Search engine optimization may seem a bit crazy and intimidating when you first start learning about it, but once you get the hang of it – it’s not too hard! The main thing you need to understand about SEO is that Google wants your website to be as user friendly as possible. With that in mind, we need to make sure that our website runs fast, is optimized for specific keywords and provides quality information. This is all doable with the right techniques, but what about technical SEO?
If you have a WordPress website, the following four plugins will do wonders for your SEO and website traffic – let’s check them out.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is absolutely unmissable on your website when it comes to optimizing it for search engines. This plugin does a lot of great things that can skyrocket your relationship with the search engines, including:
- Submitting your sitemap to Google
- Giving you the ability to edit metadata for your blog posts and pages
- Giving you extra SEO tips to improve your on-page content and interlinking strategy
2. Autoptimize
Google likes websites that keep the users happy, and one thing users like is a website that loads quickly. So many websites look great, but take forever to load! This is a huge issue when it comes to SEO – and one that’s easy to avoid. By downloading the Autoptimize plugin, you can speed things up quickly. Some of the free features include:
- Adding lazy-loading to images. This means that images won’t load until the user scrolls down, saving you a lot of data and loading time when initially opening the page.
- Magnifying CSS, HTML and JavaScript. If you’re not very code-savvy, the automatize plugin is a lifesaver. This feature cuts down on any access code and scripts, combining them into one which can speed up things dramatically.
3. Humans TXT
Apart from speed and a page optimized for keywords, Google likes an authoritative website. You need to show Google that you are an authority, that you know what you’re talking about and that you are trustworthy. Why else would they put you on the first page of their search engine? Getting a Humans TXT file onto your website can help with their authority. There is a lot that goes into building an authoritative website, but showing Google who works on your website definitely helps.
Humans TXT adds the name of people who have worked on your website into the code. If you run your website by yourself, you can simply add your name as a content creator. If there are others that help you, you can add those too.
4. Redirection
One issue I see on many blogs who don’t really understand the basics of SEO just yet is broken links. A broken link is a link that ends in a 404 error page. This usually happens with the URL has been changed or a page has been deleted. Having a good URL structure is super important for SEO and it makes sense to change this if you have created bad URLs in the past – but by changing this you NEED to redirect them in order to avoid a 404 error page.
Not only is getting to a 404 error page super annoying, it can also mess with the Google crawlers that scan your page. If they stumble upon a broken link, the page may not be indexed properly. This free redirection plugin helps you set up healthy 301 redirects if you ever want to change your URL structure or delete a post and it also detects any 404 erros on your website.
