Awesome post. I've researched some of this and appreciate your sharing.
Some of this (Image compression) I haven't come across, as many of the sites discussing SEO are all trying to sell expensive courses and tools. Following you now so I can read what else you've written on this.
Thank you so much!
You are right. I have spent hundreds of dollars as well. It is here on Hive now - for free. I am just glad to share my experience.
Because we only have "profiles" here, we can't install a plugin to make bulk changes (renaming, compression, etc). That is why I kept this to the minimum, so one can easily get started.
Otherwise image optimization is really easy.