5.1 The Importance of a WordPress SEO Plugin

Hello, and welcome back to this Tuts+ course on essential WordPress plugins. In this part of the course, we're going move on to look at search engine optimization or SEO, and I'll show you why it's so important for your site. So search engine optimization is all about getting people to find your website via Google and other search engines. And without it, your website will just exist in a vacuum. People aren't going to find your website without being able to find you on a search engine. Now for the purposes of argument, I'm just gonna say Google from now on. I know Google isn't the biggest search everywhere, but where I am based it is and in a lot of places it is as well. And to be honest, SEO that targets Google will always work well elsewhere. Because Google is the toughest to get good rankings with. So if you optimize your site for SEO, you'll be identifying keywords that you want to rank for. So these are words and phrases that people will be searching for when they're looking for the kinds of things that your site is all about. So for example, if you're selling trainers, you want to rank for trainers. Now in reality, trying to rank for a single word is really tough because there are some big players out there that are gonna be trying to rank for the same word. So what you really need to be looking for is longtail keywords. Which are longer phrases that tend to be searched less often. But when people do search for them, you tend to get better conversion rates out of those searches. Because SEO is nothing really without conversion. A conversion is when somebody comes to your site having found you via SEO, for example, and then they actually buy something or they do what you want them to do. And all the best SEO in the world won't do you any good unless you can get people to convert once they're on your website. And we've already looked at how having a fast performing website will help with your conversion. So you might want to take some time to look through this article on Tuts+, that gives you everything you need to know to get started with SEO. And here's an example of a search in Google. So I've searched for Tuts+ WordPress. And the first result I get is the WordPress Code Tutorials by Envato Tuts+, that will include a range of tutorials designed to help you get started with WordPress. And you can see there are a lot more results here. So there are tutorials and courses as well. And that will include this course that you're watching right now. So you need to identify what your keywords are and that includes phrases as well as individual words. And then you need to use an SEO plugin to help you rank for those. So in the next two parts of the course, I'm gonna show you how to set up two different SEO plugins. I'm gonna start with the very popular Yoast plugin. It's called SEO by Yoast. And it's the most widely used SEO plugin. It's recognized to be extremely powerful. But it has been controversial recently, because it has added things to the WordPress dashboard that people have objected to. So in the next part of the course after that, I'll look an alternative plugin that you might want to use, if you don't feel comfortable using Yoast. We'll get started by using the world's most popular WordPress SEO plugin, which is SEO by Yoast. See you next time and thanks for watching.