Day 10/100: Basic SEO Setup & How Images Can Crush Your Site Speed

4 min readDec 16, 2020

Ooo one of my favourite areas of study goes into search engine optimization (SEO). How can I break this down into a sequence of steps that are quantifiable?

SEO plugin because they are extremely helpful.
Plugin setup. Sitemap, breadcrumbs and more.
Image optimization plugin from the start to maximize site speed.
Google Analytics connected.
Google Search Console connected.
SEMrush connected.
Cloudflare connected.
Site titles, descriptions and base settings SEO optimized for “no code” and “no code app builder”.

RankMath SEO Plugin

What a helpful plugin. This will save you a lot of time and headache getting your SEO settings setup. It’s free or there’s a paid version — and honestly the free version is awesome. If you get the pro version then RankMath will actually track and show you analytics data. But the free version has a step-by-step analytics setup that will connect everything you need.

The main reason to setup an SEO plugin is to have the sitemap done for you. Which is essentially a large page of text links that contains all of your content in a list style within one or two pages. This allows for Google “crawl your site” in a more structured way. Crawling just means going through page by page and then clicking on links and figuring out what pages are leading to where and then examining those posts for keywords and relevancy to search queries. Also secondary keywords, potential keywords that might get removed later on down the road.

Breadcrumbs confused me for a longtime. I didn’t know what they were. But all a “breadcrumb” shows is where you are going as a user on the website and might look like this:

Home >> Tools >> Reviews

With links to each, just to show the user where they have been. That’s all it is. But they can add to your on page time, lower your bounce rate and more. Because people will often click on these to navigate instead of your nav menu. Which makes another argument for having hub pages that lead to money pages.