WordPress SEO Basics – Part 3
Building websites for users should be your utmost priority, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect building your WordPress site for SEO. The reason being is that search engines, as powerful as they are, simply are not as sophisticated humans. For instance, when a human sees an image of a tree, they may be able to determine its relative sized based on surroundings, determine the tree’s species, etc. from the picture alone. While search engines are learning how to crawl images, they aren’t that good yet. In doing WordPress SEO, one needs to be conscious of the limitations of search engines and lend a helping hand to these robots.
Some problems and challenges that search engines have:
- Duplicate pages – some older Content Management Systems (CMS) will duplicate pages. This is a major problem for a search engine looking for original content.
- Online forms – content that is contained behind login forms may remain hidden to search engines as they do not know how to login.
- Poor link structures – if a website does not have a clearly defined link structure, a search engine may miss portions of the site.
- Non-text content – as mentioned before, search engines still have trouble with images. They are getting far better, but they certainly haven’t “arrived.” They also have issues with video and audio.
- Uncommon terms – these are terms that may make sense to people, but are not commonly associated, therefore, are missed by search engines. For example, dihydrogen monoxide could be understood by humans as “water,” but search engines have no idea what you are talking about!
- Subtleties of language & internationalization – British English terms vs. American English terms are a perfect example, like “theater” vs. “theatre.” Or in Australia “work orders” are known as “job cards.”
- Mixed contextual signals – for example, the title of a blog post may be “Best Food in Boulder,” but your site is about tech.
Other problems with site SEO is the constantly changing nature of their algorithms. So whatever SEO trick may have worked 10 years ago probably won’t work any more.
So, what to do? Simple. You have to invest in SEO for your website. It is a constantly changing world out there and you need to stay on top of things if you want to stay in the rankings. Many times this may involve hiring an SEO expert.
Don’t lose out on customers and users by neglecting SEO! Building a site for users is important, but SEO can’t be sidelined.
