An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO – Introduction
Welcome to the first part of a new course – An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – where I’ll provide you with lots of advice and tips on how to ensure that your site is well optimized for the search engines.
There will be eight different parts to the course (including this one) – it’s primarily targeted to those of you who don’t know a great deal about SEO, but want to learn more about how to drive large amounts of traffic to your site. However, I hope that there will be some valuable and helpful information for more advanced users as well.
I should start by saying that for the purposes of this guide I take a broad view of SEO, so I’ll be covering lots of technical tips that you can implement instantly, but I’ll also touch on other related areas such as marketing strategies you can use to spread your content and attract new visitors.
In this post I want to provide a brief overview of what you can expect over the coming days.
SEO Core Concepts
The course will focus on a variety of different areas – in particular, I’ll start by discussing some of the core concepts related to SEO including how you go about conducting keyword research (the right way) and how to obtain high-quality backlinks that can help push your own content up in the search engine rankings.
Quick Power Tips
I’ll then move onto specific things you can do to optimize your WordPress site for the major search engines and will highlight some quick tips and tweaks that you instantly apply to your site.
Dealing With Duplicate Content
Following on from this I’ll then address some more advanced topics including the common issue of duplicate content which can have a negative impact on your search engine ranking. I’ll show you several different approaches you can implement to help address this pervasive problem.
SEO Plugins
There are numerous WordPress SEO plugins available that can help take over the burden of some of your SEO tasks. In this part of the guide I’ll highlight some of the best free plugins that you can use to assist you. Use of these plugins is by no means necessary, but they can certainly take care of some of the more tedious and boring tasks that you might not enjoy doing yourself.
Marketing
The next topic of discussion will be marketing your WordPress site – if you don’t tell anyone about your site, or the new content you’ve just created, no-one will ever see it. Putting lots of time and effort into producing great new content only to receive little or no visits to your site can be disheartening and very frustrating at the best of times! Fear not – I’ll show you several different methods you can start using straightaway to start driving traffic to your site.
Monitoring Your Progress
Finally, I’ll discuss how you can monitor the impact of your SEO efforts on the amount of traffic you are receiving. I’ll also touch on how you can use this data to refine your SEO and marketing efforts to ensure that you’re making the best use of your time.
Conclusion
That’s quite a lot to get through 
. However, it’s worth the effort – once you’ve completed this guide and started putting into practice what you’ve learned, you’ll be able to optimize your sites for the search engines and have several tricks up your sleeve that you can use to drive lots of new visitors to your site.
The next part is where it all starts – I’ll be discussing keyphrases – in particular, the importance of performing research into the keyphrases you’re going to target, what the criteria are for a “good” keyphrase, and how you can use these keyphrases to optimize your site and improve search engine rankings.
Until then …
Table of Contents
1. Introduction and Guide Overview
2. Researching Great Keywords To Help Drive Traffic
3. 10 Ways You Can Generate Quality Backlinks To Boost Your WordPress SEO
4. Ten Quick Power Tips To Drive More Visitors To Your WordPress Site
5. WordPress SEO Issues – Managing Duplicate Content Effectively
6. Top 8 Free WordPress SEO Plugins
7. 8 Tips For Promoting Your WordPress Site
8. Great Tools For Analyzing The Impact Of Your WordPress SEO
November 24th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Thanks. Looking forward to the next piece!
November 25th, 2009 at 4:20 am
Great post and the table of contents looks like it should be a great tutorial, when are you putting out number 2?
November 25th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Thanks for the comments – the next part should hopefully be out later today.
November 25th, 2009 at 6:24 am
Thanks for the very helpful information. I enjoyed reading your tutorial and I have learned a lot. Staying tuned for more.
November 25th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Hi Chris. Thanks for these tutorials. I’ve read them all. Looking forward for more.
Cheers!
November 25th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
@Kentucky – cheers for your comments – glad you’re enjoying the tutorials.
November 26th, 2009 at 5:23 am
These post is very informative. Keep it up! I have subscribed to your feed.
December 1st, 2009 at 7:39 am
Hey Chris,
Last time I checked your site it was only the introduction part I’ve read. Good thing that you added more. I’ll be reading it. Thanks.
December 1st, 2009 at 8:10 am
@Clippers Tickets – thanks for your comment – hope you find some of it useful.
December 2nd, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Nice tutorials! I really need these. I’m keeping them in mind…. =)
February 24th, 2010 at 5:24 am
Great help