Any plugin that could help promote my website or bring more people to the site is pure gold. Even with tens of thousands of visitors a month, blogging can be a solitary profession and sometimes it feels like you’re talking to yourself. Some of the best WordPress plugins are the ones that make social sharing and SEO easier.
This is really the first must-have WordPress plugin on the list. The plugin is actively installed on millions of blogs and is the standard for SEO optimization. The free version offers a huge list of SEO resources including support for SEO on custom post types, automatic title optimization for Google search, auto-generation of META tags and avoiding duplicate titles.
After enabling the plugin, you will have to set it up to run properly. Go to All in One SEO and then General Settings.
As powerful as the search engines are, even they get lost sometimes on their way around your blog. If a search engine cannot find its way around, your pages and posts won’t be indexed and won’t show up in search results.
Creating a sitemap helps by offering a guide for search engine crawlers around your website. With the Google XML Sitemap plugin, it’s easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your blog which means you’ll show up in Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com searches.
This is another one that you basically just enable and let it run. You will want to add it in Google Webmaster Tools by clicking “Crawl” then “Sitemaps” and then submitting the sitemap. Google XML Sitemaps will notify the search engines automatically every time you create a new post.
The Digg Digg WordPress plugin is favorite social sharing plugin by a long-shot. The plugin displays your social share buttons on top or on the side of posts and includes 22 different social sites.
There are four options for sharing buttons placement. The most popular is the floating social share area because it ensures that your readers are always just a click away from sharing your content. No matter far down the page is scrolled, the share buttons follow the page.
It is difficult enough to get readers to share your content. You need to make it as easy and as top-of-mind as possible. Before floating social share buttons, if a reader scrolled down past the beginning of your post, there was a good chance they’d forget that sharing was even an option.
The AddThis Sharing Buttons plugin offers some great tools for mobile. It makes it super easy for your mobile visitors to share your content with a single tap. It also offers some nice customization options to match your website or blog. Mobile traffic is growing rapidly and it's easy to lose shares from your mobile readers but this plugin will help you fix that right away.
After you’ve built some authority on your blog and are showing up on Google, visitors from search are going to start accounting for a majority of traffic. Make an impression by showing off your best work and you might just convert them to long-term readers that come back to the blog on a regular basis.
That’s where the WordPress Popular Posts plugin comes in. The plugin creates a widget that you can place on your blog and show a ranking of posts. The widget is extremely customizable and can be set to show posts with the most views over the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or all-time.
Not only can you show a list of popular posts but you can also limit the list to a specific category. I have one list that displays my most popular product review (aka affiliate) posts. It highlights the affiliate products that people read most and increases my website revenue.
Lastly, if you need to focus more time and energy on marketing, you can hire a team of experts to manage the technical aspects of your WordPress site. One such service is provided by WP Buffs.
What are your favorite WordPress plugins to promote your site?
Image Source: CoSchedule
Content marketing guru at Mailmunch. I’m passionate about writing content that resonates with people. Live simply, give generously, stay happy.
