The Perfect SEO Setup for WordPress: 8 Plugins to Skyrocket Your Rankings and Traffic
– WordPress made it easy for
anyone to create a website. It's easy to use, it's
fast, it doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge. Heck, even someone like
me who's not a developer can do things like SEO and
modify WordPress with a breeze. Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel and today I'm gonna cover the perfect
SEO setup for WordPress, eight plugins to skyrocket
your ratings and traffic. (smooth music) Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel.
If you're on YouTube click
the alert notification, that way when I go live,
whether it's on Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn you'll get notified. Question, do you have a
WordPress-based website? I'm curious, let me know
what platform you're using. Are you using WordPress, are
you using Wix, let me know. Some of the most important
factors that Google looks into in order to rank your site
are some of the following, user experience, on-page SEO, site speed, mobile-friendliness,
internal link structure, structured markups, all these
things impact your ranking, and there's hundreds of other factors.
There's over 200 factors that Google includes in their algorithm, and today I'm gonna share with you plugins that'll help you do all of
these things, plus more, in a really easy and controlled way. Plugin number one, W3 Total Cache. Look, load time is super important, especially because people
are using mobile devices now. Yes, there's 4G, there's 5G, you know, LTE, whatever you wind up calling it, but the problem with mobile devices is if you're in a place that
doesn't have the best reception I don't care if you have a 5G phone, you're not gonna load
websites really fast.
The W3 Total Cache plugin,
it ensures that your site will load as fast as you possibly can. It'll improve load times, it'll
help you connect with CDNs, it makes better use of
your server resources so that way your server
doesn't have to continue to push the same content
over and over again. Instead it caches it so it can deliver it to the user as quick as possible, and if you have a really
good hosting provider they have caching built in, but most of the hosting providers that I've seen don't
have caching built in, hence I'm wrecking, recommending
the W3 Total Cache plugin. Another plugin that you need to check out is the Smush Image Compression plugin. If you're creating blog content, and hey, you're on a WordPress blog,
or WordPress as a CMS, there's a good chance you at least have a blog article or two, and in that blog article what
do you think you're including? Images, if you're not you should change that and go add images right away.
The Smush Image Compression plugin, what this does is ensures that your images still look really good and quality, so that way when someone looks at them they don't look all pixelated and fuzzy, they still look really sharp, but this decreases the size of the image in which I'm talking about
the server size, right, that hard drive space that it's taking up, so when people ping your
site it loads much faster. The third plugin that you have
to use is a Yoast SEO plugin. It does everything from
on-page optimization, controlling your meta
tags, your title tags.
It even analyzes your content, telling you if you're doing
a good job or a bad job. It creates sitemaps for you, helps with structure and markup. It does pretty much what most things that you need if you want to ensure that your WordPress blog is SEO-friendly. Now look, WordPress out of the
box is pretty SEO-friendly, but this plugin puts those last, final touches that are really important. Most people think like, "Oh yeah. "If I do most of the things, that's fine." No, that used to work five, six years ago, but SEO has changed.
Now Google wants you to do
every little thing right, and when you combine them
all that's when you see the climb in ranking,
the extra search traffic, and this plugin will
really help you get there. The fourth plugin is Sucuri. If your website gets hacked, you rankings and traffic will tank, and when it tanks and you
fix it it's hard to recover. Sucuri helps you, helps prevent
you from getting hacked. Now, it's not gonna be perfect, but it's better than nothing. The last thing you want to do is get your site hacked and
lose all your traffic. I've seen this time and time again, someone gets hacked and they figure it out after a week or two, their rankings tank, they fixed it, and they
don't recover in 30 days.
Eventually they recover,
sometimes it takes two months, sometimes three months, if
they're lucky it happens quickly. And they're like, "Hey, my
business is in the shitter. "I'm losing a lot of money all "because of this one silly thing." Make sure you don't get hacked. The fifth plugin, AMP for WordPress. This helps with mobile users. Look, if you want to rank really high you want to get in on Google News, you want to make sure that your
site has the AMP framework. In other words, your tech space
articles loads really fast, Google just posts it on their end, they're leveraging their own framework, and I found that yeah,
in the United States by leveraging the AMP framework I didn't really get much
more mobile traffic, but other countries where mobile devices and infrastructure isn't
as good, such as Brazil, I saw a huge increase in mobile traffic by just leveraging this plugin.
The sixth plugin for you is a3 Lazy Load. When you use images on your site, even when you compress them, it still takes time for
that webpage to load. You want to make it where those images load as people scroll, that way you're not just
loading up all these images on a page and it takes
forever for that webpage to load when people haven't even started reading the content and scrolling. That's why I like Lazy Load. If you're on the neilpatel.com site you'll notice that as
you read my blog posts images load as you scroll.
This creates a better
experience for you as a user, and search engines prefer this as well. The seventh plugin, All In
One Schema Rich Snippets. If you want to improve
your search visibility by sharing rich snippets between the page title, you gotta use this plugin. It's great, it's simple to use, it is one of the best things
that I've done out there. Now, with schema markup what you'll find is some people are like,
"Yeah, we're gonna use "all this schema markup
and use all these tags "even though our site isn't relevant "to the specific schema markups." You don't want to do that.
For example, I wouldn't be
using stuff on neilpatel.com, a schema markup that's
relevant for restaurants when I have nothing related
to restaurants on my site. That'll irritate Google and
it'll hurt you in the long run, so when you're using
this be nice and kind. Don't try to abuse schema markup. The eighth plugin, Really Simple SSL. 90% of websites that rank at
the top have SSL installed. It's pretty much become a prerequisite if you want to rank well, so use the SSL. Now, it doesn't have to
be through this plugin. Maybe your host provides it, maybe your domain provider provides it, whatever it may be you want a secure site, and what you'll find is some
browsers even notify users, saying "Hey, this site isn't secure," and that'll cause people to bounce back, get away from your site, and over time that could decrease your rankings.
You want to make sure you
have SSL, it's that important. So, use these eight
plugins, you'll find that your rankings will start
going up over time, especially if you
haven't used any of them, but when you start combining all of them it does help quite a bit. If you have any questions
leave a comment below.
Let me know what your
question is about WordPress or these plugins and I'll answer it. If you need extra help
getting in the rankings, whether it's just content
marketing, SEO, link building, head over to my ad agency,
Neil Patel Digital. We love helping companies grow their search traffic online, and
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