SEO Foundations for
WordPress Professionals

Duration: 10 Days (2 Weeks) | Mode: Hands-on + Strategy Sessions

Introduction

In today’s digital landscape, simply building a website is not enough- ensuring that your content is discoverable by search engines is equally vital. This Foundation-Level SEO Course is specially designed for learners who have completed basic or advanced WordPress website development and now seek to improve their site’s visibility, performance and ranking on platforms like Google. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a pivotal role in attracting organic traffic, enhancing user experience and ensuring websites meet modern web standards. This course introduces the fundamentals of SEO in a practical, WordPress-integrated way- empowering participants to optimize their own sites or client projects using tools like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, Google Search Console and more. This 10-day intensive is perfect for freelancers, small business owners, bloggers, educators, or content creators who use WordPress and want to ensure their websites perform well in search engines- without needing deep coding or marketing experience.

Purpose

The primary purpose of this foundation-level SEO course is to help WordPress users move from just building attractive websites to making them truly effective and searchable. It focuses on the practical application of SEO principles tailored for WordPress websites, including keyword research, on-page optimization, structured content, technical fixes and analytics tracking.
Participants will learn how to:

  • Research relevant keywords for their niche or audience
  • Optimize web pages and blog posts with correct titles, headings and meta tags
  • Use SEO plugins to automate and manage best practices
  • Improve site performance and responsiveness for better user experience
  • Track site performance using tools like Google Search Console and Page Speed Insights

The course ensures that learners can independently optimize any WordPress-based website for basic SEO compliance- setting the stage for better traffic, engagement and growth.

Intention

The intention of this course is not to transform learners into SEO specialists or digital marketing strategists, but to equip WordPress developers and content managers with the essential SEO skills needed to build websites that perform well in search engines.
By the end of the program, participants will:

  • Understand what makes a website SEO-friendly
  • Be able to optimize content and structure for search engines
  • Learn to use free and accessible tools to monitor and improve their site’s visibility
  • Recognize SEO errors and know how to fix them using WordPress plugins
  • Be confident in making foundational SEO decisions when building or maintaining websites

This course equips WordPress learners with practical SEO skills to improve the visibility, discoverability and ranking of their websites in search engines. It bridges the gap between content creation and searchability- ideal for those who’ve completed the Foundation and Advanced WordPress modules and want their blogs, business pages, portfolios, or product listings to perform better on Google. Participants will learn technical SEO, on-page optimization, keyword research, content planning, site health checks, analytics and how to integrate SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math. It sets the foundation for further specialization in content marketing or digital advertising.

Syllabus and Curriculum

Week 1: SEO Principles, Content Strategy and WordPress Optimization

Objective: Understand how search engines work and why SEO is critical for every WordPress site.

Topics Covered:

  • What is SEO? History, importance, and current trends
  • How Google crawls, indexes, and ranks websites
  • Organic vs Paid Search
  • White-hat, black-hat, and ethical SEO practices
  • Overview of search engine algorithms (Google Panda, Penguin, BERT)
  • How SEO fits into the WordPress development cycle

Activity: Explore live search results; analyze featured snippets, meta titles, and SERPs of well-optimized WordPress sites.

Objective: Teach learners how to identify, analyze, and group keywords that align with user needs and business goals.

Topics Covered:

  • What are keywords and search intent types (informational, transactional, navigational)
  • Tools for research: Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner, AnswerThePublic, Google Trends
  • Understanding keyword difficulty, search volume, and competition
  • Creating a keyword list for your website
  • Long-tail vs short-tail keywords for blogs and services

Activity: Build a keyword research spreadsheet for your website or client niche.

Objective: Create content clusters and structures that improve UX and rankings.

Topics Covered:

  • Site architecture and internal linking
  • Creating content silos: Homepage → Categories → Posts
  • Blog vs service pages: differences in SEO structure
  • SEO-friendly URL structures and permalinks
  • Planning homepage, about, contact, and blog with search in mind

Activity: Sketch out a content silo and internal linking structure for your website.

Objective: Master the structure and optimization of every WordPress page and post.

Topics Covered:

  • Optimizing H1, H2, H3 hierarchy
  • Meta titles and descriptions that rank and convert
  • Using focus keywords correctly (density, placement, first paragraph)
  • Creating content outlines for blogs
  • Optimizing post slugs and excerpts

Activity: Install Yoast SEO/Rank Math and optimize one blog post using its SEO checklist.

Objective: Improve loading speed and accessibility using image best practices.

Topics Covered:

  • Importance of alt-text and SEO value of images
  • How to write effective image alt descriptions
  • Using image compression tools (Smush, ShortPixel)
  • File naming, sizes, and responsive images
  • Lazy loading and WebP formats

Activity: Optimize 3 images using compression, rename them, and add SEO alt-text via WordPress.

Week 2: SEO Plugins, Tools, Analytics, Technical Fixes & Submission

Objective: Configure and use SEO plugins to automate and improve optimization.

Topics Covered:

  • Yoast SEO vs Rank Math feature comparison
  • Setting global SEO titles, meta defaults, and schema types
  • Using focus keywords, content scoring, and readability analysis
  • Managing sitemap.xml and robots.txt via plugins
  • Integrating breadcrumbs and canonical URLs 

Activity: Configure your chosen SEO plugin and set up global defaults for pages/posts.

Objective: Make websites fast and mobile-friendly using Google’s guidelines.

Topics Covered:

  • Why speed and mobile experience affect rankings
  • Introduction to Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID, CLS
  • Tools: Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Lighthouse
  • Basic fixes: caching, image size, font optimization, hosting impact
  • Using Elementor’s responsive mode effectively

Activity: Run PageSpeed tests on your homepage and note 3 areas to improve.

Objective: Enable rich snippets through structured data.

Topics Covered:

  • What is Schema.org? How structured data helps rankings
  • Types of schema: Article, FAQ, Review, Product, Organization
  • Adding FAQ schema with plugins or blocks
  • Testing structured data with Google Rich Results Test
  • Role of JSON-LD vs microdata

Activity: Add FAQ schema to one page using a plugin like Yoast or Structured Content Block.

Objective: Teach learners how to interact with Google directly to control their SEO performance

Topics Covered:

  • Setting up and verifying Google Search Console
  • Submitting sitemaps and inspecting URLs
  • Resolving indexing issues and errors
  • Performance report: CTR, impressions, queries
  • Manual actions and mobile usability checks

Activity: Submit your sitemap and request indexing for 1 optimized page.

Objective: Consolidate learning, perform a self-audit, and explore next steps in SEO specialization.

Topics Covered:

  • Full SEO audit checklist: content, structure, performance
  • Evaluating site SEO health using audit tools (Screaming Frog, Ahrefs trial, etc.)
  • Understanding freelance/agency SEO roles
  • Next steps: Advanced SEO, local SEO, technical SEO, backlinking, content strategy
  • Tools to explore: Semrush, Ahrefs, SERanking (basic overview)

Activity: Conduct a 10-point SEO audit of your website and present findings in peer review.