6 Must Have WordPress SEO Plugins
You’ve built a website and now have a presence online, what’s next? Well, building a presence online is only good if people can find you. That means it’s time to focus on a couple things, advertising your website and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is an integral part of how people will find your website. It’s also one of the best ways to improve your brand presence online and help create more organic traffic and customers to your website. WordPress out of the box is already quite good for SEO, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it better. The following SEO plugins are a good place to start.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most widely used SEO plugins around. It’s a great starting point for improving your site’s SEO. WordPress SEO by Yoast helps you write better content by forcing you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles. It then makes sure you’re using that focus keyword everywhere, offering you a SEO grade and suggestions on what you can do to improve.
Use Google Libraries
One key thing that your SEO will be graded on is how fast your site is, especially now as more and more people are using mobile devices to browse the web. Use Google Libraries allows you to harness the power of Google’s AJAX Library API by using their content distribution network. This increases the chance that a user will already have key WordPress files cached on their computer which means fewer URL requests and a faster site.
Google XML Sitemaps
Let search engines know you exist, this helpful plugin generates an XML sitemap that makes it easier for search engines to see your website’s structure and index it in their systems. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin also notifies search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com every time you create new content on your site.
SEO Friendly Images
Though ALT and TITLE tags’ importance in SEO has lessened, they are both still very important and often overlooked attributes for images. The ALT attribute is used to describe your images to search engines as well as screen readers. The TITLE attribute informs visitors about the picture, giving them its title and/or more information, when they hover over the image. SEO Friendly Images makes sure that all images in your pages and posts have proper ALT and TITLE attributes by automatically adding them if they aren’t already set.
SEO Plugin by Squirrly
The SEO Plugin by Squirrly offers a lot of the same features that WordPressSEO by Yoast offers as far as making sure your page has a focus keyword and that the keyword is used everywhere. The major difference between the two is that the SEO Plugin by Squirrly offers a cool feature that grabs relevant content off the web (such as: images, tweets, wikis, news articles, and other blogs) that you can link to or use as a reference in order to make your article better.
RB Internal Links
One way to improve your page SEO is to adjust your page URL to contain your keywords. The only problem with this is the potential for broken links, especially if you’ve linked to that page internally in past posts (ie: not just in the site menu but a link on a random page in a random paragraph). No one likes broken links and even more importantly broken links hurt your SEO ranking. Having to find internal page links that need to be updated can be daunting and (depending on how many posts or pages you have on your site) time consuming. Fortunately the RB Internal Links plugin can solve this problem. RB Internal Links uses the post ID to link rather than the URL itself. This means that if you want to change the URL of a page or post you can without having to worry about breaking your internal links.
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