Web Toastie

The following article is the first in a 5-part SEO series examining some of the key aspects of WordPress SEO. There are a lot of similar articles on the Internet, so this series will attempt to look at some of the lesser-known SEO resources that are available to gain higher search engine rankings, and increased traffic. Part 1 looks at some of the WordPress SEO plugins that are available (for free).

1. WordPress Google Analytics Reports

This WordPress SEO plugin makes some of the reports from Google Analytics available on your blog dashboard. To save time logging into your Analytics account, you can simply access the key data (such as keywords and referral sites) from within your WordPress account. This plugin requires you to have a Google Analytics account – which is a ‘must’ for anybody remotely interested in SEO or increasing traffic.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

This fantastic SEO plugin creates an automatic XML sitemap for your blog, and submits it to popular search engines. Having a sitemap is great navigation tool for anybody wishing to find all of your content, and it is also improves the indexing that is carried out by search engines such as Google. Each time you add a new page or post to your WordPress blog, the sitemap is updated and then it is re-submitted to the search engines.

3. Position Yourself

Position Yourself (or ‘Google Positioner’) is probably my favourite WordPress SEO plugin. After entering your desired keywords, the plugin runs a number of queries on Google to see what position your site is ranked for each of the keywords. You are able to enter ‘competitor’ Web sites in order for a comparison to be made between keyword rankings, which is very useful to understand how you can improve your SEO.

4. StatPress

The StatPress WordPress plugin is fairly similar to Google Analytics in the sense that it provides data about your site traffic. This plugin is good because it is updated more frequently than Analytics, providing a more ‘real time’ report. Although sometimes seeming slightly inaccurate, I use it mostly to track which pages people are clicking on when they visit my site.

5. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack provides many configuration options such as keywords and site descriptions, which produce better search engine rankings with very little effort. When creating a new WordPress post this plugin gives you the ability to specify keywords and page descriptions that are individual to that article, which results in more flexibility and improved control over the optimisation of the site.

It’s fair to say the All in One SEO Pack is one of the most useful plugins when it comes to optimising a WordPress site – which is why my next article will be focusing on the configuration of this plugin. Please check back soon for part 2 of this WordPress SEO series.