SEO is terribly important, but it is also a vast subject that not a lot of people explore to its full potential. However, it can be somewhat simplified by looking at it from a simple angle. It doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated if you just want to scratch the surface, but if you want to go deep into SEO, you need to spend a lot of time and effort delving into the subject. So, when it comes improving the SEO ranking for your WordPress website, how do you actually approach it? Is WordPress SEO different from SEO for other websites? Here are some tips and thoughts to help you handle WordPress SEO better and in a simplified way.
The first thing you need to pay attention to is optimizing the title. It is very important in the eyes of search engines, so optimizing it properly is crucial. A great help in doing this is using WordPress plugins like All in One SEO or SEO Yoast. They can greatly help you optimize your title.
The next thing you should think about optimizing is the post description, which is almost equally important as the optimization of the post title. The post description is the thing that a search engine sees when they come up to your post. It is essential that the post description contains the key words that the user has been searching for, because if it doesn’t, the user won’t find the post.
Thirdly, there is the matter of optimizing permalinks. The thing about optimizing permalinks is that they, by default, are SEO friendly, but they aren’t user friendly at all. A default URL is something that doesn’t tell users what the post is about, and it doesn’t look pretty. A user optimized URL has a clear language, and it looks more professional. Change your permalinks to be user friendly, keep them SEO friendly by keeping the key words in them, and try to make them as short as possible, while telling the users what the post is about.
Lastly, you need to be focusing on key words. The post you are writing needs to contain the key words that are relevant, and that the users will search for when trying to find a text on that specific, relevant subject. Choosing a key word for a post is not a terribly difficult venture. You need to make sure that it is relevant; that it is contained in the text in a reasonable amount, and that the users will search for it looking for that specific subject. You need to make sure that there isn’t too much of the key word in the text either, because search engines don’t like that at all, and you may be penalized if you overdo it with key words. WordPress in most cases gives you an overview of the optimization of the text, where you will see whether you have used enough key words, and whether you have used too much of them.
For a beginner, that is pretty much what you need to know. For somebody who wants more control and more advanced options, the subject is much deeper, and requires further study. But, for now, this should do you just fine.