Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps your website appear higher in search results, increasing the chances of people finding your site. It involves various practices that make your content more visible to search engines like Google.
What you’ll learn:
- The definition and purpose of SEO.
- Three main types of SEO and how they work.
- Why SEO matters for your WordPress site.
- How to start applying SEO principles to your content.
While WordPress sites have good basic structure, this alone doesn’t guarantee visibility in search results. SEO helps search engines recognize your site as valuable by:
- Making your content more relevant to user searches.
- Improving how search engines understand your site.
- Building credibility with both users and search algorithms.
Good SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Even small improvements made consistently will help your site rank higher over time. Search engines take time to find your site, process and understand it, and rank it initially. But once they see you’re constantly improving your web presence, they’ll be back more often to look for more reasons to boost your standing in the search results.
There are three main categories of SEO that work together:
- On-page SEO
- Involves all content on your site (pages, posts, product descriptions).
- Focuses on using relevant keywords people are searching for.
- Includes content quality, structure, and media optimization.
- Off-page SEO
- Includes anything happening away from your site that drives visitors.
- Primarily involves backlinks from other websites.
- Includes social media promotion and guest posting on other sites.
- Technical SEO
- Optimizations that help search engines crawl and index your content.
- Includes site speed, mobile-friendliness, and proper HTML structure.
- Makes your site more accessible to both users and search engines.
Since content is the biggest driver for search traffic, identify one page or post on your site that you’d like to optimize throughout this course. This will be your practice content for applying the SEO concepts you learn, which you can then apply to the rest of the pages on your site.
Action steps:
- Select an existing page/post or plan to create a new one.
- Choose content that matches your site’s main topic or purpose.
- Be prepared to apply each SEO concept to this content as we progress.
Tip: Choose content that matters to your audience and represents what your site is about. The more relevant your practice content is to your site’s purpose, the more valuable this exercise will be.
