Guaranteed SEO Benefits With WordPress Plugins
There are many ways to gain guaranteed SEO benefits for your website if you are using the WordPress CMS, some more effective than others. Most of your benefits will be with off site SEO but there can be some on site SEO advantages. People reading this article may or may not be aware that the majority of your SEO benefits will come from off site SEO, back linking is a huge one, especially if you are anchoring your back links with the correct text. Here I will not go into this aspect of SEO however, this article is more concerned with how you can improve on site SEO via WordPress plugins.
As you are probably already aware there are thousands upon thousands of WP plugins that all claim to benefit you in some way, not all are made equally however and sorting through all the garbage to actually find something of real use is extremely hard work, especially if you are new to WordPress and all the plugins that are available. I cannot claim to be an expert on every single plugin available, the number to be tested is just too many and would take a lifetime to test individually but the following list shows a few of the plugins that I find are most useful for my personal needs and do give me guaranteed SEO advantages of one description or another.
Your list may vary depending on the reason why you are building a WP site but I think most people will find the list to be of use for the basics plus a few added extra bonuses. While some of these plugins are not directly related to SEO they may help you to avoid disasters that will ruin your sites credibility with both search engines and visitors alike so do not be fooled by the simplicity of what some of them do. While on site and off site SEO are very, very important the integrity of your site as a whole does come into play. If your site goes down or is slow or littered with links that go nowhere these problems will all add up to a bad site that both man and machine will dislike and avoid. One more point that you should bear in mind when installing plugins: Do not over do it! I bring up page speed further into this article, one of the things that will slow your site down is a lot of plugins.
Certain plugins are non optional, a sitemap and a database backup are for example 2 things that you absolutely need but if others are going to be of little use to you, forget them! Use your head in regard to what you need for the function of your site. Never install a plugin just for the sake of it, only use them to improve functionality! WordPress plugins with guaranteed SEO benefits The first thing that any site needs is a sitemap, you don’t need to be a coding expert and create your own thankfully with ‘Google XML sitemaps’. There are other sitemap plugins out there but this is one of the most trusted out there and something that no WordPress site should be without. ‘Yoast breadcrumbs’ is a great breadcrumb plugin that will leave a trail for your readers to be able to find their way around with greater ease. If set up correctly it will also help with internal SEO as it makes the text bold for the current page in the breadcrumb trail and also allows to set your own anchor text for both the homepage and blog page. The ‘official Statcounter plugin’ is another great piece of kit for your website, while it does not offer any immediate guaranteed SEO benefits the information that can be garnered from Statcounter.com is invaluable in your future SEO decisions.
Where are your visitors coming from? Where do your visitors go from your site? What keywords are attracting visitors? With this information and more you can start to make future plans, see what is working and see what is a wasting your time. It is well documented that Google now takes into account the speed that your website loads, feeding cached versions of your sites web pages is a no brainer when you take also consider that visitors may also click away if your page takes too long to load.
Help to improve page speed by using the ‘W3 total cache’ plugin. If you also have a lot of things going on in your sidebars you may also consider ‘WP widget cache’. Something that every WordPress site needs is a backup system of some kind. I recommend ‘WordPress Database Backup’. Depending on how active your site is you can set the plugin to Email you a complete backup of your site anywhere from every 900 seconds to bi monthly. Guaranteed SEO benefits? Well… How good is it for your SEO if your site crashes and you have to start from scratch? Ever had your content stolen from your site via your RSS feed?
Then you will like the next plugin. It’s called ‘RSS footer‘, a simple yet effective plugin that shows a link on the post that they stole which leads right back to your site, if anybody scrapes your feed content the guaranteed SEO benefit is that you get free keyword optimized back links and maybe a few visitors from the thieving gits site.:-D Bonus! ‘Broken link checker’ Ever been in a rush and put a link into a post or page that is not correct only to find out days or weeks later? (Do you have some that you didn’t find at all come to think of it!?) This plugin will monitor your site and report any links that are not working so you can correct them immediately. Google hates broken links and your visitors won’t like them too much either, neither should you if you want your site to do what you want it to do and direct visitors where you want them to go. How often do you finish off a page or post and notice mistakes?
You go back and correct them and then you make a couple of improvements and tweaks to the page, hitting the update button every few minutes to put it right… Bad!! Every time you post or update one of your pages WordPress automatically pings the Pingomatic site, if you are repeatedly pinging all the time your blog can get banned from the update sites for ping spam. Cure this with ‘cbnet Ping Optimizer’ which will only allow pinging when you actually publish for the first time. Pinging on an update will be disabled hence protecting you from being labelled as a ping spammer. Best of luck with your WordPress site, I hope this information was of use to you.