Most people who decide to build a website go with WordPress because it's easy to use and it's very effective. One of the best things about WordPress is the fact you can install plugins that will do almost anything. Sooner or later you begin to realize how important SEO is when your site doesn't get any visitors. Luckily there are a number of plugins that will help you in your SEO efforts and we're going to look at some of the best ones today. Install these on your website and you'll be a few steps closer to success.
WordPress SEO is definitely one of the most powerful plugins on the market and it's free so everyone can use it. It has a number of great features and they all combine to give you a much better chance of ranking highly in search engines. You will be able to edit your meta data with ease, it will create XML sitemaps for you instantly, it will notify the main search engines about your site data, and it does so much more.
Do you use lots of images on your site? Everyone knows you need them if you want to create an attractive site for your readers, but they can be problematic because using lots of images slows down your page-loading time. When your pages take a long time to load you end up with lower rankings because Google doesn't like slow websites. The WP Smush.it plugin compresses your images and it will automatically speed up your site.
Everyone needs to know some vital stats about their website and this is a great analytics plugin that will give you all the information you need. Just make sure you don't spend all your time looking at your traffic count because it's an easy way to waste time and procrastinate. To improve your SEO you can do certain things with your stats. Drilling down on popular pages and improving bounce rates are two good examples of things you can do.
It's very important your site has a sitemap otherwise it's much harder for Google to index your content. The reason the Google XML Sitemaps plugin is so good is because it will automatically tell Google whenever you publish new content. The way the search engines work is by sending bots through the internet and they jump from link to link. A sitemap essentially means all the content on your site is available to the bots on one page.
Note from Leva: I highly recommend creating an XML sitemap. It's an easy thing you can do to tell Google about your content and improve your SEO.
We've already talked about how Google takes site speed very seriously, so you will understand why we've included this plugin. It's the best plugin in the world when it comes to making your site faster and it's very important you install it straight away. It caches all your pages which means they don't need to load from scratch when a visitor clicks through to one. Just make sure you don't mess around with the settings unless you know what you're doing.
Nancy Baker, the author of this article, is a freelance blogger, currently writing for Trice Web Development, a professional website company in Toronto. She is great at tennis and enjoys playing volleyball. You can follow Nancy on Twitter @Nancy_Baker.
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