WordPress itself is already greatly optimized to get good rankings in the search engines, but there is still room for improvement.
What You Need To Know About WordPress SEO Optimization: The Top Free Plugins You Should Use
One of the best things about using WordPress as your blogging platform is the fact that WordPress and SEO optimization go hand in hand. And, if you're trying to make money from your website, this is absolutely crucial!
Although you can still rank in the search engines without making any changes to the default WordPress settings and plugins, making use of some of these tips and plugins will put you in prime position for bringing in far more traffic.
WordPress Permalinks Settings: This isn't even an added plugin, but it's a feature of Word press that you should change as soon as you set up your blog. For the ultimate WordPress SEO optimization, be sure to change away from the default setting (which simply creates URLs for your posts using numbers) to a “custom” setting of /%postname%/ – this will get your keywords featured in your URLs and make it easier to rank for your desired terms.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO (previosly named WordPress SEO by Yoast: This is one of the most popular WordPress SEO optimization plugins out there today. It lets you change the title, description and keywords (so search engines know what your site's about) and a range of other settings that'll even help you to avoid duplicate content on your site.
It also gives you suggestions, creates xml sitemaps and you can add extra information for your feeds.
I just to have the Google XML Sitemap plugin to create a search engine xml file. With the new Yoast SEO plugin I disabled that plugin and use the Yoast SEO function now. Yoast creates an index xml + special xml files for different options.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images: You'd be surprised at how much traffic you can get to your website through well optimized images. This plugin will make it easy by automatically filling in the “alt” and “title” tags on any images you use in your posts.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-image/
CometCache
CometCache plugin adds and extends the Caching function of your WordPress website. It creates a HTML version of a page once it has been visited. This means that there are less request from WordPress to get the content and layout etc from the MySql database.
Less requests means you have a better performing website and pages are much quicker to be shown to you visitors. Google also includes loading times into its algorithm to rank websites. Faster websites, and responsive websites are preferred over slow websites. So if you want better rankings, start speeding up your site with fast WordPress hosting and a cache plugin like CometCache.
Its easy to setup, just install the plugin and activa it, then go to CometCache settings and active it. I also like to set the Client-Side Cache option to Yes as I don't have sites where user log into to read the content.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/comet-cache/
WordPress SEO optimization may sound complicated, but the truth is that there is a plugin for almost anything you can think of! These plugins all make it easier to make simple tweaks without delving into code. There's no excuse for failing to optimize your WordPress blog for the search engines!
Besides these plugins you need to setup the right categories, create good quality content and post on a regular base, but you already know that!… right? The plugins I suggest here will help you to get that great content to get higher rankings in the search engines.
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