Top 3 WordPress Plugins for Technical SEO Issues

There are several areas of SEO that you need to pay attention to other than links and keywords.  One of those areas I like to call “Technical”.  These include anything that usually takes place by a development team, URL’s, HTML code, tracking code implementation, re-directs, canonical tags, etc.  Another reason that I love using WordPress is because most of these items are pretty easy to take care of, even without a deep knowledge of HTML.

Below are three WordPress plugins that will help you with a few of these technical issues.  The three we will discuss are canonical URL’s, 301 re-directs and XML Sitemaps.

Canonical URL’s

You may have several reasons why you may want to use a canonical URL throughout your site.  Let’s use a simple example of a blogging site on WordPress.  If you are using a theme that shows a snippet of your post, but then includes a “read more” link, typically, the linked to URL for that read more anchor text will include some extra characters in your URL, for example “/#-more.html”  Now you have two URL’s for the same blog post.  Obviously, we don’t want that.  How do we easily fix that?  We need to place a canonical tag on the “read more” link, but that can be difficult without much of a development background.

This is why we recommend installing the Canonical Link Elements for WordPress by Joost de Valk, creator of Yoast.

This plugin is very easy to use. Once installed, it will show up under your content editor in the create new post / page section.  All you need to do is copy and paste the canonical URL for that post / page.  Simple way to make sure that SEO valued is all being sent to the proper page without having a developer on staff.

301 Re-Directs

Have you ever wrote a blog post or created a page and then either accidentally deleted it or even deleted it on purpose?  Or maybe, you created a page with one URL, but then you decided that you wanted to change that URL to something different.  Do you know how to manually set up a 301 re-direct by using the htaccess file?  More than likely, if you’re not a developer, you don’t know how to do that, and that is fine, I wouldn’t want to go through that route either.  No need to worry because this plugin is very simple and easy to use.  Quick Page Post Re-Direct Plugin by Don Fischer allows you to take an old URL and easily set up a 301 re-direct to the new URL.  It’s quick, easy, simple. Exactly what WordPress should be.

XML Sitemap

Every site needs an XML Sitemap. This plugin helps you create it with just a few clicks.  Once you install the Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold you can generate your first XML sitemap and then set up the settings for how frequently you want to update the sitemap.  Once again, very simple and quick.

There are a lot of other great SEO WordPress plugins, but these are a few that we do recommend and use on every site that we develop or work on.