In almost all cases, you ought to use https instead of http for your website. To do this, you’ll need to add an SSL certificate to your website. It’s not a particularly difficult process, but there are a few steps to take, especially if you want to avoid errors and reduce the chance of losing search engine rankings.
In this post, I’ll cover the advantages and disadvantages of SSL, as well as the steps you should follow to properly set up your WordPress site with an SSL certificate.
Site speed is a ranking factor in Google, and for good reason. Visitors have a short attention span, and will quickly navigate away from a slow website, especially on mobile. This post covers essential tools and techniques for improving your load times and PageSpeed score, such as caching, image optimization, and plugin performance.
The WordPress SEO plugin is, quite simply, the best SEO plugin available for WordPress. If you use this plugin, you will probably not need any other SEO plugins. The author, Yoast (a.k.a. Joost de Valk) is a highly respected WordPress and SEO expert, and his plugin gives you the tools necessary to effectively optimize your WordPress website.
If you have a website, you should have at least one type of analytics software installed, and that analytics software ought to be Google Analytics. It is an incredibly full-featured web analytics solution, and best of all, it is completely free. In fact, it’s even better than most of the paid solutions out there. Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, and it is actually quite easy to use.
Whenever you perform a search on Google, you often see ads at the top and/or the right side of the search results. That advertising is done through the Google AdWords service, and anyone can create an account. When setting up the account, you must decide which keywords (search terms) you want to bid on, your maximum bid for CPC (cost per click, which is how much you pay Google each time your ad is clicked), and the geographical locations where you want your ad to appear.
Google uses a number of different factors to determine if your ad is shown and in which position to show it. You can influence this in some ways, but it is not as simple as the highest bidder receiving the highest position. If you have the highest bid for a given keyword, but no one is clicking on your ad, then Google is not making any money by putting your ad in the top position. Instead, Google may give more weight to other factors, such as the historical clickthrough performance of your ads, the historical clickthrough performance of your campaigns, and the relevance of your landing page (the page on your website that the visitor reaches after clicking your ad).
