WHAT IS SEO?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and it is essentially the process of preparing and promoting your website for the search engines. Whenever someone wants to find something on the internet, they use a search engine. The search engines have an incredible task, they need to find relevant results for searches that people perform.
Optimizing your site means that you are spending time getting it ready to it will hopefully rank in the search engines. This will bring traffic to your website.
To hear me talk a bit more on what SEO is and how we will be applying it to WordPress,please view video #1.

WHY YOU SHOULD OPTIMIZE YOUR WORDPRESS BLOG

Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important if you ever want to gain decent rankings in the search engine. Even though the word “SEO” can sound terribly intimidating, actually applying it to your blog is no where near as hard as it sounds. All you have to do is invest some initial time into learning the basics, and soon your blog will be better than 90% of the others out there, simply because you have SEO.
Here are just a few of the many reasons why SEO for WordPress is so important:
To learn more about the reasons you should be optimizing,please view video #2.

THE BASICS OF ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION

Before we go any further, I would like to review with you the basic principles of on-page optimization. As we move forward in the videos, I will be applying each of these (along with many more advanced concepts) to a blog.
To learn more about the basic overview of on-page optimization, be sure to check out please view video #3.

WORDPRESS PLUGINS YOU WILL NEED

Before we start breaking things down one step at a time, you will need to download and install a few plugins. Please take the time now to download all of these plugins (if you don’t want to use some of them, that’s okay):
All in One SEO
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Google XML Sitemaps
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
No Duplicate
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-no-duplicate/
SEO Friendly Images
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/
Redirection
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
Subscribing to Comments
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/
Google Analytics
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress
Popularity Contest
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popularity-contest/
Related Posts
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/
WP Polls
http://www.lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-polls.html
You can learn more about what these plugins will do in video #4

INSTALLING AND ACTIVATING YOUR PLUGINS

Now that you have the plugins downloaded, you will need to install them to your WordPress blog. This is a pretty easy process, but you will need a ftp program to access your files. If you don’t already have one, I suggest using Filezilla, as it is free and a good program as well:
http://filezilla-project.org
Please follow me in video #5 to watch me upload and activate the plugins we will be working with.

OPTIMIZING YOUR PERMALINK STRUCTURE

This is one of the most important things you should do to properly SEO your blog. Even though WordPress is a great piece of software, it is not initially optimized for SEO. Let’s say for example, that you create a post entitled “Potty Dog Training Tips”. By default it would look something like this:
Myblog.com/?p=3
That isn’t very descriptive at all, is it! By making a simple change to something called the permalink structure, we can make it look like this automatically:
Myblog.com/potty-dog-training-tips
A lot better eh?
Changing the permalink structure is pretty easy, you just need to go to the settings section of your blog, and click on “Permalinks”. Make sure that you enter this as your custom link:
/%category%/%postname%/
Once this information is saved, your blog will generate some code that you need to stick into your .htaccess file. You can do this through ftp or a program like file manager through your cpanel. Please refer to Video #6 to see me change my permalink structure.

THE POWER OF KEYWORD RESEARCH

If you aren’t doing proper keyword research before you plan and write your blog post, you are taking a stab in the dark at your post becoming popular. Just writing on your niche isn’t enough, you need to be spending time researching and discovering the best keywords to target.
The basic premise of keyword research involves finding keywords that have:
1. A reasonable amount of searches per day/month
2. A reasonably low amount of competition on the internet for that specific phrase.
3. Are related to your market, and would generate traffic that would perform well for you.
Whenever someone does a search on Google, Google keeps track of the results. We can access this incredibly valuable data by heading here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
We will use this tool as a way to gauge what types of things people in your market are searching for.
Please refer to video #7 to learn more about the fundamentals of keyword research.