Improve Your SEO with the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most useful WordPress plugins available. It’s been downloaded by millions of WordPress users. At the WordPress plugin review page, there are almost 1000 reviews, with a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars. If you are like me and always check reviews before you download a plugin, you will agree that those are some impressive stats.

Improve Your SEO with the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

WordPress SEO by Yoast does several things that make it so helpful.

  • It analyzes your post based on a focus keyword of your choice. It checks on your use of the focus keyword in the title, headings, and text.
  • It looks at your title and lets you write a meta description of the post that appears on sites where you might promote your post such as Google+.
  • It comes with Twitter card implementation, which means when you post to Twitter a description of the post appears in the tweet.
  • It gives your post a rating of good, okay, or bad and teaches you how to improve your score if it isn’t as good as you want.

Let’s look at how it does the things I mentioned in more detail.

WordPress SEO by Yoast Analyzes Your Post with a Focus on Your Keywords

When the plugin is installed, a panel appears directly under your post. This is where you enter focus keywords and meta descriptions as well as learn how to improve your post and create meta descriptions targeted for particular social media if desired.

Improve Your SEO with the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

The snippet preview shows you how the post will look to the search engines. You enter the focus keyword and the meta description. As you enter the meta description, it tracks your characters and tells you how many are left. Save the draft of your post to see how SEO Yoast graded what you’ve done.

Your rating appears in the Publish panel.

Improve Your SEO with the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

The green disc next to SEO in the publish panel indicates that I’m doing pretty well with things. Yellow indicates okay and red is bad. If you click the “Check” link next to the colored disc, you are returned to the WordPress SEO by Yoast control panel, where the second tab gives you Page Analysis. You see the same info by selecting the Page Analysis tab.

Improve Your SEO with the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

By looking at the page analysis, I can see what I need to change. I changed one of my H2 headings after checking this. I appreciate getting the reading level analyzed, because I tend to write long convoluted sentences, rather like this one, that decrease readability.

Customize the Meta Description for Different Sites

If you select the Social tab in the control panel, you can customize the meta description for specific sites.

Improve Your SEO with the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

Twitter Card Implementation with WordPress SEO by Yoast

Using Twitter cards makes a big difference in how your tweets display. The heading, the description, and a photo all show up on Twitter if you use a Twitter card. Here’s an example of how a tweet with a Twitter card looks:

Improve Your SEO with the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

With the plugin installed, an SEO category appears in your WordPress Dashboard menu sidebar. Clicking anything in this menu takes you to the Yoast WordPress SEO dashboard, so I always make sure I’ve saved my draft before I use this menu.

Improve Your SEO with the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

Select Social and then select the tab for Twitter.

Improve Your SEO with the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

Select the Twitter card meta data checkbox and supply your Twitter Username. Save. Follow the link to the Twitter Card Validator, where you’ll pick a card type, grab some embed code to add to the document HEAD of your page, and apply for Twitter card approval.

A Few Final Options

The screen shots above show a number of options and settings I didn’t have the space to get into in this post. On the Advanced tab, there are options for redirects, Canonical URLs and more. Options in the sidebar SEO category will take you to the Yoast WordPress SEO dashboard where you can set up your site with Google and Bing webmaster tools, make choices about titles and meta settings, enable an XML sitemap, make choices about permalinks, internal links, breadcrumb settings, RSS feeds, import settings from other plugins, and edit your robots.txt and .htaccess files.

I’m not a heavy user of plugins, but this one provides a lot of benefits. I think you’ll find it helpful. You can download the plugin from the developer’s site at yoast.com or from the WordPress plugin directory.

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The Complete Set of Social Media Plugins for WordPress

WordPress is the most popular blogging, CMS and general website platform in the world, and for good reason! WordPress offers its users absolute ease of use with its simple and intuitive yet robust and powerful interface, giving everyone from light bloggers to network admins the ability to manage their websites with ease.

While WordPress has a slew of appealing features built right into its main open source package, one of the most highly regarded aspects of this CMS is its extendability with plugins. No matter what need you are trying to fill or what result you’re wanting to achieve, it is very likely that a plugin or two exist to make it happen with only a few clicks.

The line between blogging and social media is blurring more and more each day, making it increasingly necessary to integrate one within the other. If you’re looking to give your WordPress blog a boost via social media, plugins are the way to go and we’ve got some of the very best lined up for you right here!

General Social Sharing Plugins

Sociable

A simple, yet robust, social media sharing plugin and widget for WordPress, Sociable is a long-trusted social media solution for WordPress websites. With the option to choose from more than 100 social network platforms, buttons for each with automatically generated “share” links can be added to posts, pages or both with a click of a button, showing above or below the content as you choose.

ShareThis

ShareThis WP Plugin

Similar to Sociable in its functionality, ShareThis sports two main differences. The first of those differences is the manner in which ShareThis displays social media sharing links within your blog, offering a flyout menu instead of a string of button icons; when on-screen real estate is a concern, ShareThis is the best option. The second and perhaps more intriguing difference is the inclusion of tracking reports, allowing you to see at a glance how often your content is shared, and by who.

Network-Specific Social Sharing Plugins

TweetMeme

TweetMeme WP Plugin

Used on more than 100,000 websites, including such giants as Wired.com and the official Time Magazine site, TweetMeme for WordPress has been the standard in WordPress/Twitter integration for more than four years. Including a simple “Tweet This” button in a spot of your choosing within your content, TweetMeme also offers a live count of clicks, letting both you and your visitors know just how popular your blog post is in the Twitterverse.

Google+1

Google+1 WP Plugin

Google+ may not match some of its competitors in terms of sheer size but its popular parent company and useful features have helped it to become by far the fastest growing social network leading into and through the first part of 2012. The Google+1 WordPress plugin does exactly what its title suggests, inserting a simple “+1” icon for your users to click in order to share your content with their Google+ circles.

Deep Integration Plugins

WP Social Toolbar

WP Social Toolbar

A beautiful and highly configurable complete social media solution for your WordPress website is the aptly named Social Toolbar. Placing a detailed but unobtrusive toolbar at the bottom of each page of your site, Social Toolbar for WordPress gives your users the ability to share anything, anywhere, with the click of a button. With options to configure your accounts, what you want included and every bit of color, this plugin can easily be adapted to any WordPress website with ease.

Social Metrics

Social Metrics WP Plugin

When all is said and done, improving your blog’s position with social media sites depends on knowing and understanding your current performance: enter the Social Metrics WordPress plugin. Compatible with Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn and Google+, this plugin tracks and displays your site’s social media performance statistics and gives them back to you in an intuitive way to help you to understand what you’re doing right and where you can improve.

Guest Author Tom Chu is the SEO manager at PsPrint and PsPrint Blog. When he’s not sitting behind a computer, Tom likes watching sci-fi movies and Japanese cartoons, hitting the golf course and playing with his four dogs. You can connect with Tom via LinkedIn at LinkedIn.

Best 5 WordPress Plugins for Managing Multiple Blogs

Running multiple web blogs of any variety takes time and attention and site owners are always on the lookout for tools to make that job easier.

While WordPress has long been the content management system of choice for multi-bloggers in the form of its WordPress MU (multi-site) offering, the latest incarnation of the world’s favorite publishing platform has taken things to a new level by integrating the same functionality into its core package, opening the possibilities of multi-site management to the masses not previously familiar with WordPress MU.

WordPress Plugins for Managing Multiple Blogs

WordPress 3 has made blog networks easier to launch but running them effectively still depends on individual needs often not covered by the base WordPress package. With multi-site usability built-in, all that’s left is narrowing down the bulk of available WordPress plugins aimed at making the lives of blog network owners easier.

1. ManageWP.com

ManageWP.com

The only plugin mentioned on our list that isn’t completely free is ManageWP, a full-featured system aimed at giving network owners full and absolute control over their WordPress sites. The ManageWP service provides a single web-based control panel for all of the sites you own, giving you the ability to manage content across unlimited sites with both a single login and a single submission.

Combined with life-changing features like one-click upgrades for multiple WordPress, plugin and theme installations along with mass publishing, automatic backups, editorial calendars the ability to clone whole sites with a single click and much more, ManageWP may be exactly what the proverbial doctor ordered for blog network owners with an eye toward extreme productivity.

2. Networks for WordPress

Networks for WordPress

Network admins managing related sites already functioning on separate WordPress installations are left with the task of making the entire network accessible to all users, often ending with messy database sharing techniques and something less than a seamless experience for network visitors.

The Networks for WordPress plugin solves this problem and a few others by allowing its users to manage blog networks based on very specific criteria, sharing resources – and users – only when and where you stipulate.

3. Shared Users Reloaded

Shared Users Reloaded

When using WordPress MU or the built in multi-site functionality in WordPress 3 isn’t an option but sharing users across sites is a necessity, the Shared Users Reloaded plugin is the quickest and easiest way to give your registered users access to content across more than one WordPress installation. Setup is simple, database changes are minimal and results are instant; there is simply no easier plugin for sharing users.

4. Multi-site Global Search

Multi-Site Global Search WP PluginMulti-Site Global Search WP Plugin

A general question for WordPress network admins already running a multi-site environment: How many times have you forgotten exactly which blog contained which particular piece of content? If your answer is anything other than zero, you are definitely familiar with searching manually through endless posts. Luckily, there’s a plugin for that!

The Multi-site Global Search plugin for WordPress allows you to search through all posts on all sites using any search string, giving you instant access to any piece of content, anywhere on your network, at the click of a button. The plugin allows for searching within several fields, including post title, post content and post author, making this the only search-enhancing plugin you’ll ever need to install.

5. Multi-Site User Management

Multi-Site User Management

One of the things that the built-in multi-site functionality of WordPress doesn’t cover handily is the fact that not all blogs are alike. Sites based on WordPress serve both different purposes and different userbases and the functionality that you provide to users at one network site does not necessarily reflect the functionality that you want to provide at another.

The Multi-Site User Management plugin gives you the ability to control what default permissions and abilities users have on a given site or the global network, depending on your needs. Where one site may be dependant on user-created content and require default permissions to reflect this, another may be updated by a single author, requiring that default users have only basic privileges.

While the plugins listed above represent some of our favorites for blog network needs, keep in mind that developers are constantly working on new ways to get the absolute most out of WordPress and those efforts are usually made public. WordPress continues to amaze blog network owners with its fast, well-written code, ease-of-use for both end-users and admins and its new built-in ability to handle multi-site environments, but a keen eye toward plugins that suit your particular needs can easily be the facet of WordPress that makes you love it most!

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Guest Author Sonia Tracy is the content editor for PsPrint and editor of PsPrint Printing and Design Blog. PsPrint is an online printing company, which you can follow on Twitter and Facebook.