SEO or “Search Engine Optimization” is the process of improving the ranking of a website or web page in organic search results. The desired outcome of higher ranking is more page visitors, based on the simple fact that most people won’t look past the first page or two of search results. If your site doesn’t show up there, the chances of organic traffic from those search results drops precipitously.
The good news is that WordPress makes the process easy with the addition of a specialized plugin service called Scribe. I’ve been using Scribe for several months now, and I’m putting together a detailed tutorial on how to use Scribe to improve a post’s search relevance. Before I jump into that, I’m going to start by covering a few basics.
First, you need a either a theme that provides support for Scribe or an plugin that adds the necessary functionality. For a great theme with built-in support, I recommend the StudioPress Genesis framework. Genesis is cleanly coded and provides built-in SEO options in the basic framework and the various child themes.
If you are using a different theme framework or have created your own, you can add the necessary functionality via a WordPress plugin. I recommend the All in One SEO Pack. There are other compatible options out there, but these are the choices I can personally recommend.
Whichever route you choose, you will see a new SEO panel in the page and post edit views, and in that panel there are three basic fields that require your attention:
- Title – This should be a maximum of 60 characters, and a minimum of four words. This title can be different from the page or post title. Why would you do this? The title of the page or post is what WordPress displays on the page to the visitor. Sometimes you may want to use a clever headline there, but in this field, your focus should be on the primary keywords — the words or phrases that you think people would search on to find this page.For example, the title of this post is SEO Basics, but the title in my SEO panel (which is displayed in the title bar and used in search results) is the longer SEO or Search Engine Optimization Basics. This longer version includes two variations on the keywords, so in theory someone could search for the acronym or the full words and find this page.
- Description – This should be a maximum of 160 characters. The text is displayed by some search engines directly beneath the title in search results. Make this descriptive. Use keywords. And tell the visitor what they will see if they click through. Pretty simple.
- Keywords – These are the words or phrases that you think people would use to search for pages like this. Each word or phrase is separated by a comma. For example, on this post I used “seo, search engine, optimization, rank, pr, ranking, search, results, wordpress, scribe” — all keywords that someone might search on and that I would like to see this page do well with.
These fields are optional, but you should complete them on every page and post where you care about search ranking.
There’s no real magic to SEO, in spite of what some SEO specialists will tell you. Create good, valuable content. Write smart titles, descriptions and use keywords intelligently. Repeat. In time, you will see your website and pages begin to climb in the ranking.
Ready for more? I’ll be posting this tutorial in multiple parts over the next week, but if you just can’t wait for more, check out this video overview of Scribe for WordPress.