What Is SEO and Do I Really Need It for my Wordpress Content?

1. What Is SEO and Do I Really Need It?

Chapter objectives and questions:

• Understand the role and value of search engine optimization (SEO) and content strategy.

• Understand search engine history, the “long tail,” and modern application.

• Understand what WordPress is and how it begins to factor into SEO.

• Provide an overview of SEO in today’s digital world.

A (Brief) History of SEO

In the early years of search engines—as with their predecessors, computer programming commands—the search engines couldn’t understand or accurately cater to the syntaxes of common phraseology, statements, and questions. To achieve the search engine results we wanted, we had to learn to think, and talk, like the search engines—with keywords and query strings. Ironically, as time progressed, several things happened:

• We spent more and more time online (and more time in search engines).

• We learned how to think more like search engines (and also to filter out ad results and fruitless directory/landing page results).

• We went from using myriad search engines with scattered results to identifying a favorite search engine (and speaking its language; for example, AskJeeves, which today is Ask.com).

• Simultaneously, the search engine(s) grew wise to human phraseology and contextual keyword search. Suddenly, a word was not merely a literal word from a dictionary, but search results were affected by the surrounding words.

• Google hit the scene and became king.

• MSN attempted to compete with Google using a new search engine also planted on Yahoo!—Bing.

• The search engines grew with semantic interpretation of keywords, integrating search history, social media content data, and web user interest to affect search results.

• And Google was king.

Google is still king. It keeps releasing notable updates, and YouTube (also part of Google) is considered the world’s second largest search engine. Google’s other search properties include Google Blog Search, Google Images, Google Books, and so on.

Bing, although small in use compared to Google, keeps trying. (At the time of writing this book, Google is at 67% and Bing is at 29% of web search engine usage; see http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2289560/Googles-Search-Market-Share-Shoots-Back-to-67.) But Yahoo! (which still represents 11% of web search engine usage while utilizing Bing as its current search engine) has many legacy search content sites and directories that haven’t completely died yet. Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, and Yahoo! Local are just a few. For obvious reasons, Bing is the default search engine and common home page for Microsoft hardware and Internet Explorer; consequently, it acquires use that way. It will be interesting to see what Yahoo! does going forward with its efforts in publicity. Many big-name search engines that were popular prior to Google have withered to almost nothing. RIP AltaVista, Lycos, and Netscape.