WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 30Optimizing 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, you see some things you can do in WordPress to better your chances of good rankings.

The healthiest way to think about SEO is to first think about your visitors' needs. Remember, the goal of search engines is 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 ranking well. Having said that, you also have to take into account the ways search engines read and interpret that content.

Writing Search-Friendly Titles

This section covers the importance of relevant titles for Posts and Pages. There are other kinds of titles used in HTML coding for images and links, which are discussed in their respective sections later in this lesson.

Having good titles for Posts is crucial because of the number of ways WordPress uses them, all of which relate to search-engine ranking:

• In many themes, the <title> tag of the post's HTML page is created simply by combining the title of the ...