WordPress Search Engine
Optimization
Second Edition: A complete guide to dominating search engines with your WordPress site
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Introduction
WordPress is a powerful and effective open source web publishing platform that
enables anyone, regardless of computer skills, to create and maintain a world-class
website. Millions of people worldwide have adopted WordPress, and its popularity
continues to increase. In February 2011, WordPress.org reported over 32.5 million
downloads of WordPress version 3.0. When you combine all the WordPress users
that haven't yet upgraded, it's obvious that WordPress is firmly established as one of
the most popular web publishing platforms.
Its popularity is well-deserved. WordPress is easy to use, fun, efficient, and, as we
will learn in this book, creates search engine-friendly websites.
This book offers a practical, hands-on approach to installing, building, and
optimizing a WordPress blog or website in a way that search engines will love.
We'll unlock the hidden and not-so-hidden elements that search engines look for
when they return search results for their visitors. We'll also look at a wide range of
new ways to market your website or blog through secondary channels such as video
sites and social media, and we'll learn that WordPress is particularly well-suited for
extension into these other channels.
We'll learn about Google's recommended best practices and how to implement the
best ranking strategies when planning and executing your web marketing plan. We'll
learn to identify and safely avoid a host of forbidden black hat techniques that search
engines frown upon.
We'll learn the full spectrum of search ranking factors and techniques: keyword
research, title tag optimization, link building, site architecture, and more. Finally,
we'll take everything we learn about search optimization and learn how to
implement it on the WordPress platform.
With the tools in this book and the inherent power of WordPress, you have the
opportunity to create a high-ranking website that can compete with any search
engines in the market.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started – SEO Basics, covers the basics of SEO from start to finish,
introducing topics such as on-page ranking factors, how search engines work, and
link building.
Chapter 2, Optimizing WordPress for SEO, helps align your SEO strategy with the
WordPress platform and solidify your plan. You'll need to set realistic goals and
timelines for your business or website through educated investigation and analysis.
Proper and thorough planning will ensure that you'll succeed even in competitive
search markets.
Chapter 3, Researching and Working with Keywords, begins by building a keyword list
based on what you have to offer consumers. We'll examine whether it's wiser to
focus on a few high-value terms or to build a broader keyword list and rank for a
wide variety of phrases. You'll learn how to group the keywords into manageable
groups and how to leverage the grouped keywords for maximum SEO benefit.
Chapter 4, Understanding Technical Optimization, covers how to take what you've
learned about keyword research and implement a ranking strategy. You'll learn
how to build a perfect web page: a web page where all the elements work together to
achieve maximum ranking power. You will also learn how to craft a domain name
that is well-poised to rank for primary keywords. We will examine how to create an
effective WordPress permalink structure.
Chapter 5, Creating Optimized and Engaging Content, shows you how to better engage
visitors with your content. You'll learn how to write effective titles and headlines—
how to grab readers' attention from the start.
Chapter 6, Link Building, covers some general topics in link building such as how and
where to get links. You'll learn about PageRank, Google's trademarked and patented
process to count the inbound votes that we receive as links from other websites.
Chapter 7, Using Social Media, shows you how to harness social media in order to
promote your company or website and supplement your search strategy.
Chapter 8, Avoiding the Black Hat Techniques, takes you on a tour through the seedy
side of SEOs. We'll examine a wide range of black and gray hat techniques—and
why it is imperative that you avoid them.
Chapter 9, Avoiding SEO Mistakes, examines the errors in keyword research that
can lead to ranking trouble in the future. We will look at the complex challenges
surrounding site architecture and some common mistakes that webmasters make.
Chapter 10, Testing Your Site and Monitoring Your Progress, covers a range of tools with
which you can monitor the quality of your website, learn how search spiders interact
with your site, measure your rankings in search engines for various keywords, and
analyze how your visitors behave when they are on your site.
Appendix A, WordPress SEO Plugins, discusses some of the most helpful and powerful
plugins that can help you take your WordPress site to the next level.
Appendix B, Other SEO Resources, provides you with some resources that can help
you stay on top of search engine optimization for your website.
What you need for this book
Some prior knowledge of WordPress is expected but no prior knowledge of search
engine optimization is required to use this book. You'll need to begin with a working
installation of the self-hosted version of WordPress.
Beyond that, you'll need little more than a web browser and your wits. All the tools
in this book—including the installation of powerful WordPress plugins—can be
accessed through your web browser.
Who this book is for
This book is written for anyone using WordPress, ranging from owners of business
sites to website developers and blog owners. Any WordPress user who wants to sell
products or services or send out a message to the world will find that getting better
rankings in the search engines will help them reach their goal faster
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