SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a series of practices that will help you improve the likelihood of someone finding your site when they search on Google (or other search engines).
SEO is a complex, multifaceted subject that can confuse even the most web-savvy bloggers and website owners. It can encompass things like the code that makes up your site, creative elements like images and videos, and even references to your site from other entities.
Getting great rankings, traffic, followers, and sales on your website takes a lot of diligent work in a number of areas, but regardless of skill level, anyone can learn the fundamentals and find success with SEO.
While WordPress sites in general have a great basic structure and code optimized so that your site can be understood by search engines, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your site will be seen as valuable by search engine algorithms. SEO will help to make sure that your site has all the correct elements of what search engines see as valuable (both on-page and off-page), and making it more worthwhile for search engines to rank the site highly.
There are many aspects involved in optimizing your site for search engines, and that can feel overwhelming. However, keep in mind that even doing one SEO task per day will incrementally help your site rank higher, and for more keywords. Good SEO work is a marathon, not a sprint. Search engines take time to find your site, process and understand it, and rank it initially, but once they see you’re constantly improving your web presence, they’ll be back more often to look for more reasons to boost your standing in the search results.
There are three kinds of SEO:
- On-page: anything on your site, including, but not limited to, page content, blog posts, and product copy. Search engines look for keywords on your site that match search queries. Essentially, does your site have the words and phrases that people are Googling?
- Off-page: anything that happens away from your site that sends visitors to your site, such as backlinks. Your site benefits when other websites link back to yours, especially if those external sites have a strong page ranking. Some good off-page SEO strategies include promoting your site on social media and guest blog posts.
- Technical: optimizations that are made to your site that help search engines crawl and index your content more effectively.
Since the content you publish is the biggest driver for search engine traffic, designate a page or a post on your site that you would like to optimize for search engines. It doesn’t matter if the page or post is already live on your site, if it’s currently in draft status, or if it still needs to be written; you’ll use this piece of content to practically apply the concepts learned in this course, within your site’s niche.
Dig in more with our SEO Foundations webinar:
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SEO Foundations
Unlock the potential of your SEO with our webinar! We’ll look at basic concepts and core WordPress features – and explore how plugins can expand…
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