WordPress, as a content management system (CMS), has always had plugins that will help optimize your web pages and/or posts for search engines. Starting late last Fall (2016), WordPress.com now has “Advanced SEO Tools.” This is huge for WordPress.com users, which are different from those who build websites on their own domains and hosts and install WordPress manually from WordPress.org. WordPress.org sites have the luxury of installing various plugins to customize a website for a business, blog, individual, etc. WordPress.com has plenty of tools within, but web builders are restricted to only using what WordPress.com has.
As such, WordPress.com users had very little control over their SEO. The main idea behind WordPress.com was for it to somewhat be another Tumblr or LiveJournal (wow I just dated myself), where WordPress.com users would peruse the main site and find blogs and sites to read. Businesses who use their paid plans, though, want to be visible to more people than just WordPress.com users. So why would they use WordPress.com then? There’s a very simple reason: it’s often a small business or a sole proprietor who doesn’t know much about web building and doesn’t really want to. Maybe it’s not in the budget to hire a full web designer. New websites are rather pricey, after all. These business owners also don’t know much about SEO and/or can’t budget to hire an SEO pro (like me!).
WordPress overall is a savvy company, and naturally they don’t want to lose any business from their paying customers. To entice them to stay and still make their website beneficial, they incorporated in their “Advanced SEO Tools.” To SEO wizards, these tools seem laughable, but for an entrepreneur just trying to get their business out there? This is huge of WordPress.com.
These SEO tools include the following features:
- the ability to write meta descriptions for posts;
- the ability to write individual meta titles for various pages; and
- a preview tool that will show how a page or post URL will look on Google and social networks.
All of these tools are pretty darn handy. Of course, the question now becomes how to write a meta title and a meta description. Users may have the power to customize them, but it doesn’t always mean they know how to utilize them best. For businesses who can’t hire an SEO pro at the moment, I will turn your attention to other blog posts of mine that discuss keywords and proper keyword placement.
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