What Is SEO?
If you’ve ever had your own blog or website, chances are high that you’ve at least heard of SEO. You may have even read some articles giving you advice on how to do it, or have heard that it’s as simple as doing one or two things to achieve great rankings.
SEO is a complex, multifaceted subject that can confuse even the most web-savvy bloggers and website owners. It can encompass things like the code that makes up your site, creative elements, and even references to your site from other entities. Getting great rankings, traffic, followers, and sales on your website takes a lot of diligent work in a number of areas, but even a beginner can learn the ropes and find success with SEO.
To help set our users on the path to great search rankings, we’ve put together a guide detailing every facet of search engine optimization you’ll need to know about as a WordPress.com site owner, both on your site, and elsewhere.
This guide will be divided into sections based on specific subjects within the SEO realm. While each section will be a completely self-contained module, you’ll gain a more complete understanding of SEO by reading the entire guide, start to finish.
Why do I need SEO?
While WordPress sites in general have a great basic structure and code optimized so that your site can be understood by search engines, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your site will be seen as valuable by them. SEO will help to make sure that your site has all the correct elements of what search engines see as valuable (both on and off of your site), and worth ranking highly.
This sounds complex! Can I really do this myself?
Yes! Even though SEO can be a very complex subject, even doing one task per day will incrementally help your site rank higher, and for more keywords. Good SEO work is a marathon, not a sprint. Search engines take time to find your site, process and understand it, and rank it initially, but once they see you’re constantly improving your web presence, they’ll be back more often to look for more reasons to boost your standing in the search results.
