Wordpress is a fantastic free and easy to use platform for delivering online content that has become incredibly popular over the past few years. Indeed, the blog you are reading right now is run using Wordpress. What really sets it apart from other blogging platforms is the ease with which it can be modified to work exactly the way you need it to using different themes and plugins.
Here we are going to look at 5 top recommended plugins to help you optimise and attract traffic to your blog. In most cases plugins take just a few seconds to install. Simply click on the link we’ve provided, and download the file from the following page. If you’re using Wordpress 2.7 just click “plugins” on your dashboard and upload the whole zip file you just downloaded using the hander installer. If using Wordpress 2.6 or older, simply unzip the file and upload the contents via FTP to the wp-content/plugins directory of your full Wordpress installation. Then log into wordpress, click on “plugins” and activate.
This Plugin is surely the daddy of all SEO plugins available for Wordpress right now. As the name suggests, All in One SEO Pack provides all the basic functions you need to optimise important aspects of your wordpress blog. With it you can;
- Manually designate the title, description and keywords on your homepage, and an optimised format for all other post and page titles. For example, your initial wordpress install will place the name of your blog first in the title tag of each new blog post, page or category, which is not ideal for SEO. All in One SEO pack allows you to construct a format that works best for your blog (typically the post title first, followed by your blog title).
- Enter META keywords and descriptions for each new post or page, or generate them automatically.
- Avoid the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs by blocking access to category and archive pages.
2. Google Analytics for Wordpress
Google Analytics has continued to increase in popularity, due in no small part to the fact that it is free, but also thanks to its ever expanding toolset allowing for more in-depth analysis. If you’re currently only running the standard Wordpress Blog Stats plugin, or you are running no tracking system at all, you really should consider signing up and installing Google Analytics to find out more about the traffic that is visiting your site. Installation requires some code to be entered into your blog’s template, however, which can be daunting for anyone unfamiliar with the many languages of the web (editing a single wordpress template typically requires a basic understanding of HTML, PHP and CSS). Google Analytics for Wordpress provides a quick and easy way to automatically add the code you are provided with on signup to Google Analytics, so you can start tracking your traffic right away.
This plugins automatically generates and updates an XML sitemap file on your site. This file is simply a list of all posts and pages, allowing search engines to quickly find and index them all. What’s more, when you submit the address of your sitemap (typically www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) to Google Webmaster tools (sign up using the same information used to access Google Analytics), your blog will automatically inform Google immediately whenever a new post or page is published, helping your new post to be indexed in a matter of hours, rather than days.
4. Redirection
From time to time, you might will want to change the URLs of your pages or posts. There are a number of reasons you might want to do this; you may wish to change the name of a post or page, and so change the URL to match, for example. Use Redirection to make sure users and search engine spiders are seamlessly redirected from any old URLs to their newer counterparts, or risk losing traffic thanks to old, dead URLs that lead only to your error page.
5. Sociable
If you’ve spent any time reading about SEO in general, you’ll have heard the mantra “the best thing you can do to optimise your site is write good, compelling content, as other internet users might link to it from their own blogs and websites”. While this strategy is indeed effective, it brings with it two problems; actually coming up with good, compelling content, and then getting people to read it. Unfortunately there’s no Wordpress plugins to write great content for you (yet!), but you can put the content you write in front of potentially thousands of eyeballs using Sociable.
The Sociable plugin makes it easy for you to add bookmarking buttons for your favourite social networks such as digg, stumbleupon and reddit to each post and page on your blog, reminding your readers to spread the love a little if they liked what they read. Whenever someone uses a social network to bookmark a page on your site, they will send other users with similar interests from that same network. Thankfully these networks tend to be used in part by precisely the kind of people you want to target - bloggers and other website owners who might link to your site as a citation, recommendation, or simply to provoke discussion on their own blog.
So go ahead, install these plugins and watch your traffic jump. Need help coming up with content that grabs your visitor’s attention? Drop Fluid Creativity a line at info@fluidcreativity.co.uk and let us help you with some ideas.
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