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A discussion broke out amongst some of the top SEOs yesterday when someone posted a topic on Quora asking, “Isn’t SEO basically gaming Google? Isn’t it one step away from parasitic scammery”. Of course, the SEO industry stood up and took the time to explain why this isn’t the case.

One of the best explanations by Ian Lurie was along these lines:

“I compare SEO to fitness: You have to take responsibility for your results: If you hire a trainer who says they’ll mail you a few dietary supplements and have you in great shape in a matter of days, and it doesn’t work, well, what did you expect?
If, on the other hand, you hire a trainer who gives you an exercise routine, helps you improve your diet, etc., and you make steady progress, that makes a lot more sense.”

This analogy is accurate and it’s honest. It also highlights the fact that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint and the best way to tackle a marathon is stage by stage with an explicit understanding of the start and finish. With that in mind, it’s important to note that there are some really simple things you can do to WordPress to get your feet off the mark, the first of which is finding a WordPress SEO plugin that suits you.

Guru Frog has three options for you:

• Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin– Joost de Valk is a well respected developer in the WordPress community. He has built a number of WordPress plugins, many of which have been downloaded thousands of times. Joost is the man behind this plugin, which covers a great deal of SEO territory and has features which allow for the control over post titles, meta descriptions, robots meta, canonical, breadcrumbs, permalink cleanup, xml sitemaps, rss enhancements and more. Out of the three plugins listed here, this is the most comprehensive one, however, it is not for the complete beginner as many areas require previous SEO knowledge.
• All in One SEO Plugin – For a long time, All in One SEO was the go to plugin when it came to WordPress and SEO – the 10 million downloads shows this! That is not to say that it isn’t anymore – this plugin remains user friendly, feature rich and can be used by the novice. There is also a pro version available for $39.00 that unlocks a number of useful features and support forum access.
• Ultimate SEO – This plugin isn’t as popular as the previous two and has only seen roughly half a million downloads; however, it deserves merit for being fairly flexible and easy to use.

To summarize: For the beginner, All in One SEO is probably the best option, but for the more advanced user who understands SEO, then Yoast’s WordPress SEO definitely the plugin to use.

This is only the first step, not a strategy or a long term plan, but enough to get you going. and next time we’ll give you a little more insight into SEO for WordPress.

Pssst. Don’t forget to look at George’s 5 favorite WordPress plugins.