Building a successful website is a dream for many people. Unfortunately, it isn’t always as easy as people hope. Even if they build a beautiful site with useful, interesting and engaging content, it won’t be a success without people visiting the page. The number one source of traffic to most websites is Google and the other major search engines, which is why optimizing a site to improve its search rankings is extremely important.
While the list of search engine optimization (SEO) tasks may seem endless, many of them can be handled for you through powerful WordPress plugins. The trick here is to find which ones will work the best for your site. The following five have been shown to be very effective in improving your site’s overall SEO profile.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Just about every ‘top SEO plugin’ article you will ever read will have this plugin included, and it is no surprise why. It’s extremely easy to use and helps to ensure your site has everything the search engines are looking for, including things like XML sitemaps, RSS feeds, the right robots.txt files and much more. A good practice for anyone who is making a new website is to have this installed immediately after WordPress itself.
SEO Friendly Images
An area that is often overlooked by website owners is their images. Most people just put in the images that they think look good, and leave it at that. This is a major missed opportunity when it comes to SEO. With the SEO Friendly Images plugin the ‘ALT’ attribute and the ‘Title’ tag will be quickly and easily added in to every picture. The search engines look at these things to determine what the picture is about, which can help them to rank you better for important keywords and phrases.
Nginx Helper
Google has recently come out and acknowledged what many have long believed. Site load times and reliability do have some impact on search rankings. With this in mind, webmasters need to do all they can to speed up their sites, and the Nginx plugin is a great way to do just that. This plugin uses a server-level cache to speed up the serving of PHO files, images, CSS and much more. This improved efficiency will help you with SEO and the overall user experience.
WP Social SEO Booster
Search engines like Google are looking closer than ever at the way your site is shared on social media. If a post doesn’t get any social attention, it isn’t likely to rank well. This plugin helps make it easier than ever to encourage visitors to like, share, tweet or pin your posts. It also ensures that these things are done in a way that maximizes the SEO benefits.
Redirection
As you know, the internal linking structure of your site is very important for both overall user experience and SEO. There are many times when you need to adjust the layout of your site by changing some or even all of the links. When this happens, it can cause the search engines a lot of trouble, and even lead to a loss of ranking. The Redirection plugin helps to manage things like 301 redirection and 404 errors to ensure traffic is routed properly, without ever losing the original links.
While plugins can’t be a substitute for building a high quality site that gets shared and linked to a lot, they are an essential component of an overall SEO strategy. Whether you use these specific plugins, or you opt to go with others, make sure you are taking advantage of the power and convenience of WordPress plugins to improve your SEO.
For expert help with web design and development, contact the BlueHat Marketing team.
