SEO Slugs WordPress Plugin For Better WordPress SEO
SEO slugs is a very useful plugin that will remove the stop words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ within the URLs of your Blog posts and pages.
For example if you publish a post or a page with a title:
“What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”
Then the wordpress automatically make the URL of the above most like
/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings
But after activating this plugin it will remove all the stop words from the URL and make it more search engine friendly. So when you publish a post using the above title then it will assign the following URL to the post:
/immediately-higher-rankings
The best part about this plugin is that it also allows you to change the URL of the post in-case you don’t like the URL that this plugin has assigned to your post. But, you need to check it before publishing a post, just save the post and check its URL and if you like it just publish it or change it according to your requirement.
Download: SEO Slugs WordPress Plugin
WordPress SEO – Best Permalinks Structure For Your Blog
As many of you already know that search engines like Google are the best source of getting free and targeted traffic to your sites. Search engine optimization become more important when it comes to getting traffic from search engines. As a blogger we mostly use wordpress platform to start blogging which is already very much SEO optimized but there is no doubt it lacks some features that we need to add via plugins or configure in it from its settings to make it completely search engine optimized.
When you install the wordpress blog it gives your blog a dynamic URL structure which is not a good SEO practice and in order to make it more SEO friendly you need to change the permalinks structure of your wordpress blog.
Its very easy to change the permalinks structure of your wordpress blog, you just need to go to “permalinks” under the “setting” and from there you can easily configure the search engine friendly permalinks for your blog. At the end of this post I will also mention some of the best SEO friendly parmalinks options that you just need to copy and paste in your blog to make it more search engine friendly.
But if you didn’t know this at the time when you installed your blog then there is way to still change the permalinks without breaking any of your existing links by using the 301 redirect. Using the 301 redirect will make sure that you will not lose any traffic from search engines and you can use wordpress redirection plugin that will make this job easier for you . So if you haven’t changed your permalinks to make them search engine friendly then this is the right time to do it and check the following options for permalinks that you can use to make your blog URLs more search engine friendly.
Choose your SEO Friendly Permalinks Structure:
Go to Setting > Permalinks and then choose custom option.
Following are some options that you can choose for permalinks:
/%postname%.html (It will show a post tile in the URL, I am using this structure)
/%postname%/ (It will only show postname without .html extension)
From SEO perspective there is no difference between the above two permalinks, I have choosen .html extension to make it look more static.
/%category%/%postname%.html ( This structure will show the name of the category in URL)
/%category%/%postname% (You will not have .html extension, that’s the only difference in it)
There are also other options available that you can choose from that are equally search engine friendly.
Important Note:
I also want to tell you that if you are using category within your permalinks structure then do not assign a post to more than 1 category. If you assign a post to “SEO” category and same post to “wordpress” category then the preference will goes to the category which have a higher ID.
For example if you have created a post that is mainly centered about SEO and you have assigned that post to two categories”SEO” and “wordpress“. So for this situation your 1st preference for the URL should be that “SEO” category will come in the URL which has a category ID 5 but if “wordpress” catgeory has 4 ID then it will take “wordpress” in the URL instead of “SEO“ like http://www.corebloggers.com/wordpress/post-name/
So just choose your permalinks carefully and do not forget to share your opinion about this post.
Google XML Sitemap Plugin For WordPress SEO
Google xml sitemap wordpress plugin is a must have plugin for every wordpress blog owner who is serious about getting traffic from search engines. Google xml sitemap plugin will generate the xml sitemap of your wordpress blog that is good for wordpress SEO and present full structure of your blog to search engine crawlers which results in better indexing of your blog in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.
Google xml sitemap plugin is easy to install and has an admin panel from where you can configure this plugin according to your requirements. Also, this wordpress plugin is available into many other languages but If you are installing this plugin first time then you might face little problem if your not good with FTP since this plugin required you to create a
sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz file and you need to make them writable using CHMOD 666 before building your sitemap.
After installing the plugin, it will generate a xml sitemap for your blog then you can easily submit that sitemap to Google using Google webmaster tools.
Download: Google xml sitemap wordpress plugin also do let me know if you face any problem installing this plugin and I will help you out :-)