WordPress SEO Basics

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is bound to be one of the things you hear soon after making your WordPress business site or blog.  For a beginner with WordPress, often you don’t know where to start or how.

Google is the 500 pound gorilla in terms of search

Most of the web uses Google in some way to provide search results, so if you’re looking to be found, Google is still king.  Since Google is the king the place to start for understanding SEO is the search engine’s own document for SEO.  This is where we start in order to learn WordPress SEO basics.

Download Google’s SEO guide here

This Guide details the importance of the following things with any serious SEO effort.  Of course, as a good website owner, you’ll read the whole document “wink, wink” but we’ll break down the basics of the document for you here.

Page Titles

This is probably the most important thing you can do for SEO.  The title of the page is what the page is supposed to be about.  You want to strategically pick keywords that encapsulate what your site is about, but also makes sense to humans.  One of the worst things you can do is “keyword stuff” .  For instance to make this page title. “WordPress SEO Basics- Basics of WordPress SEO in a Basic WordPress Fashion”  is a bad idea.  It doesn’t make much sense and adds too much length and complexity to the title.

The Meta “Description” Tag

This may not bring an instant SEO boost, but what it does do is increase click through rates.  The meta description is what google uses to display underneath the page title.  This description should have keywords in it, but it also should not be keyword stuffed.  The description should be about 2 sentences that make sense and describe what you’re talking about.

URL Structure

WordPress allows you to define the url structure of your pages extremely easily.  All you need to do is edit the permalink as you are writing your page or post.  Most of the time, you want the URL to reflect the title –  for instance:  http://wptutoring.wpengine.com/wordpress-seo-basics-start-here-first/

Site Navigation and Structure

There is no reason that your content should be buried under layers of directories unless it is either not important, or not meant to be found.  There can be some benefit in using directories to categorize content, but overall you don’t want to make multiple directories and have google crawl through them.  A bad example would be:

www.wp-tutoring.com/wordpress-basics/business/how-to/wordpress-seo-basics-start-here-first

We’ll go a little more in-depth with this document in a future post.

SEO questions?  WordPress Tutoring and Training

Copyright ByRivers Tech LLC/ WP-Tutoring.Com All Rights Reserved.