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 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: simple navigation, SEO-friendly URL naming conventions, easy publishing, and 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 within these pages.

In this book, we will take an in-depth look into how to apply sound and tested search engine optimization techniques to the success of your WordPress website or blog.

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 explore a general overview.

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