SEO with WordPress
SEO is not a dirty word
Some people who are unfamiliar with SEO are generally shocked that people might be able to “cheat” the search results in Google. This really isn’t the case at all, in fact, I liken SEO to writing your resume.
When you write you resume you aren’t necessarily cheating, but you will definitely do your best to highlight the good points and de-emphasis the not so good. This is the same with SEO, by highlighting what your site is about you are helping Google to understand your websites message. SEO with WordPress.
Becoming Human:
Google’s job is to provide its users with the best website matches possible for any given word or phrase that someone searches for. To do this Google uses it’s a complex algorithm along with their googlebot to index the web. Google does its best to provide real human results. Not only this but Google are constantly changing their algorithm to provide more “human-like” results. A most recent example of this is the “Instant Preview” feature that google uses for all search results.
When creating content, it is in your best interest to make content that humans will want to read, not what you think googlebots will want to read.
And why wouldn’t you want to try to game the googlebot?
Google’s algorithm is changing constantly:
Google algorithm changes on average at least once per day. So trying to work out how google works will not do you a lot of good, it is better to try to understand what Google is trying to achieve: Search results that humans will enjoy.
Why WordPress for SEO?
I generally group SEO into 3 categories:
Onsite – URLs, Domain Name, Design, etc
Links – Backlinks, Trackbacks, etc
Content – Blogs, Articles, Press Releases, Comments, etc
WordPress comes with so much great SEO functionality out of the box, you would be crazy not to use it.
If we look at the 3 main components to SEO above, let see how WordPress helps us out with these.
SEO with WordPress
Onsite: Things such as canonical URLs that make URL’s easier for humans to read are easy to set up and you can change the permalink structure under the Settings tab.
Links: WordPress lets you manage pings and trackbacks, along with plugins like Disqus this that take this even further.
Content: This is what WordPress is made for, making it easy for anyone and everyone to create content. You can create content, publish instantly or even schedule posts. WordPress also makes it easy for people to participate with comments, allowing you to create a community that will comeback to your website for more than just the content you create.
WordPress has a lot of other great features that make it easy for people to interact with, such as:
Tags
Categories
RSS feeds
Easy of use
Ranking in under 5 minutes with WordPress?
With a lot of the out of the box functionality combined with Googles caffeine indexing, it is easy to get ranked in under 5 mins. For non competitive phrases I have often found my blog posts in Google within 5 minutes.
Give it a go yourself!
SEO with WordPress
Take aways:
Create content for humans not robots.
WordPress is perfect for creating content that human can navigate/understand.
WordPress is awesome for a lot of things, SEO is definitely one of them.