WordPrexeo: Wordpress x SEO

The standardised practice of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for WordPress websites.

W

The Sensible SEO

As it happens, Search Engine Optimisation is rarely described as anything other than marketing a website offer through search engines. Although this is a somewhat accurate description in the context of how it is applied, it also limits what Search Engine Optimisation inherently represents.

Outside of commercial context, SEO isn’t about the chase for the ever-increasing growth in the number of organic clicks-through to the website.

At its core, Search Engine Optimisation serves as the means to amplify refine your voice through the search engines by tightening the grip on:

  1. The granular understanding of what are the right audiences for your website and their characteristics
  2. The understanding of the underlying logic and mechanics of search engines
  3. The pursuit of an ever-closer alignment between:
    • The website’s core offering with the selected audience segments’ expectations, and
    • The website’s application of technology with the search engines’ mechanics

Employing SEO for Digital Marketing

In Digital Marketing, SEO treats the now familiar alignments bweteen the website, its users and engines as structured efforts evaluated against commercial objectives:

  • What is the commercial impact of a new audience, acquired through a content change or offsite gain?
  • What degree of engine prominence is earned through a technical website change?

To this day Search Engine Optimisation is getting increasingly complex in implementation, feeding into ever more abstract, creative and technical disciplines. Assembling the right parts of what was discovered, revealed and entertained over the years requires systems thinking, with an eye for separating the value from the noise.

Traditional SEO

SEO brings new customers through the doors by growing organic traffic, as a direct result of uplifting website pages in organic SERPs.

  1. The targeting of the organic traffic most likely to convert stems from specifying Buyer Personas and carrying out Keyword Research.
  2. Targeting informs Onpage Optimisation, uplifting existing rankings or re-targeting the existing content.
  3. A sitewide organic ranking boost can be achieved through Technical SEO by ensuring a more seamless content delivery to users and bots alike.
  4. Gaps in existing content are addressed by Content Marketing: tapping into new keyword clusters with new content or content updates.
  5. Another page-specific and sitewide organic ranking boost can be obtained through Offsite SEO by earning third-party backlinks, reflecting authority, relevance, and trust, as interpreted by search engines.

SERP Features Optimisation

Implementing SERP Features Optimisation requires more extensive expertise than traditional SEO and as such, it is oftentimes overlooked by a fair number of SERP competitors. The pinnacle of optimising for SERP Features is that they aren’t nearly as heavily reliant on Offsite SEO when selecting sources for placements.

This shift from Offsite to other search engine ranking factors allows new players with the right content and tech specs to slide right into the top ranking spots, well-above traditional organic search results, and without years of building backlinks.

  1. An effective SERP Features Optimisation strategy has traditional SEO as a prerequisite.
  2. Keyword Research carried out as part of traditional SEO is extended to map the active SERP Features by Keyword.
  3. Technical SEO for SERP Features explores only the technical SEO considerations that directly facilitate SERP Feature placements.
  4. Structured Data using the Schema vocabulary allows to explicitly define the semantic meaning of your website data and content to search engines, sometimes required for select SERP Features.
  5. SERP Feature Formating is the practice of granular content matching to the targeted SERP Feature requirements.

Expanding the traditional SEO strategy into SERP Features Optimisation yields an overall increase in return-on-investment (ROI)

Sergiu George

How Search Engines Work

The process behind search engines can be described as follow: A Search Engine uses bots to create a database of web content called an index, which is then employed by an algorithm to retrieve the most relevant information from in response to a user keyword.

  1. Search Engine Bot: A web crawler following links on already known pages to discover new pages on the web
  2. Search Engine Index: A digital library storing information about webpages
  3. Search Engine Algorithm: Computer program tasked with matching results from the search index with keywords
  4. User Keyword: A user input (text, image or voice) instructing the search engine about the subject of their search

Although every search engine aims to provide the most relevant search results to its users, it is important to outline that they do not make any profit in doing so. Money-wise, the search engines rely entirely on sponsored search results that go alongside the organic search results.