WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

30

Optimizing Your Content

The most common way for people to find what they want online is through search engines, but although searches return thousands, even millions of pages of results, few people go past even the second or third 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.

The healthiest way to think about SEO is to keep in mind the goal of search engines: to deliver the most useful, reliable, best-quality web pages that meet the search parameters. If you work hard to make your site useful to visitors, you have a better chance of being ranked well. In other words, think about your visitors' needs first.

Having said that, you also have to take into account the ways search engines read and interpret that content.

WRITING USEFUL TITLES

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

Having good titles for posts is crucial because of the number of ways that WordPress uses them, all of which are related to search-engine ranking. Take a look at the highlighted coding in Figure 30-1.

FIGURE 30-1

Here are some key ...