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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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.
Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2268750/10-Essential-WordPress-Plugins-to-Improve-SEO-Usability
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