Lesson 1, Topic 1
In Progress

Keywords

Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines when they’re looking for something. For example, if someone wants to find the best laptops for gaming, they might search for "best gaming laptops." If you have a website that sells laptops, you want to make sure that those keywords are used on your site, so it shows up when people search for them. As you write the text for your post, you can work in SEO keywords that search engines will see to prove your site has information about those keywords.

Search engines make use of two types of keywords: meta keywords and focus keywords. Meta keywords were once a major SEO tool where site owners would include a list of relevant words or phrases in the page's metadata, which search engines used to determine what the page was about. However, most modern search engines, like Google, no longer use meta keywords as a ranking factor. Meta keywords had often been overused or abused, known as keyword stuffing, to artificially boost a site’s search engine rank. On the other hand, the primary terms you want your content to rank for in search results are focus keywords (sometimes called content keywords). SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help users optimize their content for focus keywords by suggesting where to use them naturally, such as in titles, headings, and body text. Unlike meta keywords, focus keywords are an important tool for structuring content in a way that makes it easy for modern search engines to understand and rank.

A great resource for finding keywords is Moz. Https://moz.com/explorer has a keyword tool that helps you optimize your content by suggesting more keywords based on the one you want to use. Adding these phrases and terms to pages and posts can help improve your site’s SEO.

  • Internal Linking: Internal linking is when you link one page on your website to another page on the same website. This helps visitors navigate through your site more easily and find related content. For example, if you have a blog post about healthy eating, you might link to another post you wrote about meal prep tips. Internal linking is also helped by creating well-organized categories and tags.

    Like heading tags, internal links help search engines understand the structure of your site. They show which pages are related and give search engines a better idea of how your content connects. This can boost the SEO of multiple pages on your site, not just one. Search the WordPress Plugin Repository for “internal links” to find plugins that can suggest internal links for your site to improve the SEO.

In addition to the SEO tools we’ve discussed, WordPress has a built-in feature that automatically creates an XML sitemap for your site. A sitemap is like a map for your website. It shows all the pages on your site and helps search engines like Google find and understand them. Without a sitemap, search engines might miss important pages on your site, meaning they won’t show up in search results. The default WordPress sitemap can be found by appending “/wp-sitemap.xml” to your website’s domain. For example, if your website is “www.example.com”, you can access the sitemap at “www.example.com/wp-sitemap.xml”.

While this built-in sitemap is useful for basic SEO, it lacks the flexibility and customization that many website owners need. For example, you might want to exclude certain pages from the sitemap if they are private, like login pages, or add extra details for search engines, such as telling them which pages are most important or how often your content gets updated. This is where SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO come in. These plugins give you more control over your sitemap, allowing you to fine-tune which pages are included and how they’re presented to search engines. Often, these plugins will create a sitemap as part of the installation and initial setup.

There are two types of sitemaps: XML and HTML.

  • XML Sitemaps are made for search engines. They list all the pages on your site in a format that search engines can read easily. Search engines then use this sitemap to figure out what your site is about and which pages are the most important.
  • HTML Sitemaps are made for people. It’s like a table of contents that lists the pages on your website, allowing visitors to see the structure of your site and quickly navigate to different sections. Typically, small sites do not need HTML sitemaps. Below is one of Amazon’s HTML sitemaps.

While both types are useful, XML sitemaps are more important for SEO because they help search engines crawl and index your site effectively.