Improve SEO by Understanding WordPress Terminology

Posted on Jul 08 2014 by in Blog 

Creating a WordPress site has never been so easy with our theme packages. The software itself is easy to use and there are thousands of websites dedicated to plugins, and various types of WordPress support. The hard part of operating any website is ensuring good SEO (search engine optimization) practices are being used. For those new to the world of blogging using a WordPress site, there are some basic steps that you can take to help your website climb the search engine rankings so that you can drive more traffic to your website. Learn how to improve your website SEO by understanding WordPress terminology.

The Differences of WordPress Pages and Posts
Let us start by ensuring you understand the differences of WordPress pages and posts. A WordPress page is a static webpage that does not contain time sensitive information. These pages typically do not contain a published date, authors, tags, and other information that reserved for posts. WordPress pages are normally used for providing information that does not change very often, such as an “about” page, “contact” page, or even a homepage. You will normally see these pages along the menu of a website.
WordPress posts are normally used for the creation of blog articles. They will often have helpful information which may be time sensitive. When creating posts, there are certain labels that are used to help improve SEO. These labels include the date published, authors, tags, and categories.

Understanding Categories and Tags
Whenever you create a new WordPress post you should add any relevant categories and tags. These are used not only for navigation purposes to provide a better user experience, they are also used to help with SEO. Each category and tag that you create will become its own searchable webpage. Many WordPress users get confused about how to properly use categories and tags; though, there is a simple way to look at them. The easiest reference for understanding categories and tags is to think of your website as a textbook. There may be hundreds of pages and readers need a quick way to find information. The categories are like the table of contents at the front of the book and the tags are like the index found at the back.

Choose your categories before you start creating posts by considering what topics you will cover. In general, most WordPress sites have less than 10 categories. Tags are used to tune the categories. Most of your WordPress posts should fall into one or even two categories at most, while there may be several different relevant tags that can be used.

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Keep Your WordPress Site Structured
By understanding the differences of pages and posts as well as tags and categories, you should be able to keep your WordPress site structured and easy for users to navigate. Remember that by making your website easy for users to navigate, you are also making it easier for search engine crawlers to navigate your site. A search engine crawler is a program that visits websites and clicks on each link to determine where it goes.

Following a simple plan with the use of pages, posts, categories, and tags will provide a solid structure and improve the SEO of your WordPress site. Before long, you should start seeing more visitors and higher search engine rankings.