Search Engine O ptimization & WordPress

1. Search Engine Optimization & WordPress By: Angela Bergmann bergmann311@live.com

2. What is Search Engine Optimization? The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases. http://searchenginewatch.com/page/glossary

3. SEO Covers • Content • The text on the page, which includes titles and links (both internal and external). • Information Architecture • How your content is organized and structured. • Platform/CMS • Basic HTML, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or something else? • Infrastructure • How everything runs, who is updating, what is the process for updating?

4. What are search engines looking for? Relevancy. How is relevancy determined? By weighing these items: • Content – Are there good titles, descriptions and content on the page? • Performance – Does the page load quickly and without errors? • Authority – Is the content so good others are linking to it? • User Experience – Does the site look ok, is it easy to navigate?

5. What do search engines hate? • Keyword Stuffing – Overusing a keyword on pages. • Purchased Links – Google figures it out, just don’t risk it. • Poor User Experience – Are there too many ads? Is your content hard to find?

6. Optimize For Multiple Channels Don’t just optimize for your website. Carry it across all platforms: • Website • Twitter • Facebook • Pinterest • LinkedIn • Email • Offline Consistency in your keyword usage across all platforms is crucial!

7. Domain Name & Usage is Critical • Choose your domain root and make sure they redirect to each other. • Choose between www.example.com and example.com and make sure they are set to redirect to the other. You never wants your domain to load as both URL’s because then you are creating duplicate content. • Old domains rank better overall then newer domains. • Having your keyword in your URL can only help your overall efforts.

8. Don’t Forget the Meta Meta keywords are dead and gone, but titles and descriptions are not only still looked at, but exceptionally important! • Meta Descriptions - a meta tag hidden in the HTML that describes the page's content. Should be relatively short; around 12 to 20 words is suggested. The meta description provides an opportunity to influence how your Web page is described in the search results, but it will not improve your search rankings. Make sure your meta description reflects the page content or you may be accused of spamming. • Title Tags - An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific Web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results. Both title tags and meta descriptions should be unique and sell the specific page. Give the user a reason to choose your page from the sea of search results.

9. WordPress & SEO How does WordPress help your SEO? I’ll tell you! WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) -Matt Cutts Head of Google’s Webspam Team WordCamp San Francisco 2009 http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/