For the April VC WordPress meetup, I volunteered to present how to setup a WordPress site for SEO and analytics. From a structural point of view, little needs to be done to a WordPress site for the search engines to index it. However, in order to optimize your search engine performance, it’s critical to understand how to analyze and measure the performance of your site’s content. That’s what I focused on in my 3-step approach to WordPress SEO.
I started out the presentation by sharing my views on SEO, specifically what is SEO is, and more importantly, what it isn’t. In my mind, there are two basic concepts to keep in mind when performing SEO:
- Content is key. Focus creating content to be read and consumed by humans. If you’re content is optimized for human consumption and useful to visitors to your site, then your content will get recognized and show up in search engines.
- Gaming the search engine process is a losing game. Trying to reverse engineer the search engine algorithm to optimize your content for the machine is a losing game. The search engines want to present people with the most useful content, not the most machine optimized. Therefore, they are constantly changing and tweaking their algorithm. When you optimize for the algorithm, you are optimizing for a point in time. When the algorithm changes, and I can guarantee you it will, there’s a better than good chance that your content will no longer be optimized for the search engine.
After my overview on SEO, I showed the three steps I take to setup a WordPress site for measurement and analysis so I can see how users are interacting with the content of a site, and how that site is seen by the search engines. I followed that up with some show-and-tell using examples from my personal site.
The presentation was well received among the small group in attendance. One member of the audience, Melody Kimball, did a great write-up of the presentation over on her site and filled in a lot of the details we discussed at the meetup. I strongly recommend checking it out to see what was covered in addition to the included slide deck. above