Are you wondering where to start with SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a wild world with a constantly changing landscape. Trends change, algorithms come and go and it can be hard to know the best solutions. The good news is that WordPress is a very SEO friendly platform.
This post won’t teach you how to run a complete SEO campaign or all that WordPress can accomplish when it comes to search engine optimization. We’ll save those topics for another day. This post is about plugins! In particular there are two that can help your organization get results quickly with SEO.
Here are my top SEO contenders:
I. All-in-One SEO Pack
It is, as the title suggests, a fairly comprehensive solution for introducing easy-to-manage SEO components to WordPress. It offers the following:
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Google Analytics support
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Support for Custom Post Types
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Advanced Canonical URLs
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Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
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Generates META tags automatically
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And more…
II. WordPress SEO by Yoast
Another comprehensive package that offers everything that All-in-One does, and also includes keyword and content analysis for your pages and posts.
Both plugins will improve your SEO without even changing the base options. They are configured with SEO standards in mind. With tweaking, however, both can become powerhouses. Do you want to integrate Google Authorship (and you should)? Done. Do you want to keep closer tabs on social media referrals? Done. These can be integrated without too much fuss.
Here are Blue Zoo, we use the SEO by Yoast plugin for our website and recommend it to our clients.
If you are wanting to explore these solutions yourself, it would be good to experiment a little. Don’t install both at the same time! Ideally, you would have two sites to use so that you could compare performance or try them one at a time.
Use the links above to download and then install via the plugin upload function in WordPress or just search for them within the plugin section of your admin panel. Before changing the settings too much, I would strongly recommend reading the following guides:
Have fun exploring WordPress SEO and feel free to leave a comment or question. We’re happy to help!