Website
establish your online presence
Website Hosting
You need a website host to store your website files in ‘the cloud’ so people can access them and read your website content. It’s like a big online hard drive. Website hosting can cost anywhere between a few dollars per month up to thousands of dollars per month, depending on how many visitors you have to your website.
I have used many hosts over the years but settled on a2 Hosting for all my new and smaller sites. With my one account, I can have heaps of websites on it. Then if they become successful I move them to a separate web hosting plan where they have more dedicated resources to support the increased website traffic.
Domain Name
A domain name is what you type into your web browser to go to a certain website. For this website, my domain is ‘beginnerseo.co’. I buy all my domains through Name Cheap.
They have great prices, and great support and include free privacy protection on domains that usually cost extra with other domain name registrars.
WordPress Theme
A website theme dictates the overall look and style of your website. I build all of my websites using GeneratePress. GeneratePress is used on millions of sites across the internet and you can use it to build almost anything you want and need.
Free and Premium Options are available. GeneratePress is built with clean, fast code, that plays well with other plugins and is a great foundation for any WordPress website.
Page Builder
A page builder is a WordPress plugin that helps you structure and design your website pages in more detail. Compared to a website theme that influences your overall site design and style, page builders assist with specific page design.
By default, WordPress includes the Gutenberg editor which helps you structure your pages, but this is limited in its abilities. GenerateBlocks is built by the makers of GeneratePress. There are both free and premium versions, and you can use it with any WordPress theme, not just GeneratePress.
Backup
If you run a WordPress website you MUST have a backup copy, in case you get hacked, or have an unexpected hosting issue. Most web hosts will include some form of backup service, but you should always independently back up your website as well.
I use MalCare and it has been amazing It not only provides backup protection, but also alerts you if your website goes down, and can provide website migration and duplication tools as well.
Security
All WordPress sites are vulnerable to attack so you need to have security in place. There are many different security plugins available, so have a look at the options and choose one.
I personally use PatchStack, and it has prevented MANY attacks on my sites and kept them up very and hacker-free very successfully.
SEO Tools
turbo charge your results
Low Fruits
Low Fruits is a relatively new tool to the SEO scene, but it has quickly become a favorite among many. Low Fruits help you find keywords that you could easily rank for. Using a range of different analysis points you can quickly see a large list of keywords on ANY topic, and then filter them based on how competitive they are, how much volume they get, and many other points.
There is a free trial, and from there you can just buy credits as you need, or opt for a monthly subscription, but it is optional.
Mangools
Mangools are a very well-priced suite of SEO tools that cover everything enabling you to find keywords, analyze other sites, view backlink profiles, monitor SERP rankings, and much more.
You can get almost get a Mangools annual subscription for the cost of one month of AHRefs or the other expensive tools. It is definitely worth a look if you need SEO tools, but can’t afford the expensive ones. This tool has helped me so much it’s not funny.
Link Whisper
The way your website pages link to each other is increasingly important. Your website interlinking has a very positive impact on the way search engines can understand your site and the relationships between all the different pages and posts. If you have hundreds of pages and posts on your website, this (interlinking) can be a very hard thing to do.
Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin that takes all the hard work out of this process. It shows you all pages that do not have any links going to them and provides suggestions for pages and text in that pages that would be worthwhile considering for interlinking. Link Whisper is a total game-changer, especially for sites with many pages.
