Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about optimizing your website’s position in search results. Many books have been written about SEO and websites are dedicated to it. It’s big business—and it should be.

Showing up higher in search results (like when you go to Google and type in a phrase or keyword) usually means more traffic and more business.

Which is another reason why using WordPress as a content management system is a good idea. WordPress is especially well suited for boosting your site’s rank in search engines

How SEO Works
SEO is part science and part art. The SEO experts figure out what search engines look at when they rank websites. Then they figure out what can be tweaked to improve a site’s rank in the results. Some SEO tactics are of questionable value and others are borderline unethical, but the mainstream of SEO thought is simple, basic improvements that will boost your rank in search engine results.

It’s usually simple things like figuring out keywords for your site and then putting those keywords in the right places. Those right places include the title bar (the text that shows up at the top of your browser), any headers, headlines or bold text on a page, and the meta data (helpful information in a page’s code that is not visible in a browser).

It’s really not rocket science. What search engines do is look at a page and try to figure out what’s the most important thing on that page. For a page to be the number one search result for something like rocket science it better have the words “rocket science” and other important keywords in key locations on the page. Otherwise it’s probably not really about rocket science.

Good SEO is about recognizing the same thing for your site. So if you’re in the rocket science business, you’d probably have keywords like rocket science, rockets, propulsion, physics, NASA, booster, missile, etc. And you’d want to use those words in your headlines and other important places on your site.

How WordPress Works for SEO
Out of the box, WordPress is SEO-friendly. It puts important information in the right places by default, so as long as you fill in the appropriate information, you’ll have a good start in the search engine rankings.

But there are also a number of extra steps you can take to optimize your search engine rank, many of which are either built in to WordPress or easily managed with plugins:

• How to Make Pretty Permalinks - Permalinks are the direct urls to your content and optimizing how those links appear is good SEO.
• Easy SEO: Google Sitemaps Generator - This plugin creates a sitemap, which is a widely adopted standard among search engines, and helps improve your search rank.
• How to Add Meta Tags (4:07) - This video tutorial explains how to add meta tags, which are information embedded in your site’s code that tell search engines what type of content you have.
• Include Your Main Keywords in Your Title Bar (4:37) - This video tutorial explains how to easily add your website’s keywords to your title bar for another SEO boost.
• Maximizing Local Search - Local search is important for many businesses and organizations, so be sure to take steps to optimize your ranking for local searches.

Using a platform like WordPress and a theme that builds on WordPress’s SEO-friendly features will move your site to the top of the search results.