A Simple Guide to WordPress SEO

We live in very interesting times, a time when from the comfort of your home, you can build a massive company or business using simple tools and techniques. Your ability to make proper use of these tools and techniques that have been made available by our current level of development can be the difference between failure and success in whatever you set out to do.

In this article we will be looking at two important things that can contribute to the success of any business in this internet driven age. We are referring to WordPress and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

A Look at WordPress

Since this is not meant to be a technical article, we shall define this tool in the simplest of terms. This tool can be described as the easiest way to own or setup a website. Primarily though, WordPress is a web content management platform best suited for blogs and other websites that post content on a very regular basis.

However, this tool has grown to become a powerful website creator that can now be used to create practically any kind of website. Despites this evolution, it has retained its core function as a web content management platform. If you will love to know about the technicalities behind it, you can read this article here.

This platform has grown so powerful that it now powers over a third of all the websites in the world today. To put things in proper perspective, we currently have over 1.74 billion websites in the world. This means that WordPress currently powers over 870 million websites in the world today. That’s pretty huge.

Everyone who runs or owns a website does so for one reason or the other and whatever these reasons are, they all need one thing – traffic. This takes us to the next item which is a strategy rather than a tool.

A Look at SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a strategy that involves various activities aimed at positioning a website to rank high on search engine results. Most people already know what we are talking about. However, for the sake of those who may not have a full grasp of this concept, we will try to briefly break it down for them.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing and others do not have any content of their own. You may refer to them as directories. As powerful as Google appears to be, it is simply a search directory. All those answers you get from the search results are from other sites not owned by these search engines.

What these search engines have done is to design algorithms that help them match your searches with the most relevant content on the entire internet. So, if you search for something as weird as “how to milk a dog”, it will search through all the webpages it has indexed to find anyone with content that contains these keywords. It will either find an exact match, or at best, something with some of the words in the keyword phrase.

In many situations and when common searches are conducted, the search engines find millions of webpages that have content on said keyword. In such situations, how do they decide which webpage should be placed first and which should be number 1 million and so on?

This is exactly where SEO comes in.

How SEO Works

There are important parameters that these search bots look out for and upon which their rankings are based. Some of these parameters include (but are not restricted to) how many websites have links pointing back to the website in questions and how long visitors stay on the site (which is used to measure the level of satisfaction the visitors get on the site. The longer they stay on each visit, the more positive the signal sent to the search bots). Of course, there are much more than these but we just want to use these two for our explanation.

Using SEO techniques such as link building and social shares, you can get many sites to link back your website. For the second parameter, you can use a good layout, interesting content (videos etc.), attractive offers and more to keep visitors for longer periods on your site.

By doing the above and associating your web content with specific keywords, search bots will easily come to the conclusion that this site offers great content which is why many sites link back to it and visitors to it stay for long periods. Based on this conclusion, its recommendation will be that your website should be ranked high for those keywords you have associated with your website.

Combining the Two

When you create content or any kind of website using WordPress, your goal is to have traffic coming to it. Whatever your purpose, you need to effectively implement SEO techniques to not only get these content noticed by search engines, but also have them ranked high.

Your goal is to have your website listed among the first three in any related search result. To help you get started, we will share a few SEO strategies you can implement on your WordPress site.

Simple SEO Tips for WordPress

While the following tips may not be the ultimate guide to WordPress SEO, they will provide you with the basic information you need to get started in the right direction.

Visibility Setting

Ensure that your site’s visibility setting is not set to discourage search engines from indexing your site. You can find this under settings in your dashboard.

Include Your Keyword in the URL

Every time you make a post, the title (which should automatically form the url), should include the keyword you are targeting.

Use Alt Image Text

Every time you want to post an image, ensure that you include an alternate image text. This should ideally include your keyword.

Create a Site Map

A site map is a document that tells search engine bots where and where pages are on your website. This is very important.

Install an SEO Plugin

One of the things that has made WordPress so successful is the ability to install third-party plugins to improve one or more aspects of its functions. In this case, there are SEO plugins that you can install to help you ensure your posts and even website is well optimized. A good example is Yoast.

Conclusion

Having a wonderful website without implementing effective SEO strategies can be likened to winking in the dark. You know what you are doing, but no other person does. With effective SEO, all the wonderful work you are doing on your WordPress site will be more accessible to the world.