Thanks to Geoff Kenyon for this guest post.
WordPress is a great blogging platform that, out of the box, actually has pretty good SEO. That said, there are some issues that I have with WordPress. Fortunately, for non-coders such as myself, there are a lot of plugins that overcome these issues.
There are a lot of really well known plugins such as All in One SEO, SEOPressor, or Sociable, but I want to take a closer look at a couple of the lesser-used WordPress plugins that could use a little more love.
First up is WP Super Secure and Fast htaccess.
My friend who runs a mountain bike blog told me about this one. This plugin allows you to take a lot of control over your .htaccess file. When you install this plugin you have the ability to prevent hot linking, protect the .htaccess file from outside access, disable directory browsing, use mod_gzip compression, and set expiration times for caching.
As an SEO I am a really big fan of using the gzip compression. Gzip compression does a great job of compressing your files so that search engines can download your pages faster. As we all know, this is important since Google updated their algorithm to make site speed a factor. The other part of this plugin that I really like is the Disable Directory Browsing feature. It isn’t good for user experience to be able to browse through your directories and you probably don’t want them there anyways. With this plugin, instead of letting users browse the directory, they get a nice, 403 error – permission denied.
If you are interested in getting this plugin, grab it here at WordPress.org.
The second plugin that find very useful, but very underused is Link Indication. This plugin allows you to apply CSS class attributes to links in your posts, pages, and comments (if you want). Link Indication gives you a lot of control as to how your links are formatted. For example, not only can Link Indication add a nofollow, you can add it selectively so that all links to certain domains will be nofollowed while all other links are followed. I really like this because while I do like to link out, there are sites that I don’t want to link out to (like Wikipedia and competitors sites).
Another great aspect of this plugin is that it allows you to apply target=”blank” attribute to all external links. While I think linking out can add a lot of benefits to blogging, I don’t want users to be forced to navigate away from my site. Making external links open up in new windows is the perfect fix.
These are two plugins that I really enjoy and can really add a lot of value to your blog. If you have the time to play around, give these plugins a try and let me know what you think about them in the comments.
