SEO on this site means one thing: making it easy for a search engine to find your pages, understand what each one is about, and have a reason to prefer it. That is the entire job. Everything else sold under the name is either a technique for doing one of those three things or a distraction from them.
The guides here are written on the assumption that you own a small site, you do not have a budget for an agency, and you would rather spend an afternoon fixing something structural than a year chasing tactics. Google's own SEO starter guide is the reference behind most of what follows, and it is worth reading straight through once.
On-page fundamentals
On-page work is the part you fully control, which makes it the part to finish first. Each page needs a single clear subject, a title that names it, one h1, a heading structure that follows the shape of the argument rather than the shape of the design, and a URL a human could read aloud. The title and the meta description are what a searcher actually sees, so they are worth writing deliberately rather than generating — Google's notes on how a title link is chosen explain why a good one sometimes gets rewritten anyway.
Internal links matter more than most owners expect. They are how a crawler discovers the rest of your site and how it works out which pages you consider important. Links inside body copy carry that signal; a link that appears in the same navigation on every page carries far less of it. The structural walk-through is in how to create an SEO-friendly WordPress website.
Keyword research
Keyword research is not about finding a magic phrase. It is about learning the words your readers use for the thing you already do, and noticing where those words show a question nobody has answered well. A term with modest volume and obvious intent beats a popular one you have no realistic chance of ranking for, every time.
The practical starting point is the round-up of keyword research tools, which covers what each type of tool measures and, just as usefully, what its numbers do not mean. Search volume is an average, difficulty scores are models rather than measurements, and the only reliable way to judge a term is to look at the results page and ask honestly whether your page belongs on it.
Technical health
Technical SEO is largely a matter of not getting in your own way. A crawler needs to reach your pages, so check that nothing important is blocked in robots.txt and that a current sitemap is published. Duplicate versions of the same content should be resolved with a canonical URL, and pages that move should be given a permanent redirect rather than being allowed to disappear.
Speed and stability belong in the same bucket. The Core Web Vitals metrics — loading, interaction responsiveness and layout stability — are a reasonable proxy for whether a page is pleasant to use, and the reference on web.dev explains what each one measures. On a WordPress site most of the wins are unglamorous: fewer plugins, properly sized images, caching, and a theme that does not load a framework to draw a button.
Core updates
Every so often a broad core update lands, traffic moves, and the forums fill with theories. Google core updates sets out what these releases actually are: broad reassessments of which pages best answer a query, not penalties aimed at your site. There is usually nothing specific to fix, which is exactly why the advice to keep improving the content is unsatisfying and also correct.
Tools and plugins
A CMS will not do SEO for you, but it can stop you forgetting the mechanical parts. SEO plugins for WordPress compares the main options, and the Yoast SEO plugin gets a closer look because it is the one most readers meet first. Install one, not three: overlapping plugins that each want to write your titles and sitemaps cause more problems than they solve.
Beyond plugins, the single most valuable tool is a verified property in Search Console, because it reports what search engines actually did with your site rather than what a third-party tool estimates. Related reading sits in the CMS hub, and the complete list of guides is on the blog index.