Originally published at: https://www.sitepoint.com/beginners-guide-to-wordpress-seo/
WordPress is used by millions of people right around the world to setup websites for a variety of applications. While it’s popular because it’s easy to get up and running and use, it still requires proper optimization in order to really improve your overall search engine rankings.
This guide will give WordPress beginners a basic overview of WordPress SEO to help your website get found online.
This article will cover:
- Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Permalinks
- Keyword Phrases
- Alt Text
- Internal Linking
- The Yoast SEO Plugin
- Basic Keyword Research
- WordPress Tweaks
So let’s get started!
Your Guide to WordPress Search Engine Optimization
Title Tags
Title tags are used in the head section of a web page to communicate your page title better to both search engines and visitors. WordPress generally features a number of different pages which include just to name a few:
- Home page
- Individual pages
- Archived post views
- Single post views
- Category archives
- Date-based archives
- Author archives
- 404 error pages
- Tag archives
- Search results
- Category archives
- Archived post views
Title tags help to boost SEO efforts which in-turn can help to boost your overall rankings. The title tag will tell your visitors what the post is about before they click into it. The title tag is generally seen in search engine results as shown below:
Meta Descriptions
In WordPress, if you’ve installed the Yoast SEO plugin (which we'll cover later), you’ll see an area for the meta description and keyword to be implemented. For optimal SEO, the meta description should include the relevant keyword that’s going to be used for the overall post. The title of your post should also feature the relevant keyword for optimal impact. It's important to make your content clear for users, not just search engines.