WordPress Takes Care of 80-90% of Search Engine Optimisation according to Matt Cutts from Google.
If this is the case, then why does a new WordPress site need to be optimised?
There is no doubt that WordPress is the best blogging and now CMS (Content Management System) available. By design, WordPress has already largely been optimised. WordPress is free, simple to install and Google loves it so why are there numerous SEO plugins for WordPress, what else needs to be done to WordPress when a website is being built?
The thing to remember here is that WordPress is the framework upon which a website is built. This framework includes all the code and components that go together to make up the WordPress software. The WordPress application consists of some 850 files and it is all these files and how well they work together that helps to make up WordPress. It is that framework that has been optimised by the designers and allow WordPress to work so well with Google.
A typical website will include all the WordPress, theme and plugin files. This could easily be several thousand files in a typical website. The website designer needs to make all this work and optimise it and all the content for the various search engines which the main one is Google.
The web designer will install and setup any required themes and plugins and any customisation required by the customer.
They will put all this together making sure all the titles, headings, descriptions and tags are titled correctly, the permalinks are correct, all links are setup and tested, all the images are optimised and titled and have correctly named tags and descriptions and one of the most important of all is that there is plenty of quality content including keywords and phrases. They will install any analytics and verify the website with Goggle, produce a sitemap and make sure the website is visible to search engines and after all, this is what you pay your web designer to do.
Without these, a website will eventually show up in a Google organic search but like all things, the last few percent of fine tuning is what can make a huge difference in where your site will eventually rank. After all this is working, the next task is to make sure that the website maintains or improves it’s page ranking because unless you can land on or near page one of a particular search, the chances are that you may not get the visitors and hence customers you are after.
– Peter
