One of the reasons many foreign trade users choose WordPress for website building is for Google SEO. When it comes to Google SEO, you cannot ignore the Search Engine Results Page, SERP. This article by Naiba explains why SERP optimization is important.
What is SERP? Is it important?
Search results page (English: Search engine results page, abbreviated as SERP) is the results page that appears after you search for something on Google. We mainly focus on the search results page of our own website.
The Importance of SERP, take a look at the screenshot below.
Search results for 'led light factory'. These two are the top independent site results. You can see that the first one's title better matches our test search term 'led light factory', and the description is richer.
If you notice the Google ad results at the top, you'll see that these ads have richer SERPs.
Setting aside the word 'ad', from a user experience perspective, which of the four websites in the screenshot above would you be more likely to click?
Undoubtedly, a rich SERP result with a description that matches your needs will have a higher click-through rate than a site that simply says 'LED Factory'.
Google's SERP results are very rich. Besides our ordinary text search result display, there are also image results, video results, featured snippet results, rich snippet results, etc. We won't go into detail here; you must have encountered them if you use Google frequently.
How to optimize SERP?
First, you need to know that the only elements you can optimize on the search results page are the title, URL, description, and structured data.
How Google displays them depends entirely on Google's algorithm rules, and it may not always show exactly what you intend.
So when doing Google SEO, we should focus on handling the title and description well. Structured data, if available, should be provided (usually for product pages); if not, it's fine, since competitors may not have it either.
1. Title Section
The first point about the title is to include the keywords you intend to target. For example, in the example above, Naiba is trying to rank forGoogle SEO TutorialRanking for this keyword: at the time of writing, it ranked third. The first was an established site, the second was Zhihu, and the fourth was Google's official site.
In terms of title, the page ranking first is certainly more appealing because many people are eager to quickly learn Google SEO methods and how to do it.
The second is from Zhihu, but because the title includes '2018 Edition', some people might ignore it.
Naiba's Google SEO page is titled 'Beginner's Guide'. On one hand, it's genuinely intended to share basic Google SEO knowledge—after all, Naiba doesn't take Google SEO orders, it's purely a hobby and sharing. On the other hand, it aims to targetGoogle SEO Beginner's Guide和Google SEO Beginner's Tutorialthe keyword.
Looking back at the first result, besides 'Google SEO Tutorial', its keywords also include 'Google SEO Methods', 'How to Do Google SEO', and can be broken down into Google optimization-related keywords.
2. URL
This is something you have little control over. Once you set up WordPress permalinks, they are mostly fixed.
Reference reading:WordPress Best Permalink Settings_Which Pseudo-Static Rule is Better
3. Description
For the description, if you have an SEO plugin installed, there is usually a separate field to edit the description. If you leave it blank, it will default to the first paragraph of your content. Of course, sometimes Google will generate its own description that it deems appropriate.
Other elements, such as related URLs and structured data, are automatically generated by Google based on algorithm and actual conditions once your site has some authority. You cannot directly intervene.
In summary, once you understand what SERP is, you will naturally pay attention to these aspects when writing articles. This unconsciously optimizes your articles for SEO, giving you a small edge over your competitors.