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 of 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 engine 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 in search in any market.
Chapter 1, Getting Started: SEO Basics, will cover 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, Customizing WordPress Settings for SEO, will align your SEO strategy with the WordPress platform and help you 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, will begin 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 out a broad keyword list and rank for a wide variety of phrases. We'll learn how to group keywords into manageable groups and how to leverage grouped keywords for maximum SEO benefit.
Chapter 4, Understanding Technical Optimization, will cover how to take what we've learned about keyword research and implement a ranking strategy. We'll build a "perfect web page"—a web page where all the elements work together to achieve maximum ranking power. We will 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, will begin by learning how to better engage visitors with your content. We'll learn how to write effective titles and headlines—how to grab readers' attention from the start.
Chapter 6, Link Building, will begin by covering some general topics in link building such as how and where to get links. We'll learn about PageRank, Google's trademarked and patented process for counting the inbound "votes" we receive as links from other websites.
Chapter 7, Using Social Media, will help us learn how to harness social media to promote your company or website and supplement your search strategy.
Chapter 8, Avoiding the Black Hat Techniques, will take a tour through the seedy side of SEO. 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, will examine errors in keyword research that can lead to ranking troubles well into the future. We will look at the complex challenges surrounding site architecture and look into some common mistakes that webmasters make
Chapter 10, Testing Your Site and Monitoring Your Progress, will cover a range of tools with which you will 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, will cover 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, will discover some resources that can help you stay on top of the search engine optimization for your website.
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.
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.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: " Furthermore, the use of the nofollow attribute is generally not possible with WordPress' dynamically-generated navigation menus "
A block of code is as follows:
<h1 class="pagetitle"><?php the_title(); ?></h1> <div class="entry page clear"> <?php the_content(); ?> </div><!--end entry-->
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "When you create a new Page or Post, you simply need to click the Edit link next to Publish immediately in the Publish box when creating new content."
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