Tag Archives: pages

3 of the best SEO plugins for WordPress that your blog shouldn't be without

There are so many SEO plugins for WordPress, some better than others of course, some don’t do all that much but below are 3 great plugins that I have been using that would be incredibly useful on any WordPress Site.
SEO Ultimate – I think this great plugin deserves more recognition than it’s gotten up till now. I have never seen a plugin with such a massive array of features, this does everything that All In One SEO, also throws in the same functionality found within SEO Smart Links and a number of other plugins it is essentially the swiss army knife of WordPress plugins. Some examples of its additional features include; code inserter (for use with adding Google Analytics, Adsense section targeting etc) Webmaster verification assistant, Link Mask Generator, Robots.txt editor and you can even export your SEO Ultimate settings to a file so you can import later or use on another blog if you need to, along with support for importing post meta data from the All In One SEO plugin – and there is more, simply a must have for your blog.

SEO friendly images – It seems like a lot of people will focus more on the off page SEO rather than on page, which itself plays a huge roll in drawing traffic to your site from search engines. Out of all of the on page factors, image ALT & TITLE tags seems to be one of the most underused. This great plugin will automatically update all images with ALT and TITLE tags, the plugin will even add these tags to images that do not have them according to the options you have selected.

Google XML Sitemaps – This is a very useful WordPress plugin, it will create an XML sitemap for your site that will allow it to be indexed better by the major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com. Search engines crawlers will be able to use it to see the full structure of your site and notify them whenever any new content is added.

XML sitemaps are very useful as they allow search engines to index pages that are not linked to your site that you wish to be indexed. It tells them the last modified date of pages, how frequently a page is updated so the crawlers know when to check back for new content or updated content and it will allow you to indicate the priority of particular pages within your site.

3 of the best SEO plugins for WordPress that your blog shouldn't be without

There are so many SEO plugins for WordPress, some better than others of course, some don’t do all that much but below are 3 great plugins that I have been using that would be incredibly useful on any WordPress Site.
SEO Ultimate – I think this great plugin deserves more recognition than it’s gotten up till now. I have never seen a plugin with such a massive array of features, this does everything that All In One SEO, also throws in the same functionality found within SEO Smart Links and a number of other plugins it is essentially the swiss army knife of WordPress plugins. Some examples of its additional features include; code inserter (for use with adding Google Analytics, Adsense section targeting etc) Webmaster verification assistant, Link Mask Generator, Robots.txt editor and you can even export your SEO Ultimate settings to a file so you can import later or use on another blog if you need to, along with support for importing post meta data from the All In One SEO plugin – and there is more, simply a must have for your blog.

SEO friendly images – It seems like a lot of people will focus more on the off page SEO rather than on page, which itself plays a huge roll in drawing traffic to your site from search engines. Out of all of the on page factors, image ALT & TITLE tags seems to be one of the most underused. This great plugin will automatically update all images with ALT and TITLE tags, the plugin will even add these tags to images that do not have them according to the options you have selected.

Google XML Sitemaps – This is a very useful WordPress plugin, it will create an XML sitemap for your site that will allow it to be indexed better by the major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com. Search engines crawlers will be able to use it to see the full structure of your site and notify them whenever any new content is added.

XML sitemaps are very useful as they allow search engines to index pages that are not linked to your site that you wish to be indexed. It tells them the last modified date of pages, how frequently a page is updated so the crawlers know when to check back for new content or updated content and it will allow you to indicate the priority of particular pages within your site.

How Website Redesign can Improve Search Results: Part 2

In the first of this article we discussed three factors that have to be given consideration during web redesign process. In today’s article we will touch upon other factors too.

4) Download speed: A slow website can ruin user experience. A user is very much likely to exit a slow loading webpage rather than wait for it. Google has taken notice of it and in April 2010 strongly emphasized on reducing webpage download speeds.

Google went to the extent of saying that webpage speed will be factored in their search engine algorithm. If your website downloads very slowly then check thoroughly the root causes. Is it a Flash banner or a heavy image? Many times inefficient programming or bloated code can also affect speed.

Thus a slow loading page can harm you in 2 ways: One, a user will not wait for the page to download and move away to a site which is faster. Secondly, Google may penalize your website and your search engine rankings may drop across all keywords.

5) Sitemaps: Many webmasters may think it as an unnecessary exercise but the fact is that search engines take it very seriously. Both, HTML version and XML version of sitemap are crucial. While the HTML version helps users in navigating the site, the XML version helps in getting all pages of a site indexed by search engines.

The HTML sitemap should ideally be accessible form the home page of the website. XML sitemap should be submitted to search engines for quicker indexing. The bigger the site, the more advantageous and important a sitemap is from SEO point of view.

6) Page Title: How many we have seen titles such “Home Page”. Such titles do great harm to a site. Such uninformative title tells a search engine nothing about the page. A vital clue that a search engine and user can benefit from is wasted.

Rarely will you ever see a webpage opaque or uninformative titles doing well in search engine rankings. Always, add titles relevant to the page name and content.

7) Content Optimization: Good content is not enough. Proper use of H1, H2,H3… and links is very vital.

Headings and strong tags signal to bots on which text is important. Always use keywords or key phrases within these tags.

Internal links are another factor. Web pages should be interlinked to increase usability of a website. Links should be optimized by using keywords and key phrases.

8) Images: Images need to be lightweight. Heavy images can drastically increase page download time. Image names should have keywords related to the page name. If the page is about Ferrari cars then the images used should have Ferrari as keyword.
Never forget to add Alt attribute. It should be a short yet keyword rich sentence.

9) Custom error pages: Many websites lose a chunk of visitors due to improper error handling pages. A custom error page can help a user navigate the site even if s/he encounters page not found error.