Wordpress get a lot of questions about SEO here on WordPress.com, and no wonder — you work hard on your site and want to get the word out! SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO recommendations are intended to help your site rank higher and more accurately in search engines, like Google. Say you write a blog about sailboats. When someone Googles “sailboats,” how many pages of results do they have to scroll through before they see a link to your blog? The goal behind having good SEO is to increase your website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking.
On the busy internet, it can be tough to make your “sailboat” stand out from all the others.
Ideally, you want your link to be on the first page of results. The best ways to accomplish this are:
consistently publish useful, original posts about sailboats; and
promote your blog in intelligent ways to people who are looking for information about your topic.
The more traffic your blog receives for sailboat-related searches, the higher it will climb in Google’s results. No mystery to that, right? But if you look around the internet, you’ll find dubious advice about how to increase your blog’s SERP ranking. Some of the suggestions you’ll find are just extra busywork, but some can actually end up hurting you with Google.
Common myths about SEO
Myth: I need a plugin for SEO.
Fact: WordPress.com has great SEO right out of the box — you don’t have to do anything extra. In fact, WordPress takes care of 80-90 percent of the mechanics of SEO for you, according to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. All of our themes are optimized for search engines, which means they are designed to make it easy for the Googlebot (and other search engines) to crawl through them and discover all the content.
Myth: I need to regularly submit Sitemaps to Google so it knows I’m blogging regularly.
Fact: Every WordPress.com blog has an XML Sitemap. To view your Sitemap, type yourblogname.wordpress.com/sitemap.xml in your browser’s address bar. What you see there is code, so it’s not meant to be easily readable by us. For the Googlebot, however, it’s a “what’s hot” guide to the latest and greatest on your site. WordPress.com also automatically sends notifications to Google every time you publish or update a post or page. This is similar to how your subscribers get email updates. Every time you post, you’re telling Google, “Hey! Check this out.”
Here’s how this blog’s XML Sitemap looks in Chrome.
Myth: The more tags and categories I use for a post, the better it is for Google.
Fact: Using a bunch of tags and categories that have little to do with your posts won’t increase your site’s visibility. Actually, Google doesn’t rely on tags or categories — it can tell what your post is about from its content (or it should be able to), as Matt Cutts explains here. Plus, any post on WordPress.com with too many categories and tags will be excluded from the Reader Topics pages. It’s best to use only a few, carefully selected categories and tags for each post — those that are most relevant to what the post is about. Likewise, avoid overly broad tags: “catamaran” is a better tag than “boat.”
Myth: Creating several identical sites about sailboats and making frequent use of sailboat-related terminology in my posts will help me get a lot of sailboat-related traffic.
Fact: Google frowns on duplicate content, and if you have multiple identical sites, your search ranking will suffer for it. Also, while it’s a good idea to use accurate keywords in your posts and post titles, going overboard with so-called “keyword stuffing” will hurt your SERP rank. Strive for clear, natural-sounding writing that reads like it was intended for human ears, not search engine crawlers.
SEO DOs and DON’Ts
Do:
Regularly publish original content.
Use a few precise categories and tags.
Write for human ears.
Build your traffic in smart, organic ways.
Choose simple, meaningful post slugs.
Create a descriptive tagline.
Include keywords se
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