My intentions in this are to lay out some basic SEO (search engine optimization) best practices, relevant not only at the time of this guide being published, but presumably far beyond. I've been building websites for a while now, starting with diving in heads-first into my first WordPress site back in 2007.
Though I'm not currently, personally using WordPress.org, save for working on some client's or previous employer's sites, it truly is a great place to begin. If you're building and maintaining websites, and you are currently using WordPress, I highly recommend that you check out the Yoast SEO plugin.
Most importantly: set yourself up for success, don't overlook SEO.
This guide isn't about WordPress or plugins therein - go check em out, though.
Onward!
If you're new to building websites, then SEO may be a foreign term. In your research of SEO, I'm sure you've discovered that optimizing your website for search engines, with intentions of ranking higher and ranking for specific keywords is truly an amazingly, vast topic.
That's why I'm here to lay out some SEO basics.
I want to lead with an important note, something that you should avoid doing in your SEO strategy.
Always avoid "keyword stuffing". Search Google for more, in regards to a deeper definition and examples of what keyword stuffing is - although I know that you can define what this is by the name itself.
Instead, focus on writing content that provides value and is readable by your website's users (humans). Search engine's advanced algorithms and indexing bots will decipher and rank your website's page or post based off of the content itself, the content's relevancy to a specific topic, among many other factors.
There are a lot of different ranking factors. Let's take look at these SEO best practices and basics that you should not overlook.
Often the first step in SEO is defining the keywords that you want your whole website, alongside individual pages to rank for. There are a lot of resources for doing keyword research: narrowing down the exact terms or phrases that are actually being searched...
Learn more about SEO and keywords
It's important to have the keywords incorporated into URLs to increase relevancy, stay semantic, and for higher rankings.
The structure of your URLs is truly important.
Semantic URLs are written with hyphens (-).
In structuring and naming of your website's URLs, it's important to be semantically correct by using hyphens to separate words, not underscores, periods, or anything else...
Learn more about semantic URLs and SEO