9 SEO Plugins Every Wordpress Blog Should Have
The best place by far to find traffic is from search engines. The art of Search Engine Optimization is often very daunting for new bloggers. Even some experienced bloggers just see SEO as a cloudy puddle of mud they would rather not play in.
Wordpress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of other things that can be done to make your blog rank better. Fortunately there are plugins available to help you get better rankings for your blog, so you don’t have to go digging into the code of your blog to get some results from search engines.
I’m not going to explain the validity or effects of each of these SEO tactics in detail. There is more than enough of that on the Internet already if you want to do some research. I’ll mention briefly what the benefits of each plugin is, and why you need it.
This allows you to set the basic SEO stuff for your blog. You need page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.
2. Redirection
From time to time you make changes on your blog. Sometimes these changes end up breaking your Permalink structure. This often happens when you make a change to an old post, or do an upgrade to Wordpress and make some changes to the permalinks. It’s very very common if you move your blog from one host to another.
Basically what happens is that each post has a unique URL, called a permalink. When this changes, visitors who go to that blog post won’t find it. The redirection plugin helps you fix these problems by redirecting the visitor to the new permalink. This reduces the amount of traffic you get to pages that don’t exist.
3. Robots Meta
By default search engines crawl and index ALL the pages on your blog. This isn’t ideal, because it creates duplicate content and you can get yourself punished by search engines without knowing it. What the Robots Meta plugin allows you to do is tell the search engines which sections of your blog to crawl. This means that you’ll get more respect from search engines, and likely more traffic.
One of the key issues with SEO is your internal linking structure. The more you link to a certain page on your blog, the more important it is to your overall content. Search engines treat your internal links as an indication of how well structured your site is. The problem with this is that if you had to manually go and create links to relevant and important posts you’ll spend hours and hours doing it.
SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘SEO’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word SEO appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.
Images also play an important role in your SEO strategy. So it’s important that you tag them correctly. SEO Friendly images allows you to do this, and saves you hours and hours of work. If, like most bloggers you use images in your posts, then this plugin is essential.
It’s important to know your keywords. And this handy plugin allows you to track the keywords you’re getting searches for. It’s pointless selecting a few keywords, then writing some content for those keywords and hoping that the rest goes well. SEO is about being proactive and tracing what works and what doesn’t.
7. Permalinks Moved Permanently
A common mistake bloggers make is choosing the wrong permalink structure. When you start your blog you think you know which is best, and as time goes buy you want to change your permalink structure. The problem with changing your permalink structure is that your traffic will come to a standstill until your site is reindexed, and that could take months.
This plugin is similar to redirect but is an easier and better way to manage permanent permalink changes.
The nofollow attribute over the last year or two has had a fairly large impact on the blogosphere. All comments in Wordpress by default are nofollow links. This means that no Page Rank (PR) is being given via the link. This plugin changes that and makes comment links valuable again. There are a number of reasons you would want to give away link juice. It’s often used to attract people and encourage them to comment. It can be very useful for new blogs who need some exposure.
9. SEO Slugs
Stop words are ignored by search engines. So most of your post titles have them in, but they are meaningless to search engines. So when you have a post title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” you have a permalink like this: ‘/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings’ but what you really want is for your permalink to look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings.
This plugin automatically removes stop words from the permalink, helping you to rank better.
Setting Up Wordpress Permalinks To Maximize Search Engine Rankings
Wordpress has become one of the most popular content management systems and blogging platforms for many people in today’s connected world, rivaled only by Typepad (another content management system) because of Typepad’s mobile blogging capabilities.
Among the features that make Wordpress so popular are the simple interface and secure environment, but when it comes to making money with your Wordpress blog you are going to want to rely on plugins and additions in order to maximize traffic, search engine rankings and revenue potential.
What you are going to learn in this article is the concept of a permalink as it relates to your Wordpress blog, as well as how you can tweak this feature in order to gain more control over the way your page address is displayed, the way that a search engine spider will rank each individual page, and even how you can use keywords properly in order to serve the highest paying contextual ads (using Google’s Adsense program for example).
First, what is a permalink? Well it is just like it sounds, it is a permanent link to a post on your blog. In order to understand the concept behind permalinks it is important to understand exactly what a CMS does and why this can be so much easier than running a traditional HTML website.
In a nutshell, the purpose behind a content management system (CMS) is to completely separate the content from the page layout, as well as to provide a simple interface where it is easy to add new content. It is also important to note that the structure of a blog is different than a traditional HTML site; whereas in traditional sites new content will be added via ‘deep linking,’ new content on a blog shows up directly on the front page. This is why permalinks are important, because your post will show up on the front page of your blog only temporarily and it needs to have a permanent link as well.
There are many different criteria that you can use when setting up your permalink structure, and this is where search engine optimization and relevant high-paying Adsense ads come in to the picture. One of the biggest factors in search engine algorithms and contextual ad serving technology is filenames, and so it is important to create a permalink structure for your Wordpress blog that will include relevant keywords that are prechosen for your title.
The default permalink structure (depending on your version of Wordpress) will either be simply numbering each post sequentially or it will be the date of the post. This does not tell a search engine spider any relevant information about your post, and as such your pages will usually rank lower in any type of hypertext-based search engine.
What you need to do to make your Wordpress posts search engine friendly is to make your permalinks display the post title and possibly category title, and then choose post and category titles that include keywords relevant to your topic. You can optimize your pages for higher paying Adsense ads by determining which keywords pay out the most per click and then using those keywords in your post and category titles.
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