WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 30. Optimizing Your Content

The most common way for people to find a website is through search engines, but although searches return thousands, even millions of pages of results, few people go past even the third or fourth page. It's no surprise then that so much attention is paid to achieving high search engine rankings. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex and constantly changing topic, well beyond the scope of this book, but in this and the following lesson I show you some things you can do in WordPress to better your chances of good rankings.

I think the healthiest way to think about SEO is to keep in mind the goal of search engines: to deliver results in order of greatest relevance to the search terms entered. The faster their users can find the right information, the better, so search engines work very hard to try and make sure the sites they rank highest will be the most useful to their clients. If you work hard to make sure your site is useful to your visitors, the better your chance of being ranked well for the search terms most relevant to your site. In other words, think about your visitors' needs first.

Having said that, you can use some techniques to make sure that your great content conforms to the ways search engines read that content.

Writing Useful Titles

In this section I cover the importance of relevant titles for posts. There is another kind of title used in HTML coding for links and images, but I'm leaving those for their respective sections later ...