SEO for WordPress
Taught by James White
James is a web marketing consultant who specializes in helping small businesses build a web presence across search, email and social media. His clients include best-selling authors, designers, and a very fancy dry cleaner (which is a real thing that exists in New York). You can read more on his site, jfwhite.org, and follow him on Twitter @jamesfacts.
If you run your own website these days, there's a very good chance you use WordPress - a platform so popular it's said to be used by 20 percent of all new domains. It's one of the easiest ways to manage your very own corner of the internet and perfect for small businesses: designers, crafters, consultants, and of course, bloggers.
While WordPress is a well-optimized content management system right out of the box, there are a lot of simple tweaks that can really turbocharge a WordPress site and help build an audience.
In this class, we'll cover the basics of what distinguishes a website that gets overlooked by Google from one that is optimized to capture relevant search traffic. With this information, we'll discuss specifics of how SEO applies to the WordPress ecosystem. Together, we'll write an optimized post, manage categories and tags, install helpful plugins, and find out which settings to pay attention to within the Wordpress dashboard.
The goal of the course is not to add additional chores to your site maintenance routine, but instead to make the most of certain elements of WordPress that exist whether they're optimized or not. You'll leave ready to make a one-time change in your site that can lead to increased exposure for years to come, whether you use WordPress as a blog or a static CMS.
A laptop in class is not necessary. We have lots of ground to cover, so you probably won't be able to get hands on and edit your site in class, but there will be handouts with a summary to take home.
