Chapter 1. Getting Started: SEO Basics

Welcome to SEO for WordPress! This title is intended to take you through the steps required to make your blog or website rank in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and many more. If you've selected WordPress as the platform for your site, you have made a good choice; WordPress is both powerful and easy to use, and ideally suited for both large collaborative blogs and small business websites.

Even better, WordPress has innate characteristics that search engines love such as simple navigation, SEO-friendly URL-naming conventions, easy publishing, and many more. With the tools in this book, you can take your WordPress blog or site to the next level. Whether you want to increase the reach and broadcasting power of your blog, or edge out the competition in search results for your small business, you'll find the tools and the guidance to do so within these pages.

So let's get started!

In this first chapter, we will cover the basics of SEO from start to finish. This chapter is not intended as a complete search engine optimization guide; we simply won't have the opportunity to cover any individual topic with the depth that it requires. It's more important, at this stage, just to have a 10,000 foot view.

For some of you, these concepts will be review, and for others, these concepts will represent the foundation upon which your more advanced knowledge of search engine optimization will be built.