Let’s face it, online marketing is more than just advertising your company on the internet. Google has evolved into a verb for searching, and your page rank is essential. Be it your personal blog, or your online business, search engine optimization is crucial for securing the top position on a search.
Many people underestimate page rank because they do not understand just how important it is to be the top rank. In some cases, the 1st position is clicked 90% more than the 2nd position. With an average click difference of 50-70%, page rank and SEO is not to be taken lightly.
There is no perfect formula for SEO. There are literally hundreds of factors that determine your page rank on Google with some factors that weigh heavier than others. Here are 5 plugins for your WordPress that can boost your website in a search engine.
1. Super Cache
One big factor is how long your website takes to load. Since your WordPress site is dynamic (content always changes, i.e. blog, news site), it will take your browser longer to load your site compared to a site with static html files. If your site takes longer to load, then the search engine bots will move on to the next site and rank your website lower. To fight this issue, Super Cache was created. What this plugin does, is create static html files, almost like a screenshot of your website which your webserver will serve contrary to the more complicated PHP files. This can shave valuable seconds off your load time which can considerably boost your page rank.
2. SEO Smart Links
Link building is crucial for SEO. SEO Smart Links is a clever plugin to link around your site. When blog topics match certain keywords, Smart Links will automatically link those keywords to your posts. There are also options for nofollow, ignoring keywords and a lot more.
3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (Yarpp)
Let’s face it, most people do not like to search through archives and prefer having exactly what they need right at their fingertips. Yarpp will do exactly that. This plugin is excellent for showing your viewers related content to the current entry they are viewing. By keeping your viewers’ interests peaked, you will keep your viewers clicking around your site thus increasing your overall page rank.
You can customize the threshold limit for relevance for your related posts to ensure relevancy. Yarpp will also cache the relevant posts to optimize performance.
4. WordPress SEO Plugin
Even though a lot of SEO is very technical, you don’t have to be a computer programmer to leverage SEO. This plugin is very comprehensive in its offerings. It allows you to take advantage of a lot of backend WordPress features that the average WodPress user may not know about.
5. SEO Ultimate
SEO Ultimate is another all in one SEO plugin that includes many different tools for optimization. When it comes to your WordPress, there are multiple tools you may have to utilize to fully optimize it for search engines. With SEO Ultimate, you can reduce your plugin clutter to just one simple and easy SEO plugin. With a convenient SEO menu in your WordPress menu, you will be able to use a canonicalizer (reduce duplicate penalties), customize meta descriptions, rewrite your titles and much much more.
Think there should be a SEO plugin that’s not on here? Feel free to let us know!
