WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Optimizing Your WordPress Blog

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of preparing your site to make it as easy as possible for the major search engines to crawl and cache your data in their systems so that your site appears as high as possible in the search returns. Book V contains more information on search engine optimization, as well as marketing your blog and tracking its presence in search engines and social media by using analytics. This section gives you a brief introduction to SEO practices with WordPress, and from here, you can move on to Book V to take a real hard look at some of the things you can do to improve and increase traffic to your Web site.

If you visit Google's search engine page at www.google.com and do a search for the keywords WordPress blog design, Lisa's site at E.Webscapes is in the top-ten search results for those keywords (at least, it is while we're writing this chapter). Those results can change from day to day, so by the time you read this book, someone else may very well have taken over that coveted position. The reality of chasing those high-ranking search engine positions is that they're here today, gone tomorrow. The goal of search engine optimization is to make sure that your site ranks as high as possible for the keywords that you think people will use to find your site. After you attain those high-ranking positions, the next goal is to keep them. Check out Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, by Peter Kent (Wiley), for some valuable ...