Choose a good web host and the right package
When choosing a new web host, don’t choose a host based on price and certainly not on recommendations of the “top 10 web hosting” sites. What they actually do is list the hosts that pay them the most commissions.
I pretty much always use Siteground, because they have 24/7 support, available quickly, by email, chat and most importantly telephone. This is a lifesaver(or a website saver) from a clients perspective.
They are more expensive than the “Go Daddies” of this word for a reason…. and most professionals go with companies like Siteground for what they offer in technical terms and support. Plus their servers are fast and Sites need to load quickly, because speed is a very important ranking factor for Google. This very much depends on the hosting provider.
Install and configure an SEO plugin
Installing a good SEO plugin is a must as it manages many SEO aspects of your blog automatically. There are quite a few:
WordPress SEO by Yoast
All In One SEO Pack
WP Meta SEO
SEOPress
The SEO Framework
Rank Math
Yoast SEO is the most used plugin, however there are great features on all of these plugins and reviews galore. Most importantly, it’s the keywords and description for your business that makes all the difference.
Add a sitemap
If you use one of the SEO plugins shown below, it will automatically create an XML sitemap for you. An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted file that lists each page of your website. This makes it easy for search engines to find all of your content. Adding a sitemap doesn’t necessarily improve your site’s ranking, however it does help search engines find pages quickly and start ranking them.
Add your site to Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a set of tools offered by Google to give website owners an overview of how their content is viewed by the search engine. It provides reports and data to help you understand how your pages appear in search results. Google Search Console alerts you if there is a problem with your website, such as when search robots are unable to access it, find duplicate content, or have limited resources.
Use a caching plugin
A caching plugin is essential for any WordPress site. Caching plugins do two useful things. First, they make your site faster. Second, they reduce the load on your web server. Most caching plugins cache static and dynamic content to reduce page load times.
They have options for page caching, browser caching, object caching, database caching and minification (e.g. cleaning up all the bits of program and code that are needed to load the page). Another reason behind reducing web page load times is to improve the user’s experience and if you make your website faster, naturally, it will be good from an SEO perspective.
There are free and paid versions and many options to choose from. For example, a free plugin is Autoptimize, or paid is WP Rocket.
Optimize images
Try to make sure the images you upload to WordPress are already optimised, which means the file size being as small as possible. If you haven’t already optimized the images you can use a plugin like Smush once they are on the site. This decreases the page size to be loaded.
You can also add relevant image tags to the images in your messages to help them rank higher in image searches and include additional keywords through alt tags in your posts.
Write content and blog articles with relevant key words.
There’s no simple answer for the “ideal” length of a blog post, however the more relevant your article is the better. If its good, people will either get in touch(if that’s what you want) or share it, or it will simply be good for SEO.
