These Top 5 Powerful WordPress Plugins Help With SEO and Rankings
Website design does not need to be as difficult as it is made out to be. In the past, it was a requirement and a must to have to hire a web designer to setup your website. With the advancements in the website hosting platforms, and the amount of open source scripts, like WordPress, anyone can setup a professional website in a matter of minutes. If you go with WordPress, then there are going to be some specific WordPress plugins you will need to install to make the most of your site.
For starters, you will need a plugin to help with the search engine optimization. The one WordPress plugin I recommend for this is the All-In-One-SEO plugin. WordPress by itself does a bad job with SEO, so a plugin is required to help get your sites ranked well.
One of the SEO tips people fail to do is the interlinking of the internal pages of the site. There are a few plugins which do this, but the one I recommend is the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). This plugin runs a calculation, and determines the most related posts on the site. It then lists these below the original post on the page. This helps with internal links and also with adding more topic related content on the page.
You will also need to analyze the website traffic. Most people use Google Analytics for the their traffic stats. And, while this is good, I like to use Statpress Reloaded. This is an awesome plugin that allows you to look at the traffic to your site while still in the admin area. I especially use it to see if I have any error pages, and then I can fix these immediately.
Here is one of my most favorite plugins: Wptouch iPhone Theme. It seems everyone has an iphone, or android, or the Blackberry. The problem with these is normal websites just do not look good on here. The Wptouch plugin determined the viewers Operating System (OS), and then displays your website based on this. This is a growing traffic area, so you should be making sure you have this optimized and monetized as well.
And, of course, you still need to let Yahoo, MSN, and Google know you have updated web pages. Installing the Google Sitemaps Plugin takes care of this for you. It only takes a minute to setup, and then it runs automatically for you.
Those are my top 5 WordPress plugins you must have in order to even begin to be a successful blogger. Since you can install all of the plugins directly from the admin dashboard, it makes it a piece of cake to get your WordPress blog/website optimized and ready to run. So, if you are using WordPress for your website, just make sure these additional powerful plugins are installed. Without them, you will have a much more difficult time being successful.