Wordpress: Best practices for optimizing your website for search

Adewale Adekile - @doncaprio

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

#smwWordpressNG

What is SEO? SEO simply means optimizing your site or blog for

search engines so as to rank better on SERP (search engine results page).

SEO is what you have to do to appear on search results

for specific keywords. Now SEO can be divided into two: 1. On-Page SEO 2. Off-Page SEO

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO, also referred to as off-site SEO, is the optimization you do outside your website.

Basically, this means gaining quality backlinks from high authority sites.

It’s all about making your site have credibility and “respect.”

Off-Page SEO Tips

• Link your social profiles to your websites and keep them active.

• Business and local listings

• Classified ads

• Use social bookmarking sites like.

• Use content curation services.

• Build quality backlinks from quality guest posting

• Gaining backlinks from Q & A websites like Yahoo Answers and Quora

What is On-Page SEO?

On-Page SEO (also called On-Site SEO) is the optimization you do right on your website or blog.

It goes beyond just writing quality articles. It’s all about making search engine bots fall in love with your content, design, navigation, and everything on your site.

On-Page SEO Tips

• Avoid internal duplicate content. • Make your site load fast by using caching and CDN. • Use a light theme with HTML 5 markup. • Optimize images by using the correct image name and alt tags. • Write optimized articles with the help of plugins like SEOPressor. • Keyword density (about 2%) and LSI terms are important. • Interlink inner pages. • Post length must be reasonably okay. A minimum of 350 words is

often recommended. • Link to trusted, high authority sites in your articles where necessary. • Format posts and pages with heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.). • Avoid duplicate Meta tags. • Content is king.

On-Page SEO vs Off-Page SEO

Which should you take more seriously?