With the boom of the Internet, almost everybody, from businesses to individuals, to the celebrity and even just the ordinary people have established a presence in the World Wide Web by creating their own website. Creating a website is very easy especially now that there are a lot of free and user-friendly content management platforms (like WordPress) where anybody can start a website.
But because there are millions of websites that abound, competing to be known in the Internet world by ranking at the top of popular search engine results is difficult and can be a very big challenge for any website owner. This is where Search Engine Optimization or SEO comes into the picture. Website owners can implement SEO strategies to improve their site performance and position themselves to be found online.
With WordPress, you can take advantage of the platform’s plugin architecture to enhance your ability to implement your SEO strategies. And there are loads of SEO plug-ins that have been developed by the WordPress community. Let’s see which ones are the most essential:
(Also, be sure to check out our previous post on five unlikely WP plug-ins designed to improve your site’s SEO.)
All in One SEO Pack
As the name implies, this is an all-in-one package for taking care of your on-site optimization. It is very easy to use as you don’t have to customize the options because the default settings have been setup to optimize a site’s SEO. (It works out of the box, and all a beginner has to do is install the plugin.) It has features like automatic optimization of titles, support for custom post types, advanced canonical URLs, Google Analytics support, prevention of duplicate content, and many more.
HeadSpace2
This WP SEO plug-in is a meta-tag manager so blog owners can customize the meta-tag documents (for pages, posts, categories, home page, etc.) and fine-tune the SEO capabilities of their site. With the plug-in, it would be easier to configure meta-data and define tags, keywords, meta descriptions, title tags, site name and description, custom themes, and more.
Google XML Sitemaps
Installing this WP SEO plug-in will create an XML sitemap for helping search engine crawlers find and index your WordPress website or blog faster. The more pages in your site gets indexed, the more you will have a good chance to rank in the top pages of these search engines.
SEO Smart Links
This SEO plug-in interlinks the different keywords and phrases in your post to any related page or category, which can drive more hits for the different pages in your site. This eliminate the burden of manually linking specific keywords to pages, so you can use this time instead in writing valuable content for your site.
Digg Digg
Website owners should not dismiss the power of social media marketing to help improve a site’s SEO. Almost everybody has a social networking account, and that’s what makes social media sites such an awesome venue for promoting your website and increasing your site’s traffic. This WP SEO plug-in is an all-in-one share-buttons tool, with icons for different social networks like Facebook, Google+1, Twitter, Digg, and more. Digg Digg also shows the number of times a post has been shared on these different social networking sites.
About the author: Abie is a freelance blogger and works as an article writer for www.tshirtprinting.org Tshirtprinting.org is a brand new site, which offers personalized clothing and tshirt printing