WordPress SEO Plugins Popular With the WordPress Community
Learn About These WordPress SEO Plugins – Improve Your SEO – Practice Ethical, Approved SEO Techniques
Plugins:
(1) All in One WordPress SEO Plugins Pack or
(2) WordPress Seo by Yoast
Note: The Jetpack Plugin that has dozens of features all in one plugin also have an Enhanced Distribution feature that you can activate. This feature automatically takes your content and shares it with search engines. But to take the WordPress SEO Plugins to a more advanced level there are specific plugins such as the All In One SEO Pack or WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Search Engine Optimization – Definition: Process of creating the site with the goal of ranking high in the search engine results.
WordPress SEO plugins. Each of these SEO plugins will automatically optimize your site for search engines. Beginners can appreciate the ease of this and more advanced WordPress users can use a long list of features to fine tune their sites.
Why SEO Is So Important
The SEO plugins will help your site to come up higher in the search engine rankings. Visitors who have been motivated enough to type in search words on an internet browser, check the results and choose to click on a website or blog are especially valuable visitors. They found your site because they have a problem, a need, or a desire that needed to be solved or met. They were not just passing the time browsing but had a specific goal to meet.
After a deliberate search they found your site. The visitors who come to your site this way are targeted towards a niche. Your site is the niche they seek. That is why search engine traffic is so highly sought. Everywhere on the internet you see services offering SEO services.
It Takes Time to Learn the Features of These SEO Plugins But It is Worth It
It takes some time and work to become familiar with all of the many features offered by either of these SEO plugins. But this is a very important part of your website or blog.
Good SEO helps you get ranked higher in the search engine rankings. Visitors who found your website by doing searches are motivated visitors. They are the niche visitors you want because they are taking action and showing energetic interest.
Use One of These Plugins, Become Educated About SEO, Avoid the “Black Hat” SEO Marketers
You might be just starting out with WordPress. The internet is full of hype and marketers promoting what is termed “black hat” and “grey hat” SEO. If you are new to creating a website or blog it can be very confusing.
You are at risk for being taken advantage of by marketers who promise easy results that are based on “black hat” approaches. Often they are using terms in their advertising to show they have an approach that takes advantage in an unfair or artificial way.
Learn as much as you can about “white hat” SEO so you can be one of the “good guys.” Protect yourself from being vulnerable to the “black hat” approach due to lack of knowledge. They often charge large sums of money, make big promises, and use a lot of hype.
I have known people who spent several thousand dollars at once on programs because they believed it would work only to find that the techniques were out of date and/or offering solutions that can get you banned from websites or in other trouble.
Regardless of which plugin you choose it will be of enormous help to read the SEO guide by Yoast. It is a complete blueprint so you can understand the terms, concepts and steps. SEO is such a complex subject.
There are so many scammers and marketers offering artificial manipulations for SEO. If you read the guide you will be educated about the right way to do SEO. Avoid the “black hat” and “grey hat” hyped up SEO marketing compaigns.
Below is a brief list of some of the main features each of these SEO systems offers. They are both ranked top in popularity with the WordPress community.
When you install these plugins they both work automatically, out of the box, so beginners can start to get some of the benefit right away. Each offers a variety of features and ways to improve and fine tune your website.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Below are some of the features of the WordPress by Yoast plugin. These are highlights and to see the real depth of the details in this plugin you can go to the website for WordPress SEO by Yoast.
- SEO Guide. First, read the free guide, WordPress SEO, The Definitive Guide to Higher Ranking for WordPress Sites by Yoast. It is regularly updated and has a handy table of contents outline so you can look up specific topics.
- Content. Writing better content by focusing on keywords and snippets is one of the top features of SEO by Yoast.
- Keywords. Focusing on a keyword and using it consistently is part of this system. You can check keyword demand and competition by going to the Google Keyword Tool for starters. Additionally there are many other keyword tools for analyzing and determining which keywords to use.
- Snippets. Snippet previews help you see how your title and meta description will look in search engine rankings so you can alter the length or content ahead of time. When visitors look at the search engine results to decide which link to click they evaluate the snippet that shows with your website link.
- Lindex Page Functionality checks your page for: length of post, meta descriptions, using your keyword suitably, added the alt text for images, subheadings and other features.
- Meta Titles. Write meta titles and descriptions for categories.
- Taxonomy. Tag and Custom Taxonomy Archives
- Settings and Permalinks for SEO. Permalinks refers to the link that goes with each individual post or page on your website. The default permalink looks like a string of characters but if you reset the permalinks you can choose to have them show something like website domain, category and post or page name. If this permalink comes up in a list of search engine results the visitors can read the link along with the snippet to decide whether to click and go to your site. Search engines can gather data from permalinks also when they have been reset.
- Meta and Link Elements for SEO
- XML Sitemaps – automatically creates sitemaps and notifies search engines that sitemaps exist
- Breadcrumbs Navigation
- File Editor built in
- Multiple Blogs. Use on multiple blogs with installing it only once
- This is just a brief introduction to the main topics to help you get started. At the WordPress SEO by Yoast main website you can study it in-depth.
All in One SEO Pack
As with the plugin by Yoast this list shows some of the main aspects of the All In One SEO Pack. To understand the details in greater depth please visit the website for the plugin.
- Supports – Google Analytics and Custom Posts
- Canonical URLs
- Page Links for SEO
- API extends functions
- Ecommerce integrated with SEO
- Security
- Titles optimized
- Meta Tags created
- Duplicate Content avoided
You can read about each of them by visiting these links.
Steps to Install
- Once you decide which seo plugin to use follow the steps.
- Go to the Dashboard
- Go to Plugins, Add New
- Type the plugin name in the search box.
- Click Install when the plugin shows up in the list.
- Go to the Plugins to Installed Plugins
- Click under the Plugin to Activate.
- There will be a place to choose Settings. First click on Details under the plugin name next to Activate to read more about it. The screenshots, directions, settings and steps will be listed whichever one of the plugins you have chosen.
- Go ahead and start setting up the plugin. These plugins have more steps and more to read than the typical plugin. There is a lot you can do to improve your site’s SEO.
- The work is worth it when you start getting ranked higher in the search engines and getting more visitors.