5 WordPress Plugins That Help With SEO

If your website is powered by WordPress, you are probably concerned with SEO just like everyone else. But what you may not know is that being on the WordPress platform gives you a distinct advantage over other webmasters! This is because WordPress has easy-to-install plugins that can make your life — and your website optimization — much easier.

Here are five WordPress plugins you should check out to better optimize your blog or website.

WordPress SEO by Yoast – With over 8 million (!) downloads, this SEO plugin is considered one of the best, if not the very best, for WordPress. It allows you to set a “focus keyword” for each post or page, and then tracks how many times you use the keyword and where it appears. It also allows you the flexibility of defining custom titles, meta descriptions, and other advanced page functions or features. The plugin is helpful for SEO beginners, but is also used by experienced experts because of the amount of control it offers over every detail.

W3 Total Cache – Speed is an important ranking factor for SEO. The faster your site loads, the less likely a user will bounce from it, and Google LOVES to rank fast sites more highly than slow ones. W3 Total Cache makes behind-the-scenes improvements to your WordPress installation that will decrease load times and make things speedier overall. The author claims that a fully configured installation can increase your load time 10x. If you’re worried about site speed, this is definitely worth a try!

RB Internal Links – Worried that frequently updating your pages may result in some broken links? Worry no more. This plugin allows you to link pages and posts by WordPress’s special internal page ID numbers instead of URLs. Users won’t know the difference, but you will: if you ever update a page URL, the ID will dynamically update, and visitors to your site will never see a 404. Say goodbye to updating your .htaccess file!

(One note: although this plugin hasn’t been updated in a while — two years — reviewers insist that it still works just fine.)

Mashshare – Although we’ve already discussed how links on social media sites don’t pass any “link juice,” the more your content gets shared on social media, the more likely it is to receive a followed link from another source (like a blog or news website). Mashshare allows you to add beautiful “share to Facebook” and “share to Twitter” options to your WordPress site. The plugin also displays the total number of total shares from each network.

Shareaholic – This plugin offers even more social sharing options, including networks like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and many others. By giving your readers options to share on their favorite sites — some of which do have followed links! — you are increasing the likelihood that you will accumulate more high-quality links back to your content.

Do you have a favorite plugin that improves the SEO of your WordPress site? Let me know by leaving a comment below!

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