If there is one dominating source of traffic that delivers visitors to your website without paying a dime, it’s Google. Optimizing your website for search engines, like Google, Yahoo! and Bing, has been a widely practiced method of driving traffic to a website in recent years. Since WordPress has become one of the most commonly used content management systems (CMS), it’s only natural that you should want to find ways to set up your WordPress website to take advantage of all of this search engine traffic. Many great plugins are available to help your WordPress site when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Here are the best five plugins, all of which are available for free to download and install on your website.
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
Improve your WordPress SEO, write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. Yoast allows users to make quality, SEO optimized content making use of keywords through each and every blog post. Available for free, this is a great plugin that allows you to take control of all the meta information while providing an in-depth page analysis and a fully configurable XML sitemap.
2. W3 Total Cache
Website speed is crucial in ranking higher on Google, and W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing content delivery network (CDN) integration.
3. WP Smush.it
If you have a slow loading site, reducing image file sizes and improving performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress may help. This plugin will help greatly reduce file sizes by stripping meta data from JPGs, optimizing JPG compression, converting GIFs to PNGs and by stripping the unused colors from indexed images. Simply install the plugin and run any new or previously uploaded media through Smush.it to achieve a fast loading website.
4. All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack is very similar to the WordPress SEO by Yoast and is a great alternative if you run into problems with Yoast. The All in One SEO Pack is a WordPress SEO plugin that automatically optimizes your WordPress website for Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. This plugin offers XML sitemap support, Google Analytics support, advanced canonical URLs title optimization and more.
5. Google XML Sitemaps
Having a sitemap on your website helps Google to crawl your website and index pages. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin quickly generates a sitemap for you, as well as submit it to Google, Yahoo and Bing for you. Additionally, it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
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