SEO help

[Steven Davis]

Hey everyone. I'm pretty sure I could use some help with my SEO for my wordpress site and didn't know if anyone knew legit people. Not those crazy anonymous emails we all get, lol.

But if anyone can point me to a legit SEO person, I'd appreciate it.

[Andrew Smith]

There are no 'get rich quick' SEO methods. It's a long term process and it involves generating quality original content on your site.

That's the best advice there is.

Andrew

[Adam Grunseth]

Originally Posted by Steven Davis

Hey everyone. I'm pretty sure I could use some help with my SEO for my wordpress site and didn't know if anyone knew legit people. Not those crazy anonymous emails we all get, lol.

But if anyone can point me to a legit SEO person, I'd appreciate it.

SEO isn't just something you do, then you have good SEO. It is a series of practices that involves everything from how content on your site is written, to layout, to the use of images.

However, since you are using Wordpress, a good place to start might be a decent SEO plugin. Yoast SEO is pretty good, and has a free version. Once installed, on ever page/post on your WP admin it will give you suggestions for how to improve your sites SEO, giving you a greenlight for things that are good, a red light for things that aren't helping your ranking, and a yellow light for things that are okay, but could use improvement.

[Slavik Boyechko]

Hi Steven,

You might consider investing in a monthly Long Tail Pro subscription. It gives you the tools to find which keywords people are searching for, and what their competitiveness is. After doing some research, you title your articles with the right keyword that has low competition, and you'll start to rank for that keyword. The key is writing long articles (over 2,000 words) to please Google.

Cheers,
Slavik

[David Barnett]

Yeah, Yoast SEO plugin is it. Be careful with WP tho, don't overdo it with too many plugins, they've had numerous hacks lately.

[Josh Bass]

But isn't it true that regardless of content that makes SEO happy, some hosts/platforms are simply more friendly/findable for search engines than others? For instance I have a site I build in Iweb and upload to a server, was thinking of switching to SquareSpace or one of those other platforms later this year, mostly for that reason.

[David Barnett]

Originally Posted by Josh Bass

But isn't it true that regardless of content that makes SEO happy, some hosts/platforms are simply more friendly/findable for search engines than others? For instance I have a site I build in Iweb and upload to a server, was thinking of switching to SquareSpace or one of those other platforms later this year, mostly for that reason.

Well, it's a combination of factors. I read an article of '200' factors to Google's algorythm. Content, is largely known to be the biggest. Other tricks can be done to help optimize it better (backlinks etc). But yeah if it's a terribly coded or outdated site/template that can affect your rankings. I'm not just referring to the looks of it, rather the backend HTML scripting used. Some terms get depricated over the years, or it can be superfluous whereas there could be a more streamlined way for things on the site to be done. Google picks up on that.

[Adam Grunseth]

Originally Posted by Josh Bass

But isn't it true that regardless of content that makes SEO happy, some hosts/platforms are simply more friendly/findable for search engines than others? For instance I have a site I build in Iweb and upload to a server, was thinking of switching to SquareSpace or one of those other platforms later this year, mostly for that reason.

Sort of, but not really. Having a dedicated domain, such as www.mysite.com is always preferable to something like www.mysite.freehost.com. How many other sites share the same IP as yours also factors in- So if you are on shared hosting and there are 30 other sites that share the same IP as your site, the SEO gods aren't going to look upon that as favorably as if you are on a dedicated server with just your site on that IP. Other things, like the CMS and how that is distributed also can matter, as well as loading times.

In short, search engines don't favor one host over another, but things like hosting configuration and response times, which can vary depending on who is hosting your site, can make a difference.

[Josh Bass]

I do have a dedicated domain, that's one thing I've done right. But as the rest I think the way some of these other hosting platforms (Squarespace, etc.) are coded might be more up to date/modern etc. than the ancient Iweb that I'm using. I hope. Maybe not.