10 Essential WordPress Plugins to Improve SEO & Usability

Word press Plugin Secrets

After you've installed WordPress and covered the basics of improving WordPress for SEO and the user experience, it's time to go a bit deeper. Many great plugins are available to help your WordPress site when it comes to SEO, usability, and conversion. Here are 10 great plugins – most of which are available for free.

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast : 

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Download this plugin now and use it on every WordPress site you own. This plugin, in my opinion, is as important as the WordPress installation itself. It's also extremely easy to use.

Also, if you haven't already, make sure to use Yoast's Google Analytics plugin.

2. Simple URLs : 

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-urls/

This plugin is great. You can track outbound links and control them completely right within the WordPress backend. If you add Disallow: /go/ into your robots.txt file it will also stop any authority from passing through the link itself.

You can use this plugin to keep track of these outbound links. For example, if you have affiliate links on your site, you can calculate a conversion rate from knowing the number of clicks to the number of people who purchase something via the affiliate link.

3. RB Internal Links : 

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rb-internal-links/

Although this plugin hasn't been updated in more than two years, it still should be included in every WordPress installation. This plugin helps with internal linking.

RB Internal Links is great because it uses the post ID to link internally rather than the URL itself. This means that if you want to change the URL of a page or post, then the URL will be updated dynamically.

This cuts the risk of internal 404 pages that can harm SEO for internal pages, as well as ensuring that no visitor reaches a page that does not exist.

4. NextGen Gallery and Lightbox Plus :

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-plus/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

These two plugins have been combined into one entry because they work hand-in-hand. Lightbox Plus uses Colorbox – a lightweight jQuery image gallery script that is the friendliest for performance and doesn't hinder on-page SEO. Although Lightbox is included as an option within NextGen itself, Lightbox Plus offers a lot more options for the appearance and behavior of Lightbox's execution.

NextGen as a plugin is all you need when it comes to image gallery management. You can define lots of things such as the image's title and alt tags, which solves any SEO image problems.

Its flexibility into WordPress themes is great too, as you can add templates to use with the shortcode NextGen offers (more information on using NextGen templates can be found here). So, for example, I may use my own image gallery viewer and want it to output a certain way so I create my own NextGen gallery template called gallery-alexmoss.php and upload it into a subfolder of my theme called nggallery.

Below is a template I have developed to work with Twitter's Bootstrap image carousel:

<?php if (!defined ('ABSPATH')) die ('No direct access allowed'); ?><?php if (!empty ($gallery)) : ?> <div id="<?php echo $gallery-> anchor ?>" class="carousel slide"> <ol class="carousel-indicators"> <?php $activenum="0"; foreach ( $images as $image ) : ?> <li data-target="#<?php echo $gallery->anchor ?>" data-slide-to="<?php echo $activenum; ?>"<?php if ($activenum=="0") {echo ' class="active"'; } $activenum++; ?></li> <?php endforeach; ?> </ol> <div class="carousel-inner"> <?php $activenum="1"; foreach ( $images as $image ) : ?> <div id="ngg-image-<?php echo $image-> pid ?>" class="item<?php if ($activenum=="1") {echo " active"; } $activenum++; ?>" <?php echo $image->style ?>> <img title="<?php echo $image->alttext; ?>" alt="<?php echo $image->alttext; ?>" src="<?php echo $image->imageURL; ?>" /> <div class="carousel-caption"> <h4> <?php echo $image->alttext; ?></h4> <p> <?php echo $image->description; ?></p> </div> </div> <?php endforeach; ?> </div> <a class="left carousel-control" href="#<?php echo $gallery->anchor ?>" data-slide="prev">‹</a> <a class="right carousel-control" href="#<?php echo $gallery->anchor ?>" data-slide="next">›</a> </div> <?php endif; ?>

5. Widget Logic : 

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-logic/

This plugin works specifically with your widgets. When installed, an extra option is added into each widget where you can define exactly where that widget should/shouldn't appear. This is great when you want to control what content appears in which sections of the site.

Here are a few examples of widget logic you can use:
is_category(X) || (is_single() && in_category(X)) - if viewing Category X or a post within Category X.
is_archive() - if viewing any archive page.
is_page() - if viewing a page.
!is_page() - if viewing anything other than a page. Note that the use of ! turns the condition into if is not.

When you use this plugin ensure that you are confident with using some PHP code as incorrect use can lead to potential problems.

6. Members : 

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members/

You may find that the default user roles provided by WordPress aren't enough for you to control the access that you want. This plugin adds flexibility to edit existing user roles as well as adding additional user roles. The plugin also comes with easy to use widgets and shortcodes so you can limit content based on the user's role.

7. Use Google Libraries : 

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/use-google-libraries/

This very simple plugin that substitutes JavaScript libraries called locally on your own server with Google's own CDN. This saves on bandwidth, keeps using compressed versions of the scripts, and increases the chance that a user already has these files cached and therefore increases the general performance of your site.

8. W3 Total Cache : 

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

While we're on the subject of performance, W3 Total Cache is the most powerful and comprehensive caching plugin available. This plugin handles everything from combine and minification for both CSS and JS to HTML linebreak and comment removal, disk caching, browser caching and more.

It's useful to test any settings out to ensure that there are no issues once enabled and deployed but most of the time W3 plays ball with your WordPress installation.

9. Gravity Forms : 

http://3doo.rs/gravity

This is the best plugin available. Although paid (from $39), this plugin is a must have on any WordPress installation and pays for itself.

This plugin handles all kind of form generation and management from basic contact forms to complete content management. There is so much you can do within Gravity Forms that I can't cover it in this post alone. Some examples of how you can use Gravity Forms:
Basic contact forms: Also includes seamless integration with CAPTCHA
Contact forms with email routing: This is great for larger companies. Based on options filled out in the form, email is routed to a different address saving time sifting through a generic email address
MailChimp integration: You can use any form's email input and send that information to MailChimp directly through an add-on available (only for people who purchased the developer license) using MailChimp's API.
Creating content: Forms can actually generate posts or pages within your site. You can create a form that populates all the data needed to publish a new post or page, including the title, excerpt, body, featured image and more.

Another great thing about Gravity forms is that all entries are stored and viewable within the backend of the site meaning that some forms don't even need to have email notifications upon submission. Not enough for you? You can also export all entries as a CSV file, as well as being able to import and export all forms for you to backup or transfer to other sites.

10. Twitter Feed Pro:

http://3doordigital.com/wordpress/plugins/wp-twitter-feed-pro/

This is my own plugin. This paid plugin ($19.99) outputs a Twitter feed based on a number of settings using the shortcode. You can output your latest tweets or someone else's (or a combination), view replies and public mentions, view favorites of any username or search for any term or hashtag. There are also many options for customizing the look and feel of how the tweets are output.

There are two reasons I mention this plugin.

First is that tweets use HTML to output tweets rather than using jQuery (as this is the only other way to do so via Twitter's official embedded timeline widget).

Additionally, this plugin is fully compatible with Twitter API v1.1. Some other plugins or Twitter Feed options within WordPress themes use v1.0 of the API which will retire on June 11. If you want to know more about this issue, I have written about Twitter API v1.1 and its implication.

Summary : 

It has taken me a long time to find the best plugins to perform all kinds of different tasks and tweaks with WordPress. Finding trustworthy authors and plugins that are not abusive is extremely important so I like it when I find confidence in a plugin to use on my own sites, and more importantly, sites for my clients.

5 Basic Tips to Improve WordPress for SEO and the User Experience

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems available today. In September 2012, it was reported that WordPress powers 1 in 6 websites.

As someone who codes within WordPress on a daily basis, it's easy for me to sell WordPress to clients. They are assured that the CMS platform is future proof – at least for the foreseeable future.

However, downloading and installing WordPress isn't enough to make the site successful for SEO, security, and performance. But the following basic tips will improve your WordPress site for SEO and the user experience.

Although most of you reading this post already have a live WordPress site, this post will begin at the point just after a self-hosted five-minute install.
Remove Some WordPress Defaults

The top item to remove from WordPress sites: the “Hello World” post and “Sample Page”. If the site is still in development, then these elements are OK to have for testing layout and typography. Once the site is live to the public, however, make sure you remove them – you could even delete them from the trash to keep your database a little less cluttered.

Tip: You should rely on better content than the default post and page. If you want to have better sample content you can download the WP Example Content plugin by Josh Ferrara and Jonathan Simmons.

In addition, remember to remove (or change) the default “Uncategorized” category. If you want to keep it, at least create a new category that you know will become the most popular category for you and set it as default. You can do this within the admin area by navigating to Posts -> Categories.

Why this is good for SEO: The sample page and post “Hello World” is less problematic for SEO, but more important to remove for user experience. However, the default category should be a top focus for SEO. Your post is generally not uncategorized, so ensure that you create relevant categories for all your posts.
Set Your Permalinks

The default setting for Permalinks isn't an efficient URL structure for SEO. Changing the setting to Post Name (/%postname%/) is usually best practice. Some like to use /%category%/%postname%/ as their setting but can cause a few issues when content for categories aren't optimized (more on that later).

Why this is good for SEO: WordPress’ default setting sets all pages to run via URL parameters, which Google advises against.
Add Some Update Services

When new pages and posts are created it may take some time for that new URL to be indexed by search engines (depending on the site’s crawl rate). To speed this up, WordPress offer the chance for you to add update services within the General Settings page. Ensure these four are in the list:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2www.domain.com/

You can see a few more within WordPress.org, and allstuffweb also offer a much longer list.

Why this is good for SEO: Having your site indexed is fundamentally the most important thing for you. If a URL isn't indexed it will never be shown in any SERP. Not indexing quickly or often enough means your site could miss some big organic search opportunities, especially if your site relies on current affairs or breaking news.

WordPress Homepage: Blog Posts or a Static Page?

Originally, WordPress was a blogging platform. Although still essentially true, now it's more of a content management system (CMS). 

Because its conception was for bloggers, the default setting sets the homepage to output your latest posts. If you want to change this to a static page: 

Create a blank page for your latest blog posts.
Go to Settings -> Reading settings.
Choose whether you want latest posts or a static page for Front Page Displays.
For each article in a feed, show the excerpt.
Ensure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unticked. 

Note: some themes actually use a different method by letting you choose a page template to output blog posts rather than use the default settings. I’m not a fan of this but is something you should be aware of. 

Why this is good for SEO: Solving the issues above will help with potential duplicate content and indexation issues.

Customize Media Settings

By default, WordPress provides settings on how to deal with image thumbnails. I’m not a fan of the default settings – I like to set my own dimensions for all three available image sizes (thumbnail, medium and large) per WordPress install; and more importantly I like my thumbnails not to be cropped exactly to the dimensions. I don’t like this as, more often that not, I want to upload images that maintain their proportion when resized. 

To change these settings, simply navigate to Settings -> Media and change the settings to how you like to see your site deal with thumbnails. 

Tip: Already have a site set up and you're only now realizing you can do this? Want to automatically change all previous thumbnails? There is a solution. Once you’ve changed the settings as above, you can download the plugin Regenerate Thumbnails by Viper007Bond that can do this for you. 

One more thing I like to do is untick the month/year hierarchy setting. Some larger sites do have a need for this for better organization, but it’s an unessential setting the majority of the time.
Why this is good for SEO: Thumbnails are useful to display an image smaller than full size, which helps bandwidth and performance. As an example you may want to upload an image that is 2,000 x 2,000 px – this size will only be needed for people who want to download the full size version. Here it would be better to set a large size to say 940 px to ensure that it fits on most screens – then simply call that image in the source rather than the larger version. Note that this is different than adding the full size image and then resizing to 70 percent in image settings (as the original 2,000 px image is still called and loaded).

Use Google Analytics

You should never manage a site without some form of tracking. Google Analytics is free and so easy to implement that there’s no excuse not to use it. 

Create a new analytics profile, and then install Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk. This plugin makes it easy for you to connect your profile to WordPress without the need to use copy and paste (and you can also enter the tracking code manually). Once connected, there are numerous settings that you should tweak at your discretion. 

Additionally, you should ensure that you enable site search in your analytics profile. 

Why this is good for SEO: Having analytics on your site can provide so much useful data and help you complete a number of different tasks such as locating 404 pages, studying how long a visitor browses your site for, and how much traffic you receive from search engines. Incorrect implementation of analytics can cause incorrect data to display. The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin makes it easier for you and adds functionality such as tracking users by username, which is useful for ecommerce sites and ignoring administrators who spend a lot of time in the site and cause anomalous data such as extremely high page views.

Summary

By tweaking some default settings, setting permalinks, adding update services, and customizing media settings – plus installing Google Analytics – you will greatly improve your WordPress site for SEO and the user experience.

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