The TRUTH About WORDPRESS SEO Plugins
Mark
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of influencing the online visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results. In 2018, SEO strategies helped me to increase my traffic by 6x. Yes, 6x! The image below represents my traffic growth, which started to decline upon rebranding my domain to digitalfodder.com (a decline in traffic is typical).
Many studies highlight the importance of being on the first page of search results. Call it convenience or laziness, most searchers limit their click throughs to page one results. According to one study, “On average, 71.33% of searches result in a page one organic click. Page two and three get only 5.59% of the clicks. On the first page alone, the first five results account for 67.60% of all the clicks and the results from 6 to 10 account for only 3.73%.”
There are many WordPress SEO plugins, and I use the All in One SEO Pack. However, SEO plugins are useless without an understanding of SEO. Learning about SEO and implementing the best practices won’t guarantee top rankings. Nevertheless, it will provide you with strategic advantages and allow you to pick your search rankings battles more wisely. For example, I’ve chosen not to write about specific topics because those posts probably wouldn’t rank well (given the competition).
You should learn about SEO if you:
- Create content regularly
- Own or manage a website or blog
- Conduct online marketing activities such as affiliate, content, social media, and video marketing
- Have a desire to expand your digital marketing strategies
- Generate revenue on online marketplaces, for example, Amazon, eBay, Fiverr, and Upwork
Critical Search Engine Ranking Factors
Since this is a book about WordPress, I’m not going to write a novel on SEO. Of the 200 or so ranking factors, I prioritize these five:
- Page title
- Highly quality, optimized posts of at least 1,000 words
- Page description
- Page URL
- Page speed
My site uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for security, which Google takes into consideration. Courses, Tutorials, and Resources SEO educational content is everywhere you look and often free.
Therefore, there’s no need to pay to learn about SEO. A few years ago, I took an SEO course on Coursera. Coursera has a handful of SEO courses and a
specialization. You can also explore:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide by Google
- A Complete Guide to SEO: What You Need to Know by Search Engine Journal
- SEO Learning Center by Moz
- The Beginner’s Guide to E-commerce SEO by Shopify
- A Complete Guide to SEO: What You Need to Know by HubSpot
YouTube has thousands of videos about SEO. Also, Skillshare, Udacity, and Udemy are popular e-learning platforms that have SEO courses.
