Presented at WordSesh2. SEO is not hard. If you think it's a game, then you're doing it wrong. With WordPress, and your content, you have a lot of things you can do to stay organic in your search results. The first step is getting back to the basics.

1. WordPress SEO
Getting Back to the Basics
By Nile Flores
http://blondish.net

2. Objective
❏ Explain basics of SEO
❏ Explain Social Search and what it means for your site
❏ Share strategies to optimize your site’s design
❏ Share strategies to optimize your content
❏ Share WordPress tools and resources to help you with
SEO

3. Just a note!
Search engine
optimization is not as
difficult as you believe it to
be.

4. What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. What is on your website
from content, code, and design are basic factors in telling the search engines
the organization of your site.
Wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a
website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic")
search results.

5. The Major
Players in SEO
on Your Site
Content
Social
Search
Design -
Graphics
Design -
Coding

6. Content 101
❏ Your site should contain an About page and
a Contact page
❏ Video, audio/ podcast, image/ infographics
should be accompanied by some text
❏ Blogging is not required, but it certainly is
recommended in order to build authority

7. Blogging 101
❏ Write unique and eye-catching article titles.
❏ Try to put your keyword in your article title.
❏ Your keyword should be mentioned between 2 to 7
times in your article.
❏ Do not overstuff your article meta tags with keywords.
Between 3 to 5 is acceptable.
❏ Short paragraphs are easier on the eyes so stay away
from long paragraphs.

8. More Blogging 101
❏ People do not have time to read long articles. Think
about breaking those long articles into 2, 3, 4 or more
posts.
❏ Recipe and Review sites might want to think about
installing Schema or a plugin that will show up on
Google’s results with the review markup or recipe
markup.
❏ Categories and Tags – Know the difference

9. Categories versus Tags
Categories
❏ General organization for
your site
❏ Only need 1 category per
post
❏ You do not need to have a
lot of categories for your site
Tags
❏ More detailed organization
for your site
❏ Can have more than one tag

10. Google has made its algorithms
to be more human-like, so do not make your
keywords for robots and aliens…
Unless you don’t want to be found.

11. Design 101
❏ While HTML5 throws valid coding for a loop, it is
important to try to keep to coding your site with clean
and well organized markup.
❏ If you are not sure about how to code a site, most new
themes in the WordPress Theme Repository have gone
through extreme review before being approved. ( http:
//wordpress.org/themes/)
❏ Keep your navigation clean and to the point.

12. More Design 101
❏ If you want social network interaction, you might want to try installing a
social share type plugin or adding the social buttons manually to your
theme’s templates.
❏ Your front page does not always have to look like the traditional blog page.
For some site’s this does not work.
❏ Got a business? Your whole site can be on WordPress! Let WordPress do
the work and all you have to do is add your content.
❏ Keep the design clean and easy on the eyes for your readers.
❏ Watch load time

13. Remember that
WordPress already comes
SEO ready out of the box!

14. Social Search - What?!?
Google has been active about making their
search engines more human-like and have
recognized that...
Content Is King,
Visitors are Queen!
You MUST engage your readers in
conversation and to social share your articles in
order to build authority and rank.

15. Content Syndication
Content syndication means that you need to actually do something with your
content. It could be:
❏ Sharing on social networks
❏ Getting readers to social share
❏ Getting readers to comment
Google sees the importance of your articles by how much engagement is being
done and not by older algorithms based on keyword density and backlinks.

16. Social Share Plugins
❏ Digg Digg http://wordpress.org/plugins/digg-digg/
❏ JetPack http://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/

17. Related Posts
Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP)
http://wordpress.org/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/

18. WordPress SEO By Yoast
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

19. What Can WordPress SEO Do?
❏ Add breadcrumb navigation to page
❏ Alter RSS feed with more accurate elements you want
to put in.
❏ Option for Sitemaps
❏ Controls Page and Post Titles as well as meta
❏ Options for permalinks and canonical URLs
❏ Import settings from other SEO plugins

20. Getting Your Site Indexed
Google XML Sitemaps Plugin
http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
This plugin gives your site a Sitemaps.org valid sitemap
that will alert search engines like Google, Bing, and more
that your site exists.

21. Cache/ Site Load time
❏ W3 Total Cache
http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
❏ CDN (Content Delivery Network)
❏ Plugins Organizer
http://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-organizer/
❏ WP Smush.it
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

22. What Can W3 Total Cache Do?
❏ Reduces download times
❏ Optimizes serve performance
❏ Can be used hand-in-hand with content deliver network
(CDN) services
❏ Browser caching
❏ Save on bandwidth
❏ Works great with dedicated servers that have
memcache (often do not need CDN if you have this)

23. CDN
CDNs allow your content to be distributed by a
large system of multiple servers across the
Internet.
CDNs can also provide a level of security.

24. Plugin Organizer
Scripts take up load time. Those contact forms, sliders, and
other plugins that use jQuery bog down your load time. This
plugin allows you to control exactly what pages on your site
will use certain scripts.
For developers, this will cut down on coding time!

25. WP Smush.it
Compresses images without any loss to the
quality.

26. Any Questions?
Nile Flores
http://blondish.net
Twitter: http://twitter.com/blondishnet
Facebook: http://facebook.com/NileFlores
SlideShare: http://slideshare.net/blondishnet