There is nothing like an extra boost, particularly when it comes to your business. In order to stand out from the competition it is critical to take advantage of every little opportunity to make your site more visible to potential clients.

A great way to improve your site’s visibility is to use WordPress plugins that help you complete SEO-related tasks in a correct and efficient manner. Given that there are some malicious developers out there, make sure that you install only those listed in the official WordPress.org plugin directory. Since there are so many WordPress plugins out there and you would spend so much time reviewing them all, I wanted to help you out.

Here is my list of best WordPress SEO plugins for 2013.

WordPress SEO

With over 5 million downloads at the time this article was written, WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins in the world. As of the time this article was written, the team behind this plugin is working in translating the plugin to 24 languages.

Joost de Valk a very prolific programmer and SEO expert, has developed 37 WordPress plugins,including this one, and he collaborates with top-notch sites such as Mashable. He developed this plugin with the purpose of providing the right options for both newbies and experts. For newbies that have no clue or time to tweak around with WordPress, this plugin is turnkey and automates the creations of meta tags. For advanced users that have solid WordPress experience, they can fine-tune everything and override many settings.

A great feature about WordPress SEO is that it can help you to develop better content for your blog posts. By selecting a focus keyword for your article, the plugin checks whether or not you are tagging the article correctly, and tells you what you are missing.

Finally, this plugin implements Facebook OpenGraph so your content is social media friendly and helps you verify Google authorship so your content is attributed correctly to you in Google search results.

SEO Friendly Images

It is said that images speak louder than a thousand words and when it comes to SEO, visuals are a gold mine! Just to give you a small idea of the power of images consider these facts:

• In 2011, the average number of photos uploaded to Instagram per second was 3. In 2012, that number increased to 60.
• In 2011, an engineer at Facebook Photos revealed to Quora that 200 over millions were uploaded per day, or around 6 billion per month. He also added that back then there were almost 90 billion photos total on Facebook.

I can guarantee you that in 2013 and beyond those numbers will continue to grow exponentially. People worldwide are hungry for photos and if you have great images you need to make it easier for people to find them. A great way to do this is to properly tag the metadata of your pictures with the SEO Friendly Images plugin.

This WordPress plugin automatically assigns proper ALT and TITLE attributes to the images on your site. The ALT attribute provides alternative information for an image if a user for some reason cannot view it such as a slow Internet connection or an unexpected error in your site’s code. However, this tag also informs the search engine crawlers about the content of your image, which commons in handy for Google and Bing if you have been naming your images using the standard “IMG00001”. If you haven’t already learned how to name an image for SEO purposes, you should start practicing today!

The proper tagging of your image files is a critical task that is often overlooked by site owners, especially those of ecommerce sites. In order to sell your online products, people need not only to be able to see them, but also to find them through search engines. By assigning great ALT and TITLE tags with SEO Friendly Images you can take up a step closer to a more optimized site.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Also developed by de Valk, the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to easily connect your Google Adsense and Google Analytics accounts to your WordPress site. With over 4.8 million downloads at the time this article was written, this is another popular plugin from de Valk.

The reasons to use this plugin are that it is uniquely customized to the needs of WordPress users and it saves you a lot of time from custom setting your Google Analytics account. For example, you can track what authors get the most page views and what blog categories get the most hits. All of this and much more is available without leaving your WordPress backend, saving you plenty of time and allowing you to focus on cranking out great content.

Takeaway

Improving the SEO from your WordPress site is an ongoing journey. In this article, we reviewed three key elements to get started: metadata for blog posts, metadata for images, and coordination with Google Analytics. By using these three WordPress SEO plugins you can get your site on the right path towards better indexing from search engines.

Do you have more questions about these SEO plugins? Need help with the SEO from your WordPress site? Click or call Seattle SEO Consultant at (888) 574-6067 for your free, no obligation 30 minute consultation today.

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