When you’re starting a small business, are locally-based, or are simply looking to improve your search engine results ranking, you may be focusing on your online marketing and SEO strategy. If your business uses a company blog on the WordPress platform, there are more than a few plugins that can help you optimize each post, and your blog as a whole, for SEO marketing. Here are the top 5 plugins to consider.
1.All-in-One SEO Pack (AIO)
The All-in-One SEO Pack is the most popular SEO solution for WordPress blogs. This plugin automatically optimizes your WordPressblog for search engines by generating meta tags and helping you optimize web page titles. Advanced users are given the ability to customize post titles, descriptions, URL structures and tags for each post. This plugin even helps you avoid duplicate content. Perfect for both the new and experienced, most optimization-focusedWordpress sites use this plugin.
2.SEO Friendly Images
A key component to an effective blog is featuring images. Many smaller companies don’t realize they can optimize images to boost their SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings. You can generate a lot of organic traffic with this plugin that automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images don’t have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according to the settings you designate.
3.SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and even tags on your blog. Interlinking can be time consuming when done by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs. It also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” commands for links. More than anything, this is an automated linking process that saves you time.
4.Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Google, Bing, Ask, MSN and Yahoo. This plugin’s main function is to create and submit a sitemap, making it easier for the search engine crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve information more efficiently when it comes time to index your page. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages and automatically notifies all search engines when you create new content.
5.Redirection
Sometimes you need to move a page from one spot on your website or blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more. This is a very useful plugin if you are changing the directory of your WordPress installation. Several features available with this plugin are redirection of any URL and redirection using various methods, such as redirecting to random pages, redirecting based upon a referrer, etc.
When it comes to SEO marketing and WordPress, of course there are things you want to avoid, but these 5 WordPress plugins can help you stay on track while optimizing your site for search engine marketing. Even if you’re using WordPress for a personal blog, having these tools can help you generate more traffic and rank higher in search engine results.
About the Author
Erica Bell is a small business writer who focuses on topics such as SEO marketing and online marketing. She is a web content writer for Business.com.
