Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Search Engine Optimization
This post will cover the top search engine optimization elements that using WordPress Plugins can help you automate and enhance.
WordPress website optimization seems like a walk in the park, thanks to the numerous SEO plugins that WordPress presents. Developers and businesses no longer have to undertake long and tedious SEO projects as almost every aspect of the SEO exercise has been automated and thus very easy to do.
The costs of these SEO exercises have been greatly reduced, from previous project cost of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, to an average range of between 100 and 10,000 dollars per SEO exercise.
This allows websites owners the flexibility of undertaking occasional website optimizations either by outsourcing to SEO experts or by their own in-house developers.
The key optimizations as done by these plugins include;
-
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs help your users and web spiders to crawl your website. This means that they are able to easily navigate through your website based on the pages it has. The categories define and even identify parent and child categories and pages appropriately.
The Yoast SEO plugin helps in defining these breadcrumbs to help in streamlining the structure of your website, and this is of great importance as it helps search engines to understand the website’s structure. Due to this, the website is ranked higher by the search engines.
-
Titles and meta descriptions
In order to have a unique website that ranks high in the search engines, you need to use catchy and unique titles and meta descriptions to the content, posts and archives, of your website. These come in handy in user searches and also entice the users to keep visiting the pages and drive traffic to the website.
Yoast plugin, for example, helps you in optimizing meta descriptions, titles and headings, and be able to preview them as they would appear on a Google search result.
-
Correct link and anchor texts
Using links in your posts and other website content is important as a way of optimizing your website for search engines.
However, the process of cross referencing all your posts may be tedious and time consuming, especially if you have numerous posts uploaded over a long period and worse still, if the posts were previously posted by different persons.
In such a scenario, the use of a plugin like SEO smart links would come in handy. Such plugins that help in optimizing links and anchor texts help in cross referencing the posts in relation to the keywords used, or other features like the subject matter, titles, content etc. They also help you in developing relevant anchor texts that would be best fit to match the content of the posts being interlinked and thereby driving traffic to them.
-
Form optimization
One of the challenging elements to optimize is the form, which have repeated fields and most of the developers do not give a second keen look to form optimization. To them, once a form is done and functional, well, that is all.
However, there needs to be keen review of the form’s ALT attributes, title and descriptions to ensure they match up and enhance the overall website optimization.
Most plugins come with form builders, which help in building, managing and optimizing these forms. They are also able to set triggers for the forms which call particular form actions if certain attributes of the user interaction are evaluated to be true, e.g. loading a form once a user scrolls over an item, etc.
To determine the best WordPress plugin to use for the SEO, you can access various forums and user review sites, where users and developers interact and review the various software and plugins, e.g. http://wpdean.com/ where you can view bloom plugin review, and other WordPress compatible SEO plugins, and evaluate them.
