This article will help you to Improve your WordPress and prepare it for SEO.

So, yes, you have a WordPress Blog and now, what?

Your work is not done, it just has begun. In this page i will give some advice in the next steps and explain some plugins that we should put, and configure, in any WordPress blog/site in order to:

• Be able to track (by allowing site statistics and Google Analytics integration)
• Ensure the security (avoiding spam that leads to potential risks)
• Be prepared just in case a fatal crash happens (by having backups done automatically).
• Publish in one place, your blog/site, share automatically in your social accounts.
• Have a better, attractive and personalized registration and login window.
• Prepare the blog/site for SEO pourposes. (this makes your site to appears before other blogs/sites when searching in a search engine, Google, Bing, etc).
• Monetize your blog/site.
• Get rid of HTML/CSS errors that could slow-down your site and being compliant with the Official HTML5/CSS Validation standard.
• Improve the speed of your site/blog.
• Easily be able to send newsletters to your users/subscribers.

I have divided all plugins in sections, depending of their functionallity.

Maintenance

First, we should be able to recover from a site crash or deploy a specific version/status of your blog.

• BackUpWordPress. Backup plugin. It is very easy to configure. This plugins allows us to have automatic blog/site fully backups (database and files).

• Inactive User Deleter. With the time, and more if there is no anti-spam tool, you get a lot of inactive/spam users in your DB. This plugin detects them allowing to remove this non desired users from your database.

• Update the WordPress installation. New updates are more stable and correct things that could affect to your site perfomance.
• Ensure that you have the last version of your plugins. The updates fix bugs and potential risks and give sometimes more functionalities. Before update, be sure the plugin is compatible with your current WordPress version.

Tracking

To improve the number of visitors, improve your contents, you need to know how is working your blog.

• Google Analytics for WordPress. This plugins allows to set your Google Analytics tracking token for your blog. Analytics gives a lot of useful information about our blog/site

• kStats Reloaded. This plugin creates a new section in your WordPress (KsStats) to analyze your blog giving statistics and charts.

• StatPress Reloaded. Another plugin to analyze your site, giving statistics and charts but also details about any post/page and who visits your blog, how and much more. I recommend this plugin over the kStats.

Newsletter

It is important to be in touch with your subscribers. Giving them news maintaining your blog in their minds. After looking and try some plugins i decided to use the below plugin. It is easy to configure and very complete.

• MailPoet – Newsletter (formerly Wysija). A very easy and complete solution.
• MailPoet – Contact Form 7 Integration. This plugin integrates Contact Form 7 with MailPoet by providing an option for your customers to signup for your newsletter lists while submitting a form

Customization

Our blog/site is how we look to the others so the time spent is not a waste. We should put attention to it and improve it.

• Custom Login 2.0. This plugins allows to customize the register/login window. Easy to configure with a lot of options.

Performance

If our site takes long to show a page or post, the user can close the navigator window, loosing a possible visitor. Install this plugins and configure them properly is very important.

• W3 Total Cache. This plugin is quite complete, really. It will boost your blog a lot if is properly configured. I recommend to also enable the CDN (Content Delivery Network, Amazon CloudFront is free up to 10TB of bandwidth, enough for a normal site or blog. Some related lCDN links: link1, link2).

• jsDelivr.com. It is a free public CDN (Content Delivery Network). Easy and effective. If W3 Total Cache plugin is installed, you don not need this plugin.

• P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler). This plugin allows you to know the load time of your blog or site analyzing the impact of your installed plugins. You should run this test at least once after a new plugin is installed or updated.

Social Sharing

It is important to make easy sharing content from your blog for your users because they will spread your blog. Making easy for them makes easy for you the work of make more visible your blog on the net.

• NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster. This plugin allows to post automatically your blog post to FB, Twitter, and more social accounts. (The free version on allows to configure one of each social account type).

• Slick Social Share Buttons. Adds social sharing buttons to the blog. There are a lot of plugins that can do the job. If you do not like this, use another one. Just be sure to have one.

Anti-Spam

It is important to avoid spam registrations and comments in our site/blog, this only can slow down the site and have potential security risk. There are a lot of malicious bots on the net that you must avoid in your blog.

To avoid this try install some anti-spam plugins:

• SI Captcha Anti-Spam. Adds Captcha anti-spam methods to WordPress forms for comments, registration, lost password, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots. I recommend using this plugin, it is free and works great.

• There are other options, and more advanced, Anti-Spam tools:

  • Sabre

  • Stop Spammers

  • Stop Spammer Registration.

  • WangGuard

Monetize

If you have an AdSense account and ads for your blog/site, this is your plugin.

• Quick Adsense. This plugin allows enabling easily the AdSense ads in your blog.

SEO

SEO is a whole world and is quite huge so, i will only try to tell you about some useful plugins and give some advice to get the most of your site.

Plugins

• WordPress SEO (Yoast). This plugin is very useful and complete to prepare the blog for SEO purposes. Configure it properly and follow the advices that pugin gives when creating posts or pages.

• SEO For Images. Allows to have automatically set the ALT and TITLE tags for your blog images.

• Author Box Reloaded. If you want to use Google Authoring (your photo and information in the search results of Google), this plugin puts the author information in your posts. Remember that you also have to configure your blog properly using the Yoast plugin also and create a Google+ profile linked to your blog. To see the results use the Google tool at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.

• Google sitemap plugin. Creates your blog sitemap.

Advanced

When starting a new blog, it is good to be search engine friendly. A lot of things can be done, a few of them are:

Pass some Site/Blog qualite tests

• Try to ensure your site passes the W3C Markup Validation Service Test http://validator.w3.org/. If so, put the logo in your site with a link to the test. This is quite dificult sometimes because some plugins are not very well done so you will have to disable some plugins and sometimes, modify the theme you are using in your blog.

• Ensure your site passes the W3C CSS Validation Service Test http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. If so, put the logo in your site with a link to the test. This can be difficult again, if this can not be get, try passing the above Markup validation test.

• If there is a mobile version of your blog, web, try passing the W3C Mobile Validation Test http://validator.w3.org/mobile/. Also put the logo in your web with a link to the test. It should be good to pass this test also.

Improve your Site/Blog speed

• Use the tool GTmetrix, is a free tool that analyzes your page’s speed performance. Using Page Speed and YSlow, GTmetrix generates scores for your pages and offers actionable recommendations on how to fix them http://gtmetrix.com.

• From Google, use the tool PageSpeed Insights, similar to GTMetrix https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/. Try getting the higher number (100).

• You could also deactivate the WP-CRON of your WordPress. See howto here.

Reputation

Also it is good to show a kind of reputation and safety information about your site. You can use the Webutation Service http://www.webutations.net/. Once done, put the logo with a link to your information in your blog.

CONTENT

SEO needs content ans also a properly formatted content. Use headings, bolds to structure the content of your pages and post.

 

I really recommend to install these plugins and also follow the given advices to get a better WordPress site. I also will create a page for this and updating this information.

 

I hope this article will help, greetings

JavocSoft, 2013