Welcome to the first part of a new course – An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – where I’ll provide you with lots of advice and tips on how to ensure that your site is well optimized for the search engines.

There will be eight different parts to the course (including this one) – it’s primarily targeted to those of you who don’t know a great deal about SEO, but want to learn more about how to drive large amounts of traffic to your site. However, I hope that there will be some valuable and helpful information for more advanced users as well.

I should start by saying that for the purposes of this guide I take a broad view of SEO, so I’ll be covering lots of technical tips that you can implement instantly, but I’ll also touch on other related areas such as marketing strategies you can use to spread your content and attract new visitors.

In this post I want to provide a brief overview of what you can expect over the coming days.

SEO Core Concepts

The course will focus on a variety of different areas – in particular, I’ll start by discussing some of the core concepts related to SEO including how you go about conducting keyword research (the right way) and how to obtain high-quality backlinks that can help push your own content up in the search engine rankings.

Quick Power Tips

I’ll then move onto specific things you can do to optimize your WordPress site for the major search engines and will highlight some quick tips and tweaks that you instantly apply to your site.

Dealing With Duplicate Content

Following on from this I’ll then address some more advanced topics including the common issue of duplicate content which can have a negative impact on your search engine ranking. I’ll show you several different approaches you can implement to help address this pervasive problem.

SEO Plugins

There are numerous WordPress SEO plugins available that can help take over the burden of some of your SEO tasks. In this part of the guide I’ll highlight some of the best free plugins that you can use to assist you. Use of these plugins is by no means necessary, but they can certainly take care of some of the more tedious and boring tasks that you might not enjoy doing yourself.

Marketing

The next topic of discussion will be marketing your WordPress site – if you don’t tell anyone about your site, or the new content you’ve just created, no-one will ever see it. Putting lots of time and effort into producing great new content only to receive little or no visits to your site can be disheartening and very frustrating at the best of times! Fear not – I’ll show you several different methods you can start using straightaway to start driving traffic to your site.

Monitoring Your Progress

Finally, I’ll discuss how you can monitor the impact of your SEO efforts on the amount of traffic you are receiving. I’ll also touch on how you can use this data to refine your SEO and marketing efforts to ensure that you’re making the best use of your time.

Conclusion

That’s quite a lot to get through  . However, it’s worth the effort – once you’ve completed this guide and started putting into practice what you’ve learned, you’ll be able to optimize your sites for the search engines and have several tricks up your sleeve that you can use to drive lots of new visitors to your site.

The next part is where it all starts – I’ll be discussing keyphrases – in particular, the importance of performing research into the keyphrases you’re going to target, what the criteria are for a “good” keyphrase, and how you can use these keyphrases to optimize your site and improve search engine rankings.