Producing a steady flow of high-quality content is sure to be beneficial for your blog.
However, simply publishing a blog update won’t ensure you get the most out of your content marketing strategy. There are many on-page factors such as keyword optimisation, meta-descriptions, social share buttons etc to consider before you even think about off-page activity.
All of the above require work via WordPress so it’s important to understand where one can gain a helping hand, either with development or the inputting of content.
It is difficult to choose just five as there are so many, but here is our selection of the top most useful WordPress plugins for your blog.
This is used by most bloggers as it is widely regarded as being the best SEO plugin WordPress has to offer. If you do not have it installed on your blog, do it now (new versions of WordPress come with this plugin already installed). It is an automated tool that does the hard work for you by optimising meta-titles, descriptions and keywords for major search engines.
2. Akismet
When your blog gets indexed by Google, there will come with it a steady stream of infuriating spam. Akismet is a great plugin that protects your blog against this. It easily identifies spam comments and blocks them from littering your blog. Problem solved!
As any webmaster or blogger should know, having a site map is essential if you want yours to rank highly on major search engines such as Google. It allows their spider crawlers to easily index the pages within your site. Google XML Sitemaps makes the process easier for crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and relay the information more proficiently. After each new post it generates a new site map automatically.
Better WP Security simply does what is says on the label: when it is downloaded, all you have to do is click ‘activate’ on each security feature that you wish to be enabled on your site, and as if by magic, your site is as secure as Alcatraz. It runs on a simple principle of Obscure, Protect, Detect and Recover. For the pros there are various advanced features for you to manage.
This is probably the best plugin on WordPress for speeding up your blog. When a reader visits your blog it creates a new database query in PHP. This results in a fresh copy of your site being displayed to the visitor. If you have lots of visitors, then your servers will be put under a lot of pressure. W3 Total Cache stops this from happening by generating a cached copy of your site and displays that to the visitors instead. This puts less pressure on the server, allowing more visitors to view your site at once without compromising your landing page speed.
These are our pick of the five best WordPress plugins for your blog. Make sure you add them to help ease use for your readers and back-end management for your blog. If you’re going to invest in time-producing content then you are missing a trick if you don’t optimise the back-end content and make your page easy to share via social media.