Letting the world know about your blog is one of the trickier aspects of starting a new blog or getting people notice one that you’ve been working on. Google is the most obvious target for these efforts as it dominates the search market and is the default search engine for popular browsers like Firefox. Working around the rules that keep Google and other search engines relevant is arcane at best and at worst will result in your sites being demoted in relevance or delisted entirely. There are many theorists and companies that indulge in this sort of speculation and some are more successful than others at nudging search results in the ways they desire them to.
The general rule is that the better content your site contains then the more highly ranked in search results it will become. The tricky part is how to relay that information to the search engine crawlers and robots without getting yourself into hot water during the undertaking. How does one accomplish this effectively without risking negative repercussions? This is where WordPress plugins again become indispensable as many are set up to safely optimize your ranking without bending or breaking rules to try to cheat the structure entirely.
Here are a few examples of plugins you can confidently use for that pursuit:
1. All In One SEO Pack. This plugin does a huge amount of work in making your blog more search engine friendly. One of its best features is the ability to create META tags in all of your posts, even the ones made before the plugin was installed. You can also manually toggle the keywords for each post or page or create a list from the content of your categories. Overall this plugin gives you a very high degree of control over how each post or page is presented to a potential search engine spider without offering risky options and even giving users the opportunity to remove duplicate content before the site is indexed. This plugin would be the first to install or the only if you’re looking for an all inclusive solution that adequately handles nearly all of your SEO needs.
2. Headspace2. Headspace2 also deals with tagging and a myriad of other SEO tasks but it has some extras that make it worth investigating. One of its most powerful features is its ability to make per page/post changes like enabling otherwise disabled plugins on a per post basis. It can also theme specific pages with very little effort on the admin side. Headspace2 can also handle things like nested keywords and cleaning up affiliate links.
3. SEO Slugs. This plugin does a simple job but one that is pretty vital to SEO work: it removes common words like conjunctions from post slugs to make them more search engine friendly. It can make a post that initially looks like: a-search-engine-is-an-indispensable-friend into search-engine-is-indispensable-friend. While it may appear as line trash to the human eye, spiders unaware of the subtleties of English grammar and tense will eat these titles up.
4. Google XML Sitemaps Generator. This fella will generate a map of all of the pages on your WP site in a manner that allows more efficient crawling by not only Google but other engines that adopted the XML sitemap protocol including Yahoo! and Ask.com. This is a great idea because it utilizes a protocol approved by the big guns instead of trickery.
5. AskApache Search Engine Verify. This plugin allows the creation of verification codes from both Yahoo! and Google to enhance the validity of your site and to assist in correcting past wrongdoings if you’ve recently purchased a domain that may have gotten in trouble with either engine prior to your ownership. This becomes more important when you’re purchasing domains with the intent to have them appear more relevant to the big boys: it is likely that someone had the same idea and possibly gave your new home a criminal record. You lose nothing either way and have a lot to gain by adding this one to your site.
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