Consider SEO When Setting Up WordPress If you are setting up a WordPress site and want to achieve a high search engine ranking there are a few basic things you should consider at the outset. Getting these matters sorted at the outset will make it more likely that your site will be successful. Hosting You need to use a host that specifically supports WordPress. Not all hosts do and, although you should be able to run it on most Linux services, you may have to install it manually and resolve any problems on your own. You should look for a host that provides a quick install, without the need for any technical expertise, and with easy to access support in the event of there being a problem. A good host will also provide a fast and reliable service, something that Google now takes into account. More information can be found by clicking the following link - Best WordPress Hosting. Wordpress Theme Having got your WordPress site up and running the next thing to consider is the Theme you will use. You can find plenty of free themes, both on the WordPress site and by searching the web, and also premium themes for which you have to pay. A free theme may be fine but they often have no options (or a limited number) so unless you edit the code you simply use the Theme as is. Another problem with some free themes is that they are designed primarily for their appearance rather than to help optimise the content for the search engines. The way they display titles and heading may be less than ideal. On the other hand premium themes are designed for SEO and offer lots of settings to get the look and layout of the site how you want it. In addition they usually make it easy to monetize a site. One good example of a premium theme is the Socrates Theme. WordPress SEO Plugins There are a lot of WordPress SEO Plugins available and whilst they all address some issue, my experience is that you can install too many. The site then gets complicated to manage as plugins you had forgotten about do things you weren’t expecting. I would recommend a general SEO plugin like “All In One SEO Pack” which will give you the control you need but without being intrusive. Once it is setup you just need to remember to enter the meta title and description for each page and post. The other SEO plugin I would recommend is "Google XML Sitemaps" which
creates and maintains a sitemap for the search engines and should get your pages indexed quicker. A premium SEO Plugin that I recommend is the SEOPressor Plugin. This checks the on-page SEO of each page and post and gives it a score. In addition it makes recommendations for improvements. You might think that you could do this manually, which is true, but it is an unexciting task that few people would get round to. However, it is important to get on page SEO as good as possible so it is very clear to the search engines what your content is about. Once you have the above in place you will be able to generate a site that the search engines will like. As a result you will have to build the minimum possible number of backlinks to get a high ranking.