The WordPress CMS is becoming more and more popular among bloggers as well as online marketers and business owners.
The simplicity of the system lends itself well to people that have limited or zero programming experience (like me!).
WordPress users can easily customize the look and feel of their websites, adding social media widgets, multimedia, and email forms, but it becomes a bit blurry when setting up a wordpress run sight correctly for SEO.
The good news is that there are many SEO plugins available in the wordpress marketplace, but confusion easily sets in when trying to decide which one to use.
There are two SEO wordpress plugins that stand out from the crowd and that I have personally used with a great deal of success.
1.) All In One SEO
This plugin is available for free and maximizes your SEO efforts in several different ways. All In One SEO supports Google analytics, an essential tool available free from google to track and measure your unique visitors, page views, bounce rates, where your traffic is coming from etc.
All In One SEO includes all of the basic features like editing your SEO title and your meta description, but extends on the basics with its own API to extend functionality to add-on plugins. It also automatically formats titles for SEO and generates meta tags.
This may all sound like greek, but it’s all there for beginners and comes ready to work right out of the box.
2.) WordPress SEO by Yoast
This is by far my personal favorite. The developer of WordPress SEO by Yoast, Joost de Valk is a WordPress developer and a WordPress SEO consultant. As far as credentials go, it doesn’t get much better. Wordpress SEO by Yoast promises a user friendly yet highly customizable interface and seriously delivers.
This plugin provides users everything from a SEO snippet preview to useful page analytics functions.
Some key features included in WordPress SEO by Yoast include:
- Post titles and meta descriptions
- Robots meta configuration
- Canonical urls
- Breadcrubs
- Permalink cleanup
- XML sitemaps
- RSS enhancements
- The ability to edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
- Clean up your head section
WordPress SEO by Yoast provides a guided tour when first installed to familiarize new users with the different functional areas of the plugin. Users have access to all of the basics and can tap into the advanced features once comfortable.
This truly is a killer plugin, and has seriously helped me set up a great foundation to boost my page ranks.
These screen shots illustrate the WordPress SEO by Yoast user interfaces in your wordpress admin dashboard.
When optimizing a specific page or post, WordPress SEO by Yoast gives you this easy to use interface, and lets you know your SEO progress with a real time keyword count.
The bottom line is if you’re looking for an easy to use wordpress seo plugin with all of the advanced features and real time analytics, WordPress SEO by Yoast sticks out ahead of the crowd.
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