We’re going to discuss a few plugins that nearly all wordpress users have for increasing traffic. You do not have to only use the plugins we talk about today feel free to experiment and find what works for you.

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Yoast SEO | Free SEO plugin for WordPress

The first plugin will be Yoast SEO. To install all you have to do is go to the plugins section within your WordPress. Search for Yoast SEO plugin, install it and then, you’re off to the races. Yoast works by providing bullet points that starts red for needs work and become green after fixing the issues. Yoast will also give you pointers on how to improve the reading experience of your content. 

How to use Yoast seo plugin for WordPress

There are two key focal points to SEO optimize a page, The SEO tab and the readability tab. With the new updates to Yoast they’ve included two additional tabs, Schema and Social. We’re only going to discuss SEO and readability because they impact SEO the most.

SEO Tab

The SEO tab inside of yoast will allow you optimize your on-page SEO to drive the most traffic. There are fourteen analysis results that once corrected will improve your on-page SEO. The SEO layout is very simple to follow and keep track of how well your article will be Google friendly. Here are the areas that are shown inside the SEO tab.

• Key density
• Keyphrase in Subheading
• Outbound Links
• Internal Links
• Keyphrase in Introduction
• Keyphrase in meta description
• Previously used keyphrase
• Keyphrase Length
• Image alt attributes
• Text Length
• Keyphrase in Title
• SEO title width
• Keyphrase in slug

Making sure these fourteen areas of on-page SEO are all green will make your page perform well. Making Yoast one of the best free WordPress plugins for SEO.

Readability Tab

The readability tab allows you to create the content that makes the reader experience easy. When writing Google will give you the article structural it wants to show users. Providing to great user experience will help increase your ranking and drive traffic to your website. Over time your writing skills will improve and the article format will become second nature.

XML Sitemap

The first thing that you need to do is create a XML sitemap. That’s within the Yoast plugin. It automatically generates it for you. Once you create a sitemap, go to Google search console. Once you add your site, go in there and add a sitemap. It’s really simple. You add in the URL that Yoast gives you.

It takes Google, let’s say a day or two to index all of your pages. They’ll either determine if they want to index them or if they don’t want to index them and that’s okay.The more pages you feed them, the more pages that you’ll get indexed. In addition to that, within the Yoast plugin, it pretty much does most of it for you. Just make sure you use a really appealing title tag and a meta description.

Title Tags

The title tag doesn’t have to be the same as your blog post title. With the Yoast plugin, you can actually pick a specific title tag for that post. It doesn’t have to be the same title tag as the blog post name. That’s what happens with default WordPress.

If you write a blog post, whatever you call it tend to be the title tag but now with Yoast, you can pick a new one. When you do a Google search, you see a blue link at the top and then a sentence or two underneath. The blue link at the top is called a title tag. The sentences or two underneath is called a meta description. That title tag up top, you can create a specific one just for people Googling. You want to put in the keywords that you think people will be Googling for and of course, make it appealing as well.

Meta Description

It’s that simple. I can go and break down a ton of other ways that you can optimize your blog using the Yoast plugin. Meta Description gives user a quick overview of the article. It’s important to have targeted keywords and persuasive copy here to help with click-through. When writing your Meta Tag make sure to use the main focus keyphrase you blog is trying to rank for. With the Yoast plugin you can fully optimize this for improve ranking.

Cross Linking

The only thing that you need to do on your end is when you’re writing blog posts, make sure you cross link.If you have a post on dog training and you have another one on items to help train a dog. You can cross link them together. By interlinking them within the text within each blog post, you’ll notice that your blog posts will get crawled better and they’ll rank higher.

You also want to make sure you use the right words and phrases as you’re writing the content. If you’re trying to rank for the keyword SEO, Google the word SEO. Look at the top site that ranks for SEO. Put it in the tool by SEO book. It’s called the SEO book keyword density analyzer. You put in the URL and I’ll show you all the words and phrases people are using that already ranked at top. When you get those words and phrases, you’ll see them by percentage.

You can then integrate some of those keywords within your blog post and you’ll notice over time, your rankings will increase. That’s it. Do those tactics and you’ll rank higher in Google.

Smush WordPress Plugin

Another great WordPress plunging for SEO is Smush. Sumsh is an image optimizer that formats all the images used to write your blog. By having smush installed you can maintain site speed and user experience. Performing a site audit is very important to maintenance and performance. Having and image optimizer will help keep your site speed high while having high quality images.