In a previous SEO Tips article, we covered some of the most popular Wordpress plugins for SEO. This list was by no means exhaustive. There are dozens of Wordpress plugins out there on the Internet that can help to optimize your website in their own ways.
But we really only want to worry about the best ones. The plugins we are covering will get you the most bang for your buck and are easy enough for even a Wordpress novice to install and configure with minimal effort.
The plugins that we are covering here are going to help your visitors as well as search engine crawlers be able to locate your content easier.
Many of these plugins perform a specific task that, done separately, sometimes doesn't seem like it's worth your time to install. But a successful SEO campaign is a case where the end result is greater than merely a sum of it's parts. In order to be able to produce a successful, refined website you must start with a solid foundation which doesn't produce any red flags to search engines.
Let's go over a few of them:
Robots Meta
Along with 404s, search engines also hate duplicate content and Wordpress does a terrible job with duplicate content.
In addition to displaying all of your blog posts on your index page, Wordpress may also make them available under the date-based-archives and the author archives -- all with their own unique URL. To search engines, it appears as if you copied and pasted multiple blog posts to multiple URLs to try to trick the search engines into believing you have a lot of content for the particular keywords you are targeting.
Robots Meta not only allows you to prevent Google's webcrawler from crawling your date-based and author archives, but it even gives the option to disable these archives entirely.
Wordpress SEO Pager
Creating page numbers not only helps your SEO by making it easier for web crawlers to access all of your content, but it also lets your viewers browse your site easier.
Instead of just the typical 'Next Page' and 'Previous Page' links, your users will be presented with the ability to jump to specific page numbers of your blog. Because of the increased linkage to older content, search engines will be able to crawl your blog easier.
Wordpress SEO Pager this one is one of the first things you should add to any blog.
XML Sitemap Feed
Sitemaps allow search engines to find your content easier. You can even submit sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Toolbox to make it even easier for their respective search engines to crawl your site.
The XML Sitemap Feed plugin creates a Sitemap feed for your site on the fly so you never have to manually keep one updated again.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives your visitors easier access to related, older content.
YARPP analyzes your blog post as you post it and compares it to blog posts you have made in the past. If it finds any related posts, it presents your visitors with a list of posts related to the one they are reading.
YARRP is highly customizable, allowing webmaster's to set the relevance threshold or even base the search algorithm off of post titles, content, tags, or categories.
All of these plugins are designed to get your content noticed by crawlers and by your visitors. After all, what good is creating great blog content if nobody sees it?
Richard Silvers - My wife and I are practitioners of a paleolithic diet. Much of my writing covers the topics of health, nutrition, fitness, and weight ...
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