5 Plugin’s to Boost Your WordPress SEO !

February 7, 2013 Blogging Guide

English: seo block (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When you’re a freelance SEO consultant you get to work with many types of blogs and websites. From all of those, my favorite type to optimize is WordPress blogs. By default WordPress is well optimized for search engines. But combined with plugins it becomes a SEO’s dream website. Below are 5 plugins that will surely enhance your search engine rankings.

1#WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is my favorite SEO plugins. It has many features and there are comprehensive guides explaining exactly what you need to get the best out of those features. Also it is perfect for people who are not tech savvy. For example instead of manually adding your Google webmaster tools code by modifying files you can just add those data in a data field provided by the plugin. Some of its features include the ability to optimize titles, automatically generate XML site maps, ability to add breadcrumb navigation and ability to add RSS signatures.
But it doesn’t stop there. Whenever you’re writing your next post it provides guidelines on how to best optimize that post for search engines. The advice given always updated to match the latest SEO trends. And best of all, it’s totally free to download.

2#Broken Links Checker

For search engines broken links mean bad user experience. It could be a comment link left two years back in a post that doesn’t get any traffic, but a search engine crawler won’t know that. This is why it is essential that you install a broken link checked that periodically does the scan for you. No broken links mean better user experience and good user experience means better search engine rankings.

3#Internal Linking Plugin

Internal linking is important because of many reasons. For one thing it reduces the bounce rate which is a positive sign for search engines. Also it gives you a chance to highlight and constantly direct people to your most important pages. Internal linking plugins automate this process for you. You can specify some keywords and the plugins automatically links to the specified page when those keywords are mentioned. You don’t have to worry about excessive linking because most internal linking plugins allows you to specify how many links per page etc.
An added advantage is you get links from your older posts as well, without having to do anything extra.

4#Exploit Scanner

One big advantage of WordPress is that it has thousands of themes and plugins. With so many out there it is easy for hackers to exploit any vulnerable theme or plugin and hack your website. Exploit scanners scan the code for you and alert you to those dangerous codes. Most of the time it is an innocent mistake by the programmer, but sometimes these things can be done with malicious intent.
Hidden links in themes can really hurt your website rankings. If you link to gambling or adult sites without your knowledge it can hurt your rankings and in some cases get your site removed from the index as well. It’s always good to have a better safe than sorry approach.

5#WordPress Caching

Page load time is becoming a critical factor in search engine rankings. Fast loading websites means better user experience and search engines gives preference to those sites in search results. As the name suggests caching plugins cache your blog pages and quickly retrieve them for interested users. Not only will you have happy users but fewer loads on your servers as well.