The discovery process begins with a known list of URLs and search engines can discover these in several ways:

Rendering is when search engines try to understand and extract key information from the crawled pages. In order to do this, they have to run the page’s code to understand how it looks to users.

Few people outside of the search engines’ teams themselves know too many details about this process. But all that is required at this stage is to know is that it involves extracting links and storing content for indexing.

Indexing is when processed information from crawled pages gets added to a search index.

The search index is what one searches when he/she uses a search engine. That’s why getting indexed in the major search engines such as Google is so important for business. Users can’t find businesses unless they’re in the index.

Search engines also need a way to rank matching results when billions of users perform online searches. This is where the search engine algorithms come in. Search Engine Algorithms are formulas that match and rank relevant results from the index.

One of the primary advantages of SEO is that the organic traffic is free of charge. In other words, it can take a substantial investment of time and effort to get started and some patience to see a return on investment (ROI). However, once you start ranking, you’ll receive free traffic at no additional cost per click. Unlike paid advertising which is seen as a tap because you can switch the spending and subsequently the traffic on and off, SEO is a waterfall because it brings in new traffic consistently over the long term.

Another advantage is the sustainability of organic traffic. Once you start ranking through SEO, the rewards are often there to stay without the need for continuous spending and reinvestment. Building a sustainable stream of highly targeted organic traffic to your website could be the difference between your business surviving or seeing a downfall in times of economic uncertainties. In other words, while in the case of PPC, you may be forced to switch off the tap on ad spending, with SEO you may find yourself in a position where a decrease in spending won’t necessarily bring traffic drops.

Unlike more traditional channels SEO is Highly Targeted and has the capacity to target users in various stages of the decision-making funnel. Results served via organic search are inherently relevant to the search query that is entered by the user, allowing you to target potential customers looking for your products or services. SEO Managers can target different Search Intents by creating types of content that suit user needs determined by the keywords they are searching for at different stages in their decision-making cycle of buying a product or service.

SEO can also reinforce your brand-building and traditional advertising initiatives. You can use SEO to reinforce your brand at different stages in the decision-making cycle, and namely Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. You may also use SEO to reinforce your traditional marketing initiatives by encouraging users to search for your Brand, as opposed to asking them to visit a website.

SEO and Paid Search can have synergies, providing the perfect opportunity for sharing resources considering in both cases customers use keywords to find products or services and the measurability is tracked using click through rate (CTR) and Conversion Rates (CR). As previously stated SEO requires time while Paid Search is instant, which is why it’s so important to align the strategies and the reporting of the two. Successful PPC campaigns can also indirectly have a positive impact on SEO as they may be responsible for bringing backlinks.

Considering search engines’ algorithms have gotten so advanced and look to reward high-quality websites that provide a good user experience to their users, in modern SEO, your User Experience (UX) team and SEO Team should be more aligned than ever. Some of the UX factors that affect SEO are mobile optimisation, page loading speed, website security via SSL certification, lack of intrusive interstitials and website structure.

Given the importance of backlinks for SEO, Public relations (PR) can have a significant influence on the overall SEO performance. So much so that SEO Managers have designed an entirely new discipline called digital PR, a spin-off of traditional PR designed to focus on building backlinks and getting mentions from reputable sources on the web for the purpose of building brand awareness.

The SEO process starts with Research in order to establish an understanding of the organic search market, users and technology implications within its wider SERP environment.

The insights gathered in the research phase then fuel the practice of Onsite Optimisation which targets both content and technical areas for improvement on the website at hand.

Lastly, the Offsite or Link Building efforts are directed towards establishing awareness, authority and trust within the industry at large with the purpose of reinforcing the efforts behind onsite optimisation and content marketing at large.

So as previously noted, even before getting to install WordPress, one major decision you’ll have to make is choosing a hosting provider and a hosting plan. If cost is an important factor, Hostinger is the value-for-money option. Otherwise, if prefer going for the very high-end of hosting, you should consider Kinsta.

Among the reasons for choosing Hostinger as your hosting provider are the fact that they’re big enough to allow for economies of scale, as a result both offering competitive prices for their plans. Most importantly, they are well-regarded as providing timely and helpful customer service, commited to promptly solving hosting issues and this is imperative for the rare ocassions when you do need support.

Hostinger offers a number of hosting plans and you should read the specifications carefully, paying particular attention to the approximate number of monthly visitors those plans will be able to serve and the storage capacity. You will want to ensure that the hosting plan can accommodate a significantly higher number of monthly visitors than you expect to have to account for traffic fluctuations and has plenty of extra storage to allow you to develop your website moving forward.

If you chose Hostinger, you should also consider if you’ll need:

1. A WordPress staging tool: employed to test various website features without publishing them on the website. The primary benefit of this comes in the form of preventing technical errors on the live version of the website which may arise as you add new and more complex features.
2. Object Cache: Capable of accelerating page loading speeds, which translate into positive signals to search engines about the perceived quality of a landing page.
3. Content Delivery Network (CDN): Helpful in accelerating page loading speeds on websites which are accessed by website users across the globe, as opposed to website users within a single country.
4. Dedicated IP address: Can be useful for increased control over the hosting environment among other things, which may be important for certain websites. As a general rule, hosting with a dedicated IP address is useful for either large or complex websites.

Although installing WordPress might sound like a lot of work, in reality if you’ve opted for “Managed WordPress Hosting” it can be acomplished with a few clicks through your hosting provider. You will, of course, have to go though the manual set up of the basic WordPress settings, choose a WordPress theme and pick any WordPress plugins you might need on your end, after the installation. All of the above processes are described below.

Assuming you have purchased your domain from Hostinger, you will need to log into your Hostinger account and find your “Domain Portfolio”. Once you find the domain listed on this page, click “Manage” next to it and find the “Domain Checklist” panel on the corresponding page. You will find the first step relating to your “Domain registration” marked as completed and the next one in line will be “Create your Website” with a “Get Hosting” button, which you need to click to kick off the WordPress Installation process, as illustrated below.

You will be presented with a list of options to tick and login credentials to create. At this stage, just make sure you have WordPress selected as the option for building your website and assign the right domain. Do not worry about having a WordPress theme ready at this stage and just select one of the themes provided for free.

If you bought your domain from another Domain Registrar, you will need to first create a website using Hostinger, specifying the domain name you have purchased from another Domain Registrar. You will, of course, need to go through a domain verification process with the other Domain Registrar, as illustrated below.

Although, instructions on how to verify a domain are provided on both ends, your Hosting Provider and your Domain Registrar, if you run into difficulties reach out to customer support. You will need to navigate to the “Websites” panel in your Hostinger account and find the “Check Guide” button explaining how to connect your Domain, as illustrated below.

Use the provided instructions on your Domain Registrar’s platform. Reach out to your Domain Registrar support if you’re unable to complete the process on your own.

Once you have installed WordPress, there are a few basic settings that you will need to set, summarised below.

Setting the Preferred (Canonical) Domain

The preferred domain (canonical domain) specifies the version of the preferred domain (www or non-www) that precedes the domain name. To be technically accurate the www version of a website actually means the website will be placed on the www subdomain. Although there is no set preference by search engines for either one of these options, only one single version should be used across all the URLs on the website for consistency purposes.

If you use both domain versions on and outside your website, search engines will treat the two versions of the same page as references to separate pages, resulting in duplication issues on a large scale. When you set your preferred domain, you’re telling search engines which domain you want to be crawled and indexed. Although search engines do not give preference to any one version over the other, one argument against the www version is that it serves no functional purpose, while the non-www version makes for a shorter URL, allowing more space for what may, in fact, be important.

To set your preferred domain you need to login into your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to “Settings” > “General”, where you’ll need to ensure you have the preffered version of domain specified, as illustrated below.

You also need to make sure you redirect the www version of the domain to the non-www to prevent duplication issues. Failing to do so will result in duplicate content issues as well as issues surrounding the consolidation of your backlink profile. With 301 redirects to the preferred domain, you won’t lose the value of the backlinks that are pointing to the other domain, which happens more often than you would think.

Access the Website Visibility Settings

The single most important checkbox for SEO in WordPress is the one controlling whether search engines must not index your website. With this checkbox checked – no search engine will index your website and no user will be able to find your website in search engines. The primary purpose of this option is to make websites unavailable to search engines and thus users that might find the website through search engines, when the website is , in fact, not ready for the public.

To prevent search engines from indexing your website or to ensure that your website is indeed indexable by search engines use the checkbox next to “Discourage Search Engines from Indexing this Site”, found on your WordPress Dashboard under “Settings” > “Reading”, as illustrated below.

Specifying the Permalinks

Keeping a clean and SEO-friendly URL structure will have a significant impact on your SEO, which is why it is a good idea to set the permalinks preferences right from the very start. Doing this after you’ve already published your blog posts can involve a significant amount of additional work.

In order to change your Permalink Settings log into your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to “Settings” > “Permalinks”. Then, select Post Name as the option, as illustrated below. Post Name typically works for most sites. However, as you’re advancing in SEO you may end up implementing a custom structure depending on your preferences.

Back in 2014 Google stated that HTTPS is a SEO ranking factor, so having this on the list can go a long way in improving your SEO. It is also considered a trust signal among users, meaning internet users are more likely to trust and interact with websites that are secured using HTTPS. If you want to take advantage of a secure connection via HTTPS, you need an SSL certificate on your site.

Thankfully, if you’re using WordPress with Hostinger, you’ll have an SSL certificate installed free of charge. However, if you already have a website and it still doesn’t have a SLL certificate installed, just raise it with customer service upon hosting migration to Hostinger and they’ll guide you through the process or install it for you.

Mandatory Technical Adjustments post SSL Installation

1. Force HTTPS using Hostinger Website Dashboard: After Installing the SSL certificate, ensure that all your website visitors are redirected to the HTTPS version of your website instead of the previously-available HTTP version. To do this, log into your Hostinger account, find the “Websites” panel and click on the “Dashboard” next to the website in question. Then in WordPress > Overview find the Force HTTPS toggle and ensure it’s activated, just as illustrated below.

   

2. Force WWW using the Hostinger Tools Plugin: You may also force the www or non-www version of the website through Hostinger, but you’ll need to install the Hostinger Tools plugin in order to be able to do so. Once the Hostinger Tools plugin is installed, you will find a “Force WWW” toggle right below the existing “Force HTTPS” toggle.

3. Use HTTPS in WordPress Address and Site Address fields on WordPress: Next, you will need to ensure your website address uses HTTPS instead of HTTP by logging into your WordPress Admin, navigating to Settings > General and making sure the “WordPress Address” and “Site Address” fields use HTTPS, just like illustrated below.

   

4. Update website address in Google Analytics settings: If you’re using GA4, log into your GA4 account and select the proper in question, then click “Admin”. Find the “Data collection and modification” panel and click on “Data Streams”. Your Data Stream will list the domain that is being tracked with the corresponding HTTP or HTTPS in front of it. If needed, replace HTTP with HTTPS by clicking on the stream and then the pencil icon, as illustrated below.

   

As it happens SEO is rarely the priority when a new website is built, which eventually turns into a pretty costly endeavour. Selecting a SEO-friendly theme can go a long way in preventing SEO issues later down the line.

Practical Considerations for Selecting an SEO-friendly theme

• Responsive Design: Google is an active advocate of responsive design use. Responsive design ties into the user experience on mobile devices which is also an important SEO factor. Most, if not all, modern WordPress themes are responsive, but it’s advisable to read the theme description and ensure that it is indeed coded with various devices and screen sizes in mind.
• Simple layout: Although a subjective consideration, a WordPress theme with a more simple layout is likely to reflect favourably upon the user experience of the website. As far as SEO is concerned, it’s wiser to have a theme with just the features and layout you need and extend the functionality later than have a theme burdened by unnecessary features, which may ultimately negatively reflect on your page loading speeds and cause additional SEO issues, fixing most of which will not be possible without the input of a certified web developer.
• Woocommerce compatible: If you’ll need an online shop or you believe you might need it in the future, you’ll need your WordPress Theme to be compatible with Woocommerce.
• Multilingual: If your website will use multiple languages, look out in the Theme description for topics related to multilingual support or translation.
• Theme Tech Support: If you’re not a certified web developer, it might prove very useful if with the purchase of the theme you get at least 6 months of support. This way you can ensure you have someone to turn to in case you encounter difficulties. You may also have the option to extend the support after. the initial period expires, that’s in case you found it useful to begin with.

These are very simple (soft) but practical considerations and most modern WordPress Themes will tick all the boxes. If you’ve found a manageable list of WordPress Themes that tick all the boxes above, run a few extra tests, as detailed below.

1. HTML Mark-up Validation: Ensuring your theme follows the most basic of best practices is another important consideration. Simply copy and paste the live demo of the WordPress theme into the W3 Validator to ensure it doesn’t have major issues, as illustrated below.

   

2. Another test you need to perform to check if a WordPress theme is worth using, it is the Google Page Speed Insights test, a shown below. A test score above 90 is considered a good score.

   

When it comes to SEO, plugins should always be installed with caution, as every plugin may negatively affect your SEO. This is because when you start overloading your WordPress website with plugins, you bring all their baggage to your website. Some plugins can negatively reflect on your website page loading speeds and, as a result, on your organic rankings in search engines. So, when it comes to selecting and installing WordPress plugins, less is more.

Testing your Plugins

It is highly recommended to install any WordPress plugins you may need one at a time and test its impact on Page Loading speeds after you’ve activated the plugin. To test the impact of any given WordPress plugin on your page loading speeds, you’ll need to compare the said page loading speeds before and after installing and activating the plugin. To do just that, navigate to Google Pagespeed Insights, enter the URL of your homepage or, if your plugin is primarily employed on other URLs – enter one of those URLs and check your page loading speeds before and after the plugin activation.

Installing an SEO plugin

Depending on the specifics of your website you may have to install different kinds of WordPress plugins. However, the single most important WordPress plugin to install for SEO is an All-in-One SEO Plugin. This plugin will enable you to control all the basic SEO settings, but is by no means the only plugin you will need for SEO purposes. Although you will find that the most used SEO plugin in the industry is Yoast SEO, there’s a number of other options on the market with the Rank Math SEO standing head and shoulders above the rest. You will find the free version of the plugin to be highly useful and the paid version – very competitively priced.

Primary metrics are counts of interaction and tend to be definitive in their nature. On their own, they show limited insight on overall SEO performance, but they make up the core of the ones that do, the secondary and tertiary metrics. Primary metrics are counts of interaction and tend to be definitive in their nature. On their own, they show limited insight on overall SEO performance, but they make up the core of the ones that do, the secondary and tertiary metrics.

One instance of primary metrics is any of the Keyword Metrics including Keyword Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, Organic Traffic Potential*, and Paid Advertising Cost per Click. Another instance of primary metrics could be considered any of the Web Analytics metrics, including the Acquisition Metrics, Engagement Metrics as well as Conversion Metrics.

Some examples of Acquisition Metrics can be the number of Organic Sessions, the number of Organic Users, and the Click-Through Rate to the website or landing page. Similarly, some examples of Engagement Metrics are Bounce Rate or Google Analytics’ newly introduced Percentage of Engaged Sessions, Average Time per Session, and Average Pages per Session. Lastly two examples of Conversion Metrics are simply the number of Conversions and the Conversion Rate.

Secondary metrics are compound of relationships between select primary metrics and contexts relevant to the business. These sets of metrics afford a historical insight on SEO opportunities in a competitive context.

Things get significantly more complicated with Secondary Metrics but in simple terms, these are merely Primary Metrics viewed through an additional layer of context. For instance, in the case of Keyword Metrics, how did the Search Volume change Month-over-Month or Year-over-Year? Or in the case of Web Analytics Metrics, how did the number of Organic Sessions change or the Percentage of Engaged Sessions for that matter? Simply adding an extra layer of context, like in this case a timeframe comparison turns a primary metric (which can provide limited context on its own) into a Secondary Metric.

Tertiary metrics are likely to be determined in-house for the particular purpose of understanding the SEO impact on the website’s measurable business goals, in a competitive context as part of a changing industry.

Tertiary Metrics are the metrics that simply put can show the value of SEO beyond the SEO department. Namely, things like Return on Investment are but a single Tertiary Metric that can estimate the inputs and outputs of, for instance, a Content Marketing strategy over the period of a year, putting the monetary investment against the monetary gain over the one-year period. Tertiary Metrics are rather difficult to implement in technical terms but are rather important in large-scale organisations.

The historical development reflects the evolution of organic visibility, rankings and performance over time. By exploring these clusters of metrics at two or more points in time, inline with changes in the market, changing user behaviour, SERP fluctuations, and optimisation efforts carried on the website, SEOs can establish hypotheses to guide further actions.

The competitive landscape stands for the abstract understanding of the website’s organic competing domains within the boundaries of the website’s organic search visibility at large, as well as competing pages within specific SERPs. This can extend to direct competitors just as much as to websites that may follow divergent commercial interests but compete for the same keywords.

The SERP landscape stands for the aggregated collection of SERP factors manifested across all the SERPs the website is visible under. SERPs change and evolve over time, with a constantly increasing and decreasing number of features competing for user attention which has direct implications for the click-through-rate, organic traffic and measurement at large.

Firstly, it depends on whether you’re working with a new or an established website. Generally speaking, since older websites have been around for longer, they tend to have a stronger backlink profile, more content, as well as already established rankings for keywords. As you would expect in this case you’re likely to see results in a relatively shorter amount of time. On the other hand, newer websites need more effort and resources to get off the ground, that come especially in the form of new content and backlinks. So if you’re working on a new website, it may take longer for SEO to show results.

Next is the competitive framework. If the keywords you’re targeting are highly competitive, it will take more effort and most importantly a longer time to outrank your competition.

Thirdly, it all depends on your internal and external resources. The more resources you can dedicate to SEO the faster your results will show. For instance, you could hire more content writers to create new content, allocate human resources to link building to build backlinks or invest in SEO tools to make your work easier, faster, and more efficient.

Lastly, it all depends on your SEO strategy because a nailed-down strategy on how you will tackle your target keywords can lead to a higher chance of climbing in organic SERPs. More specifically, if you have a strategy that targets a group of highly competitive keywords, you will find that no matter your efforts it may take years before you will be able to establish first-page organic rankings. While using alternative methods by targeting low volume and low competition keywords first may bring in results faster and reinforce your efforts for ranking for shorttail keywords in the long run.