subject: WordPress SEO Plugin - The Key To High Search Engine Rankings [print this page] Installing the correct WordPress SEO plugin and theme will help you optimise your WordPress site for the search engines. Many people under-estimate the importance of on-page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and move on to link building too quickly. This is a mistake because making sure that all your pages/posts are properly optimised for their respective keywords will leverage the backlinks to the site i.e. a link to a page that has been properly optimised is worth several links to a page that has not. To put it another way you will need less backlinks to get top ranking.
This article looks at the basis of on-page SEO, what you need to do, how you can ensure that you have done it correctly and the WordPress SEO plugin or plugins that you will need.
Search Engines must understand what the page or post is about
The key here is "relevancy". When considering whether to display a page the search engines will evaluate how relevant it is to the words typed into the search box. A page may have lots of links to it but if it is not considered relevant it will not be displayed.
The point of on-page SEO therefore is to make sure that the search engines consider a page to be highly relevant to the keywords it is targeted towards.
At the same time it is important to avoid writing a page just for the search engines, it still has to provide good content for human visitors.
WordPress SEO Plugin
It has been said that the search engines favour blogs over static sites. I don't think this is true as such but the search engines do like sites with regular updates which tends to be the case with blogs. WordPress itself is ok for SEO purposes but can be considerably improved through the installation of a WordPress SEO plugin or plugins and theme.
In addition to the numerous free themes available there are also many paid themes that are SEO optimised.
You should install a free WordPress SEO Plugin to help setup your SEO. There are many available but perhaps the best known is "All in One SEO Pack". Amongst other functionality this enables the administrator to control how the site appears on the search engines.
You can also install a paid WordPress SEO Plugin like SEOPressor which checks the on page SEO and gives a percentage score with recommendations for improvement.
Things you must do
SEO can be very complex and is always developing but the basics are quite straightforward and include:
* Select a keyword (phase) for the page/post
* Use the keyword in the URL, title and header tags
* Write a good meta description including the keyword
* Use the keyword in the first and last sentence and elsewhere at a reasonable density
* Include a graphic with the keyword as the ALT text
* Have proper internal linking within the site
* Have external links to authority sites (don't link to dubious sites).
WordPress SEO Plugin - The Key To High Search Engine Rankings
