Wordpress SEO

Wordpress SEO is a course that will teach you how to optimize your Wordpress website for Google and other search engines.  Wordpress is a fantastic platform for building websites, but can produce a lot of SEO challenges out of the box.  Most notable is the duplicate content issues that can get your site penalized by the search engines.  

Wordpress SEO will teach you how to set up your Wordpress website in an efficient and search engine friendly manner, to minimize duplicate content and to maximize your exposure in the search engines.

You will learn:

• How to make use of the Google Search Console to keep you informed of problems, and how to use it to identify poorly performing pages and fix them.
• How to set up an self-updating sitemap and submit it to Google so they will always know when you add new content, or edit existing content.
• How to identify a good web host, then test it for a while to make sure it is reliable and your pages load quickly.  
• How to use a free tool to monitor the load times of your web pages, and how a cache and Content Delivery Network (free with some hosts) can boost load times to keep your visitors happy.
• How to effectively use internal site linking to keep your visitors on your site, and enable them to find anything they are looking for quickly.
• How to create dynamic sidebars on your site, so that you don't use the same sidebar on all pages of your site.  These valuable marketing areas on your web page should be highly relevant to the article the visitor is reading, which means using a different sidebar in different areas of your site.
• How to set up permalinks for better structured web page URLs, and how to manually edit the filenames that Wordpress assign, for better SEO.
• The importance of stop words, and how avoiding them in certain areas of your web page can improve relevancy and rankings.
• How Wordpress comments should be set up, to keep your visitors happy and prevent hackers from using them against you.
• Why it is important to keep your site up to date, and how to do this in only a few minutes every month.
• How to use categories and tags effectively, to reduce duplication, and to help these power pages rank higher in Google.
• About page archives set up by Wordpress, and which ones you should be setting to noindex.
• About nofollow, noindex and noarchive, and how and when to use them.
• How to optimize every element on the web page, from title to author bio and everything in between.
• How to avoid thinking about SEO in terms of keywords, and start thinking in terms of themes.
• How to set up a powerful (and free) SEO plugin for fine control over your on-site SEO.
• How to override default SEO settings on a page-by-page, post-by-post, category-by-category and tag-by-tag basis.

By the end of this course, you will be confident and proficient at on-site SEO of a Wordpress website.  You will understand the main problems caused by Wordpress out-of-the-box, and how to avoid them.  

Unlike a lot of SEO courses, you won't be no-indexing category and tag pages.   You'll be setting them up as powerful pages that can rank really well in Google.

You'll also understand the importance of certain areas of your web page in terms of SEO power, and how to maximize those areas for better search relevance and rankings.  

Most importantly, by the end of this course, you will know the benefits of using the Google Search Console.  You'll have your website integrated into the search console so that Google will notify you of any problems with your site (like indexing, downtime or malware).  You'll also be comfortable using the tools included in the Search Console to help you better optimize your page listings in Google.  You'll be able to identify keywords that your site is rankings for, the average positions of those pages in Google, and what percentage of people click on your listing.  Armed with that information, you can set about testing and tracking to see if you can increase click through rates, which translates to increased website traffic.

As with all of my courses, I am only a message away.  Any problems or questions will be quickly answered in the course discussion area.