With an influx of small business owners using the WordPress platform to develop their websites, it is vital to the success of each website to learn which WordPress plugins are more beneficial than others.
To eliminate the trial and error process of finding the perfect plugins to compliment and automate your website, here is a list of the top 10 WordPress plugins that many small business owners are finding extremely useful and easy to use.
- All in One SEO Pack – This plugin is geared towards implementing effective SEO (search engine optimization) elements on your website. Once installed, this plugin will allow you to add SEO titles, descriptions and keywords to each individual web page and article posts. In turn, these will be the descriptions users will see when they find the pages in the search engine results.
- LJ Longtail Keywords – This plugin automatically detects and underlines the use of longtail keywords that are published throughout the content of your website. For example, if you are targeting keywords that have more than 3-4 words, they will quickly be identified and highlighted for visitors. Tip: Using longtail keywords can consistently increase the quality of traffic you receive to your site.
- Sexy Bookmarks – This is social media driven and adds the icons to social media sites for users to quickly share the content they find on your site. While these icons are not linked to your individual accounts, it works with the users social media accounts to increase exposure and traffic. There are currently more than 35 social media icons available for this plugin.
- Contact Form 7 – If you do not have coding or html design experience, this plugin will help you easily create and customize a contact form to use throughout your site. Once the form is created using their option menus, a code will be generated for you to copy and paste (in the html tab of new posts and pages) that will generate the form into a graphic on your site.
- Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin allows you to automatically create sitemaps for your website to be indexed by the search engines. Not only can this increase your traffic, it will also satisfy the new Google algorithm ensuring that your site does not get blacklisted for any reason.
- Automatic SEO Links – This is a rather new plugin that is currently in its third update state. It provides automation to create internal and external links to the keywords assigned to each page or post of the website.
- Nofollow Case by Case – As any website owner can tell you, not all links published on your website should be followed by the search engines. This may include links to internal images, pages and comments left by visitors that contain url links. By adding this plugin you can delegate which links are to be followed and which should be attached to a “no follow” code on the site.
- Platinum SEO Plugin – This is a paid plugin that allows you to delegate the essential SEO elements on each page such as keywords, page titles and description. It also provides additional features such as redirect options and reports that are essential to maintaining optimal results.
- SEO Friendly Images – This plugin provides you with images that are automatically generated to your website due to the relevancy of the content. All images are already optimized for SEO purposes and enable you to drive additional traffic to your site from users that search through images rather than web pages.
SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – Many websites have no choice but to publish duplicate content on the pages. This is a well known “don’t” in the SEO world but is often times unavoidable. This may be for products that are offered in various sizes, services that offer customizable options or profile pages. This plugin allows you to choose which pages should be indexed by the search engines and which should not be included in the sitemap for indexing.
