Search Engine Optimization WordPress

4 WordPress Plugins: SEO, Google Analytics, Image Resize, Contact Form

SEO (WordPress SEO), Google Analytics (Google Analytics for WordPress), Image Resize (WP Smush.it), and Contact Form (Contact Form 7) are WordPress Plugins that augment the previous WordPress Plugin List we published here: Starting a Movie Website: WordPress Plugins and are WordPress plugins that can improve the efficiency of your website.

WordPress SEO

Much like All-in-One SEO (written about here: Starting a Movie Website: WordPress Plugins), WordPress SEO incorporates everything from a snippet preview that helps you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

The question you might be asking yourself is: What is the difference between WordPress SEO and All In One SEO Pack and which one is better?

It’s not a secret that the author of this plugin, Joost de Valk, aka Yoast, doesn’t really like All In One SEO Pack. The main reason is that All in One SEO pack has a default option for auto generating meta descriptions that is actually making it harder for people to rank well in a lot of cases, giving them a false sense of security.

Once you’ll start using this plugin, you won’t ask that question anymore, you’ll just ask yourself “why does anyone still use All In One SEO”? There’s several things this plugin does better: it has a snippet preview in the write post screen that’ll help you optimize your titles, meta descriptions and copy instantly while working on your posts and pages.

Also, other than All In One SEO Pack, this plugin has a completely working canonical implementation for all pages within your site, whereas the one in All In One SEO pack is broken, it was originally written by the author of this plugin, so he knows. It comes with XML Sitemaps, an XML News sitemap module, loads and loads of robots meta options and other options to improve your SEO.

More “sauce for the goose” – Spock, Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country

Post titles and meta description can be customized on a per post basis (with WordPress SEO). The plugin offers full support for Taxonomy (tag, category & custom taxonomy) titles as well as meta descriptions. It also gives Google search result snippet previews

WordPress SEO Post Screenshot

WordPress SEO Post Screenshot

You get to see what your post will look like in a Google SERP while writing it in WordPress’s Add/Edit Post page. That’s insane and V.E.R.Y. useful.

More details can be found here: WordPress SEO: The New All-in-One SEO Solution for WordPress Sites

Google Analytics for WordPress

Track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.

At first I thought this plugin was just a way to add the Google Analytics read-out and charts to your WordPress site but once I watched this video I discovered that it offers a plethora of useful options I had no idea could exist or be tracked. After you watch the video I’m sure you will feel the same.

WP Smush.it

Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API in WordPress. Yahoo’s excellent Exceptional Performance series recommends optimizing images in several lossless ways: stripping meta data from JPEGs, optimizing JPEG compression, converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs and stripping the un-used colours from indexed images. Smush.it offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG meta data) automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates Smush.it with WordPress.

WP Smush. It allows you to take an image like this, condense and clean it.

Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone, Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Sucker Punch

Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone, Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Sucker Punch

I personally reduce images manually (written about here: 5 Ways to Optimize Images for Increased Pageviews and SEO) if necessary (i.e. 4000 x 2000 pictures take far too long to load and slow your website down. I usually scale them down then save them at the new size). Big images are good for Google Image Search since generally larger images and the ones that must closely match the search criteria appear at the top of the search results. Another reason I manually manipulate images is because sometimes the photographer’s data (if its present) can be useful in your post i.e. if the photographer of the picture put in the location where the image was taken in the picture Description area, I might use that in my post. The reader might care where the image was snapped and other data the photographer or movie studio placed in the Description or Alternative Text area.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

A contact form makes your site look more professional but be careful. Some contact forms do not display properly in the mobile version of your website. After you install one, check it in the mobile version to make sure it is displaying properly on an Android phone and an iPhone. There are mobile emulators that let you check easily, which can be found here: Mobilize Your Website for Mobile Web Users through Design, Plugins, Validators, and Emulators.

Source: Cssreflex

About the author

Rollo Tomasi

Rollo Tomasi is a Connecticut-based film critic, TV show critic, news, and editorial writer. He will have a MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in 2025. Rollo has written over 700 film, TV show, short film, Blu-ray, and 4K-Ultra reviews. His reviews are published in IMDb's External Reviews and in Google News. Previously you could find his work at Empire Movies, Blogcritics, and AltFilmGuide. Now you can find his work at FilmBook, ProMovieBlogger, and TrendingAwards.

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