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 opti-
mization, 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 information on keeping those high rankings through ongoing opti-
mization of your site.
WordPress is equipped to create an environment that’s friendly to search
engines, giving them easy navigation through your archives, categories,
and pages. WordPress provides this environment with a clean code base,
content that’s easily updated through the WordPress interface, and a solid
navigation structure.
To extend search engine optimization even further, you can tweak five elements of your WordPress posts, pages, and templates:
✦ Custom permalinks: Use custom permalinks, rather than the default
WordPress permalinks, to fill your post and page URLs with valuable
keywords. Check out Book III, Chapter 3 for information on WordPress
permalinks.
✦ Posts and page titles: Create descriptive titles for your blog posts and
pages to provide rich keywords in your site.
✦ Text: Fill your blog posts and pages with keywords for search engines
to find and index. Keeping your site updated with descriptive text and
phrases helps the search engines find keywords to associate with your
site.

✦ Category names: Use descriptive names for the categories you create in
WordPress to place great keywords right in the URL for those category
pages, if you use custom permalinks.
✦ Images and ALT tags: Place <ALT> tags in your images to further define
and describe the images on your site. You can accomplish this task
easily by using the description field in the WordPress image upload