Book Image

WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization

Book Image

WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization

Overview of this book

WordPress is a powerful platform for creating feature-rich and attractive websites and blogs; but with a little extra tweaking and effort your WordPress site can dominate the search engines and bring thousands of new customers to your blog or business. WordPress3.0 Search Engine Optimization will show you the secrets that professional SEO companies use to take websites to the top of search results and proliferate their business. You'll be able to take your WordPress blog/site to the next level, as well as brush aside even the stiffest competition with this book in hand. We'll begin with a typical WordPress installation and with a variety of simple techniques, turn it into a powerful website that search engines will reward with high rankings. We'll go further: with advanced plug-ins we'll connect your WordPress site to popular social media sites and expand the reach of your site to bring more visitors. You'll learn about dozens of free online tools to accomplish everything from keyword research to monitoring your ranking progress. WordPress is a great start for building search-friendly sites. However, with the tools in this book, you'll get your website/blog noticed by numerous new users/customers or your target audience.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Improving your rank on all search engines


While Google is the undisputed leading search engine worldwide, there are, of course, alternative search engines; the fortunes of the various search engines ebb and flow with Google maintaining a commanding lead. Comscore.com is a well-regarded analyst of search engine metric and reports Google's share of US search queries at about 64%, Yahoo! at about 17%, and Bing/Microsoft at about 12%. The remaining field is made up of a handful of third-tier search engines such as Ask.com, Dogpile.com, and hundreds of smaller search engines.

So how does one rank for all search engines? The answer is easy; optimize for Google. Google's search algorithm is the most advanced, and is certainly the best at detecting disfavored optimization techniques such as keywords stuffing, paid link arrangements, and so on. Furthermore, Google's technology is so dominant that the other search engines imitate most of Google's innovations.

And so, if you rank well for Google, you'll certainly be well-positioned to rank well in the other search engines. Keep in mind, however, that Google is also the most responsive search engine: Google crawls (visits) your site more often and indexes websites faster than the other search engines. So, as you work on optimization, you might see positive changes in Google rankings in a few weeks, whereas the other search engines might take months to respond.