Introduction to WordPress SEO

Search engines like Google but also Bing, Amazon, Youtube and your computer work on the same principles. If you are a WordPress site editor in almost any country of the World, your main interest in search engines – and for reading this article – is ranking on Google. Understanding how search engines work, you can optimize your site for better ranking and more traffic!

If you are using WordPress for your blog or are thinking of starting a site using WordPress, you will want to know whether it is a good choice for SEO. More specifically: will WordPress help you get more traffic from search engines like Google? This article attempts to answer this question, but also points out that there is more to SEO than a choice of CMS!

Finding the right keywords is fundamental to SEO and should be a first step when starting a blog. Good keywords will be the pillar on which to build your SEO strategy. They will help you structure the navigation of your site, highlight the pages and posts you will have to write, calculate search engine advertising budgets and find sites that will link to you.

After finding keywords you need to use them in your WordPress site. Posts, categories and tags; parent-pages, pages, and menus should be optimized on your keywords. For different types of pages you also need to add HTML tags that are important for SEO. TITLE and META Description tags, for example, are very important and you need a SEO plugin to handle them correctly.

When you search Google you are not searching the web but an index of the web created by Google, stored in data centers across the world. If you want to feature in Google’s results, you must first be sure that your site and pages are included in Google’s index. The first question you should ask yourself when a new page is not ranking in Google is whether it is actually in the index or not.

Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) are not new concepts for Google but SEOs have been viewing them recently as important ranking factors, possibly the major factors behind recent Core Updates and something that will gain more importance in the future. They are particularly important for sites dealing with subjects such as health, safety, current events, finance, education, real estate, politics and religion. But all WordPress site owners should know how to demonstrate Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness to Google.

Google revolutionized web search in 1998 when it launched a search engine that used links to rank pages. Over twenty years later, a page’s “backlinks” (links that it receives from other pages) are still a major ranking factor. Links on popular websites can help you rank higher in Google, but they can also generate valuable visibility and traffic by themselves. Understanding the importance of links will help you learn how to earn links for your site.