WordPress is the most effective and extremely easy CMS and also very popular platform. WordPress is customizable and you can customize everything as you want. About more than 60 million people chosen WordPress for their website just because the user friendliness and flexibility. The most powerful matter is their plugin support and most of them are free. You do not need to know much about coding because plugins are going to do the rest. Plugin is going to do all the work for you, which is quite impossible by coding. As this is the most useful platform for website, developers are getting active and developing lots of powerful plugins and themes.
If you are not using WordPress and just started blogging in blogger platform, then also I have one article for you ” How to Do SEO for Blogspot Blogs? “.
There are lots of important and must have plugins for WordPress that will not only help you for developing a well designed website but also increase your trust. Many helpful plugins are available in WordPress and most of them are free as well. Premium plugins have some extra features that will help you make your site precious, productive and also secure. Here I am going to share some best WordPress plugin and how to use them.
WordPress SEO By Yoast:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and its highly important for every website to increase visitor or to rank in search engines. You have to follow some search engine rules to do that and implement in your platform. But most of the platforms are too much disturbing to do that but WordPress is super easy because of WordPress SEO by Yoast. This is amazing plugin that makes your site lovable to many people. It makes your site effective and friendly to search engine to rank well.
Tips:
- Install WordPress SEO plugin from the dashboard. Then setup the plugin settings as per your requirement. But I prefer the default settings and its good.
- When you try to publish your article you need to be careful about the SEO section at the bottom. Maintain the SEO rules, which will inform you after every saving as a draft.
- Careful about the keyword, Meta Tag, Meta description, heading tags, image optimization with keyword, title length and others. You did right or wrong will be shown by the plugin automatically after each time you click on “save”.
- Also careful about the social sharing option that how is the article will look like when you are going to share it on Facebook, twitter or Google+.
Do not know how to keep your blog updated when you are busy? Please read the article “How to Keep the Wheel of Your Blog Moving When You are Busy?“
JetPack by WordPress.com:
This is another most wonderful plugin with great features. A series of important features made this an important plugin to people. Features like email subscription, simple stats, contact form, site activity monitoring, auto sharing into social media, CSS editor and many more. By this plugin you can make your site well designed and secure. It’s a very useful plugin but very light. It’s not going to harm your server or site. It’s very useful and must have plugin for every site to save time.
Tips:
- This plugin contains lots of features but do not go for all the features. It may slow down your site. I am not saying there is a problem in the code but activating all the features may reduce the plugin performance and also for your site.
- Some must have features: Related Post, Google+ Profile, Likes, Publicize, Subscriptions, Spelling & Grammar, Sharing, WordPress.com Stats.
- Do not use contact form feature as you can install another plugin to use this feature. Same goes for mobile theme, notifications, wp.me shortlinks, shortcode embed.
Akismet:
This is the plugin that will make you smile with its awesome doing. Spamming is the biggest problem for a continuous blog and there are many plugin that will help you against spam. But Akismet is the best plugin that comes with WordPress. What this plugin do is to stop spam comments and send real comments for moderation. All doubtful comment is moved to spam section and saves your time. This is free for the personal use and you can find other pricing too.
How to – All you need to do is to install the plugin and then generate the API key by signing up. Then you need to add the API key in your WordPress dashboard Akismet plugin and you are good to go.
Tips:
- You have to inspect spam comments on the spam section and approve any comment that seems not a spam to you.
- Scan through the spam link for false positives.
- If the majority of your comments are spam, it is probably not worth having them on your site.
- Google totally do not like spamming.
- Google is de-listing and even blacklisting many sites for comment spamming.
- Spamming will harm your site if Google understand that you are a link site and just link to others without any context.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin:
This is another important plugin and a must have plugin. Every Webmaster needs this kind of plugin to increase page views and decrease bounce rate. This plugin shows related articles below each article that will increase page views. It displays posts, pages or custom posts under every similar post that gains reader satisfaction. It helps readers to find related articles that may help them.
You might know that adding related post or recommended reading section to your blog encourages readers to stay on your site longer and consume more of your content. And this is something that Google likes to see and give you good ranking as well as engaging your reader and making them more likely to comeback to your blog. There is lot of different plugin that works the same but his plugin is more flexible than others. You can choose list, thumbnails or custom format to see articles as related posts. You can also edit templates if you want. You can order the post by relevance so the most relevant post will show up first. You can also order them by date or alphabetical or reverse alphabetical. You can choose if you want them just for the post or pages or both.
Tips:
There is an important option called “Display Related Posts in Feeds”. You can try or bring people in to your other post that might not be on the feed by activating this option.
These four plugins are very useful and must have plugins for every website. They are very friendly for your website and help you a lot that can be done by a paid plugins. They are not even less powerful than paid plugins. WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin is free and the biggest mystery for me though because of its extra ordinary features. I think you are going to like these plugins and do not forget to tell me about your best plugins by commenting below.
One last trick to make you blog SEO friendly is to use already SEO optimized blog. The free or default WordPress themes are not SEO friendly. You will have to make the themes SEO friendly manually. If you want to get already optimized theme, you will have to go for a premium theme. I personally recommend the TruePixel theme from MyThemeShop which is really a good one and a lot of top bloggers use this theme for their blogs. You can have a look at the theme or you can browse for other themes in MyThemeShop.
