First of all, when discussing WordPress SEO, there are terms that need to be defined.
What is WordPress? WordPress is a CMS. What is a CMS? A CMS is a content management system. CMS’s are geared to make creating content that gets posted on the Web easier to create and get on the web than if you had to do everything from scratch. CMS’s aim to help content author’s focus on content. WordPress is known to be about the best CMS for blogs, but WordPress is also great for websites that aren’t blogs. Being a CMS, WordPress allows you to easily manage your content — meaning that adding a web page to your website is a lot easier than if you had to code the page in straight html. It’s also easier than nearly any other method of creating content once you get through the initial learning curve. (For instance, I’m posting this blog post by typing it as an email that my Blog will receive and post for me.)
OK, what is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of making a website more search engine friendly and includes various strategies whose aim is to raise a website’s position in the rankings of search engines like Google and Bing.
What about putting SEO and WordPress together? WordPress is built to work well with search engines. WordPress places content you create into your WordPress website in a way that is beneficial to search engine recognition and ranking. But there is more you can do to help your WordPress site get noticed by the search engines beyond the help you automatically get from WordPress.
One of the easier things you can do that provides a good boost to SEO is to install the free yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. The author of the plugin, Joost de Valk, is respected in the SEO community and this plugin is an essential tool that should always be in your repertoire when your working with WordPress SEO.
Along with that, the author of the Yoast SEO Plugin has created a good write-up about working with SEO in a WordPress site. That article is here: WordPress SEO Tips from Yoast
— Scott Cooper
