There is no doubt that SEO is hard work, especially if you’re new to it. A successful SEO campaign requires a mixture of technical knowledge and networking flair and it all takes a lot of time. Luckily for you, if are undergoing an SEO campaign and your website is built with WordPress then your life is about to get a whole lot easier.
WordPress takes a lot of the headaches out of editing your website and there are some great plugins available that can really benefit your SEO campaign. If you aren’t comfortable with the more complicated aspects of editing the code of your website or using FTP then WordPress plugins can be a godsend. Here are 6 of the best that you should definitely include in your SEO strategy.
The Yoast SEO plugin is the go-to for all the basics that are needed to optimise your website. Once installed you can easily edit the Meta Tags on each page and post through a handy editable box at the bottom of the page.
You can also add your social media pages to the plugin which will make it easier for Google to index them. One of the best features of the Yoast SEO plugin is its ability to allow you to upload an XML sitemap easily without having to use FTP.
If you have recently updated your website or are going through a rebrand then the Redirection plugin will save you a lot of time and effort. Broken links can lost you potential customers as they drop will off your website and it also has an adverse affect on your overall SEO.
Redirection allows you to simply state the urls of the page you want redirected and the new destination page. So if you are optimising your urls to make them more SEO friendly then you can easily redirect the old one to the new version.
As discussed broken links can be extremely detrimental to any SEO campaign and so Broken Link Checker is perfect for finding and easily fixing broken links within your website. This plugin makes it easy to spot broken links within your content by highlighting them for you. You will also get email alerts whenever a broken link is found which makes it harder for you to forget about them. Once you have spotted the broken link all you need to do is go to the plugin page and you can easily edit all them there without having to go into each individual page and/or post..
Images are often overlooked when a website is being optimised and with the SEO Friendly Images plugin you don’t need to worry as it will take care of it all for you. Title and alt text are important pieces of information that search engine robots look for when crawling your website and now they can be automatically added to all of your images. You will probably still want to optimise some images to include specific keywords but if you have a website that is constantly uploading new images then it can save you lots of time.
It isn’t enough to drive traffic to your website, you need to convert that traffic into paying customers otherwise there’s no point to your digital marketing efforts. OptinMonster is a very useful plugin that lets you collect the email address of those who visit your site. This allows you to future these potential customers through targeted email campaigns to increase their awareness of your brand and grow to trust it.
You can create forms, pop ups, header, footer and sidebar calls to action that are great at grabbing visitors’ attention and enticing them to provide their details.
All In One schema.org Rich Snippets
How your website is displayed in the search engine results is very important as that can be the deciding factor to whether someone clicks on your result or a competitors. If you have rich snippets within your search result then you will greatly improve your chance of earning a click through into your website.
A rich snippet is an area where extra information about your website that the use may find useful is listed. They can include, review ratings, opening times, offers, prices etc. and they also extend the size of your listing which is a proven bonus for increasing the click through rate.
Using these plugins is by no means a quick fix, you will still have to work hard and keep up to date with this ever evolving industry but they will allow you to implement changes more easily and allow you to perform mundane or technical tasks with a lot more ease.
If you don’t have a WordPress website then don’t panic, there are other plugins available for a wide range of CMS’s, you just need to do some research to find the best ones.
Author Bio: David Elliott is the owner of Instant Print,a marketing and print company based in Northern Ireland.