Boosting WordPress SEO: Tips and Plugins
Plugins are a wonderful thing that enable layman bloggers to setup amazing blogs on their own. One of things every blogger, layman or hardcore webmaster, needs to keep in mind is SEO. Search engine optimization isn’t an easy thing for everyone to wrap their head around. Fortunately, there are a ton of plugins out there to help us manage our SEO. Here are a couple tips for giving your site the extra search engine lift it needs.
Almost every single post on this subject lists the same exact tips. With this quick list, I want to set you up with a couple actionable tips that will immediately make an impact on your blog without restating a lot of what’s been said out there.
SEO Auto Linker
Interlinking your content is very important to keep search engines interested in your website. SEO Auto Linker lets you automatically target content with specific keywords. Basically, you make a list of keywords you want to hyperlink to content on your website. So if you run a blog about freelancing and have written a post about Adobe Photoshop, you can have the keyword “Adobe Photoshop” link to to your original post about Photoshop in every post you ever write. This makes ranking for specific keywords a lot easier.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
In the spirit of promoting your older content, a plugin you must install on your blog is called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Don’t let the name fool you though, this isn’t just another related posts plugin. This plugin is widely regarded as the best(just scroll down on the plugin’s main directory page for glowing testimonials). The algorithm behind the plugin makes sure it only displays older posts that are directly relevant to the current post your visitors are viewing. It even lets you fully customize the way the related posts are being displayed, giving you the ability to ensure it doesn’t conflict with the style of your blog.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links on a website are never a pretty thing. A broken link is bad for SEO. A link that doesn’t work means less stuff for a search engine to analyze. It also means your visitors are disappointed with a dead-end. This plugin is very simple, it scans to see if there are broken links associated with your blog. If it minds any errors, you can rectify the issue by fixing a post’s title or by whipping another post. This saves you a lot of headache in the long run as you don’t have pesky factors like broken links hindering your search ranking.
Image Optimization
Images in blog posts are good tool for expressing concepts visually or simply catching the eye of readers. Besides being great visual tools, they’re also important when it comes to SEO. Adding “alt” tags to images shows Google how the image is relevant to your post and what it’s about. In the end, this simply means more visitors for your blog. Who doesn’t want that? Now to add “alt” tags, all it takes is adding alt=”image-keyword-here” to the HTML snippet for the image. However if HTML is something you’re not proficient in, this plugin may be of interest to you.
Author Highlights
When you search for something in Google and see an author’s picture, that picture is called an “author highlight.” This tiny little picture catches the eyes of potential visitors and helps you seem like an authority on a certain niche or subject. Enabling this feature is very very simple, to do follow these steps:
1. Sign up for Google+ and and in your profile, make sure you have a link to your website
2. Add this snippet in the section of your WordPress header file:
(Place your own Google+ posts URL in the quotes next to href)
3. In your Google+ settings, make sure all of your +1’s are public
