website. However, there’s an issue with the pagination element of the Blog module when it comes to using Divi for SEO.
By using the pagination element, you automatically disable the native WordPress pagination which helps create paginated versions of your achieved pages using an orderly URL structure like the:
/blog/page/1/
/blog/page/2/
/blog/page/3/
In contrast, the Divi Blog module pagination doesn’t create a paginated page structure for pages. Instead, it uses AJAX to generate the content within the browser by reloading the blog module when the user clicks on pagination links instead of the entire page.
The problem with this design is that it often leads to creation of unnecessary URLs which if indexed by Google may hurt your rankings. This is why it’s recommended that you make some changes to the Blog module setting.
To do this, go to the blog module setting and click on Content. After that, increase the initial value of the number of posts to be displayed. This allows you to avoid indexing a large number of unnecessary pages. Also, don’t forget to uncheck the option “display pagination” in the sub-table “elements”.
If you’re making this change on an existing page, it’s recommended that the affected URL is redirected to avoid 404 errors. If the pages are many, then you might want to consider doing mass redirections, also known as REGEX (regular expression). You can use the WordPress Redirection Plugin.
5. Add Breadcrumbs To Divi
Breadcrumbs refer to website links that allow users to track where they are on your website and how far they are from the homepage. They’re usually found at the top or just under the navigation bar of your website. They can enhance user experience and help search engines to crawl and index your content efficiently and accurately. Breadcrumbs are very crucial both for users and SEO. It allows
Divi doesn’t have an option that allows you to automatically include breadcrumbs, which means that you will have to do it manually. There are many ways to add breadcrumbs to your site.
You can add breadcrumbs to your site using Yoast SEO plugin. The plugin has the breadcrumb feature built in it, but you have to enable it manually to add the breadcrumb code to where you want it in your theme. You can read this self-explanatory blog post by Elegant Themes, the developers of the Divi Theme or consult an experienced SEO to help you out.
6. Use An SEO Plugin
You need an SEO plugin to make your site’s optimization easier. You can’t totally rely on the advanced SEO options offered by Divi. You can install world’s trusted WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or SEOPress to help you with basic optimizations like canonical urls to avoid duplicate content, noindex or nofollow option for each page, OpenGraph tags, a valid Schema.org structure data implementation and others.
7. Create Content That Satisfies Search Intent
If you implement all of the tactics mentioned earlier and fail to create content that satisfies search intent, you’re unlikely going to rank on search engines. When a user is searching for a keyword, the search engine filters through their indexed pages for the keyword and serves the content that’s most relevant to the search query.
Before you go ahead and publish any content, you should ask yourself: “Does this content really satisfy the user’s search intent?” Your content should be properly researched and well-written to provide a specific solution to a particular problem. Your focus shouldn’t just be about ranking, but instead about creating valuable content that helps readers find solutions to their problems.
Need A Divi SEO Expert To Rank Your Site?
Divi SEO isn’t what can be learned fully in a single post. Of course, you can spend hours learning it and making mistakes while trying to optimize your Divi site or you can save valuable time by simply engaging the service of a Divi SEO expert.
If you need help optimizing and ranking your Divi site, I’m your guy! I specialize in Divi SEO and have helped several clients rank their sites using the Theme Builder and will be more than happy to help you, too.
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