A Beginner’s Guide to SEO for WordPress (Part 1)

Don’t you feel like there’s an awful lot to do when it comes to keeping up with your competitors?

With Search Engine Optimisation, there’s so much you can dissect, research, test, measure and change, so it can be hard to know if you’re doing the right things and at the right times.

I’ve often sat back in my chair after hours of link-building and thought to myself, there must be an easier way!

Now, it’s no secret that all of us here at ‘Web Design from Scratch’ are big fans of WordPress and I would suggest to anyone who hasn’t yet given it a try (there can’t be many of you) to take the plunge and get started with the famous 5-minute install. It really couldn’t be easier.

I’ve been using WordPress for a year or so now and it’s been interesting how much I change my approach to SEO when setting up and maintaining a WordPress build.

In my opinion, SEO should take on a slightly different form when applying it to a WordPress blog/website and I feel it’s much more beneficial to use more of a natural style when building up a blog and the results have been conclusive.

I would like to share with you guys the rules for turning a WordPress blog into a successful traffic magnet, the easy way!

The purpose of this guide is to enable you to grow your website in a way that will ensure you get the results you need. To achieve your website’s potential and compete in today’s fiercely competitive online markets, a good understanding of how to best optimise your website is essential.

In the guide we will cover these key factors …

• Part I – Your keywords and how to use them
• Part II – How to write great content for your website
• Part III – How to setup and use the Yoast SEO Plugin (recommended)
• Part IV – How to set up your ‘on-site’ SEO
• Part V – How to acquire links to your website
• Part VI – How to check your progress

Part 1 – Your Keywords & How to Use Them

Your keywords are the logical place to start. We’re assuming you already have a WordPress blog and you are writing about something you are passionate about, or at least interested in (otherwise, why are you doing it?!?).

Now, here’s where you’ll start to notice the difference between more standard SEO techniques and my more natural approach to SEO for WordPress.

What we’re going to do is use just the one keyword. We’re not targeting 5 or 10, we just need the one and it needs to be the very best keyword to describe the subject of your article/post in as few words as possible. So, for instance, my keyword for this post would be ‘SEO for WordPress’. It’s short, to-the-point and describes my post without having to go into too much further detail before you get the idea.

It’s very important that your keyword is totally relevant to your content so please spend some time getting this part right if you need to.

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about keyword research yet. Well, that’s because we’re not going to use it … at all. *Cue the gasps of SEO experts everywhere*. Well, it’s not all that radical really and if you think about it, it’s not logical to let keyword research dictate the terminology you use in your article or post (don’t forget that we’re writing this article because we want to share it with the world, in its proper context).

I’m not suggesting that keyword research is out-dated and useless and we shouldn’t be using it. All I’m saying is that I find it can dilute the subject matter of your article and you can often find yourself writing about stuff you you don’t know too much about and you had no intention of writing about in the first place.

To build a site full of naturally written, original and compelling content will be the difference between success and failure and when writing content for your blog, keywords should be chosen and used just as organically.

You may even find yourself writing a complete post before it even occurred to you that you will need to select a target keyword. If that’s the case … BRILLIANT! You’ll probably find the right phrase has been repeated on numerous occasions throughout your copy and you can simply pluck out the right one. Personally I would love to be able to do that but for some reason, I prefer to have my phrase before I start writing.

So, by now you should have a clear idea of your target key phrase. The next natural step (for me) is to begin writing.

Writing neat, compelling and original content for your website is probably the most important skill for any web publisher. Let’s not forget that blogs allow us to interact with our visitors and our community, so we’re not just writing for the search engines any more. It’s not about how many keywords we can cram into a sentence. We need copy that will engage our visitors keep them coming back for more.

Part 2 – How to Write Great Content for your Website

Part two of our 6-part guide will be published next week, so please bookmark this page and come back soon to learn how you can write great content for your website.