Make your website more search-engine friendly
Want to boost your SEO, but you’re not sure how? There are a lot of factors that go into your ranking in search engine results.
While there’s no quick fix, there is hope for WordPress users. A couple WordPress plugins are available to at least make your site more search engine friendly, without tons of ongoing effort on your part.
Those plugins are Yoast and All in One SEO Pack.
A couple quick warnings:
- It’s best to use one or the other, not both plugins.
- Neither of these tools will automatically optimize your website for you. You still need to do SEO keyword research, have well written copy and a well-coded theme, and configure the plugins properly.
SEO keyword research
Before downloading either one of these, I’d recommend you make sure you’ve done your SEO research and you have the keywords that people will be looking for sprinkled across your website.
It’s tempting to want to include only the keywords you think are the most important, but remember—it’s likely that everyone who could do business with you isn’t already in your industry and familiar with your lingo.
Make sure you do research through Google AdWords, Wordtracker, or find a similar free tool (simply Google free keyword research tool) to get an idea of what other people are searching for related to your industry and services.
Search-engine friendly plugins
You can really choose either one of these plugins—they do similar things, and it’s just a matter of preference. Choose the one that best suits your needs, or seems more user-friendly.
- Yoast: Yoast has both free and premium plugin versions. You can find real-time page analysis functionality with this plugin, and can optimize your content, image titles, meta descriptions, and other aspects of your site.
- All in One SEO Pack: With All in One SEO Pack, you can either use it “out-of-the-box” or customize to your heart’s content. It provides Google Analytics support and notifies Google and Bing whenever you make changes to your site.
To find out more about Yoast or download the plugin, you can visit their website. If you’d like to see more of what All in One SEO Pack can do, check out their WordPress plugin page.
Regardless of which plugin you choose to download, they’ll be more effective if you do some SEO keyword research first. That way, you’ll know that the elements the plugin highlights will be based on what people are actually searching for!