Some time ago I started writing a big old post about the plugins I was using to optimise my site for SEO. I got distracted. Badly! I ended up getting sidetracked and creating a splog based around politics that aggregates a bunch of feeds together and displays them on a new domain – not something I’d recommend in a hurry, as it has also meant that this site has had a spanking in the rankings as well, and I have very effectively lost the completion with Cole for Bristol SEO. I have however discovered all sorts of useful bits of information on plugins and setting up WordPress that I will of course be sharing in the future.
To get back to my original follow-up post on WordPress SEO, the remaining seven plugins that I use on this site to optimise it for SEO are as follows:
1) SEO Slugs – A ‘fit and forget’ plugin, SEO slugs removes so called stop words from your URL when creating post titles. You’ll notice on this site that none of my URLs contain words like ‘the’ ‘and’ ‘or’ ‘at’ and so on. These words are effectively ignored by search engines, so there is no need to include them in the URL as they are effectively useless.
2) Simple Tags – Fairly self explanatory, this plugin is all about tags. Simple Tags really doesn’t need any tweaking to make it work very well for SEO, as out of the box it is pretty much ideally setup for SEO. You might want to look at the setup of the related posts and related comments section, and if you’re setting up a site for someone who really doesn’t know that much about SEO I’d suggest doing some keyword research on their chosen niche and fill in the keywords list under Posts > Auto Tags for them, so that they can simply write and not really have to worry about tagging too much – the posts will automatically be tagged for them, and these tags will help to create the related posts. It’s not an ideal way of working at all, but for those who really can’t be bothered or don’t understand, it’s better than nothing.
3) Subscribe To Comments – Encourage your blog subscribers to get follow-up comments emailed to them, and therefore increase the number of pageviews of your blog. Subscribe To Comments is another plugin that really doesn’t require a lot of changes to be made to it, and works very well out of the box. You may need to edit the path to header, sidebar and footer depending on your current theme, but this shouldn’t pose to much of a problem, simply add the correct path to each of these elements to the boxes in the settings and you’re away.
4) WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Yet another non-SEO related plugin, but one that does make life significantly easier, even with the ability to update from the admin panel in WP 2.7, WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows you to simply update your installation and will prompt you to backup your old installation and database before making the upgrade, so if it does all go horribly wrong, you have something to fall back on.
5) WP Super Cache – Probably not strictly necessary for the vast majority of blogs WP Super Cache is ideal for if you receive heavy traffic from, for example, being Dugg. It creates flat HTML page versions of your site and stops all the usual database calls being made to the server, cutting down on response time, and effectively allowing your site to operate under incredibly high volumes of traffic.
6) Yoast Breadcrumbs – Joost de Valk is a WordPress plugin hero, and if you are remotely interested in WordPress SEO and plugins, then you should subscribe to his RSS feed. This plugin is more about user experience than anything else, and adds in a breadcrumb to your site to show users where they are within the navigation of your site.
There is of course some debate as to whether or not you need a breadcrumb in WordPress, but in my opinion the more ways that you can give users to navigate around your site the better. And if you’re thinking that no-one uses it, then just use some Crazy Egg tracking on a popular page to see exactly where people are clicking (install Crazy Egg using the HeadSpace plugin, go to Settings > HeadSpace > Site Modules and check the Crazy Egg box – see my previous post on WordPress SEO for other headspace settings) and you can judge for yourself.
To install this plugin you need to make a change to your template. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP BEFORE CHANGING THE TEMPLATE. Go to Appearance > Editor > Single Post (single.php) and insert the following code:
<?php if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
yoast_breadcrumb('<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>');
} ?>
You need to insert this in the place within the post that you want the breadcrumb trail to appear. I have mine at the very top of my posts, so it looks like this:
<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
yoast_breadcrumb('<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>');
} ?>
<div class="entry hentry" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
But you may well want to change this to suit your own taste.
7) Comment Redirect – Direct people commenting for the first time to a specific page thanking them for making a comment. You’ll need to set up a page for this in the first place and decide on your call to action on this page, but once you have done this, all you need do is add the page in that you want to direct people to.
I hope that this list and my original list of WordPress SEO tips helps, and please leave me a comment if you have any issues with any of these plugins or the way that I’ve suggested setting them up. Based on my experience with my other project I will be updating with yet another few plugins that I think are valuable and could help provide a better user experience in WordPress, or assist with SEO, and this time I won’t take so long between posts!
Tags: breadcrumb, Bristol SEO, SEO, Wordpress
