The WordPress SEO plugin allows you to easily optimize your post content, titles, images and meta tag descriptions for Google listings. Your blog posts are then indexed with more relevance for a particular keyword. This means higher rankings and traffic.
Here’s a full list of the WordPress SEO plugin features:
1. Post titles and meta descriptions
The WordPress SEO plugin lets you set a template for each page. This template includes the fields: SEO title, meta description and the keyword you want to optimize the page for.
You also get a snippet preview here. So you know how your site will look when listed in the Google search results. This also shows your chosen keyword in bold.
Another cool feature is the “focus keyword.” Here, you can see the keyword density in the post heading, title, URL, content and meta description. This way, you can tell if your keyword has been used the right amount of times.
All these features mean that you can optimize each post well for the chosen keyword you want to rank in Google for. So you get a higher ranking hence, more traffic.
2. Page Analysis
This checks whether your posts are long enough, have alt tags for the images, and if you’ve written a meta description/subheadings for your post and more. These are important elements for good SEO.
3. Robots Meta Configurations
This feature helps you to block any page or post from getting indexed by Google. You can also “noindex” categories, tags, custom groups of pages that you don’t want to be indexed.
4. Permalink clean up
If you get weird variables at the end of links, by checking one box this function gets rid of that. This means your content gets found in Google under the URL you want it to be found under.
5. XML Sitemaps
There are many sitemap plugins to choose from. But what makes the WordPress SEO plugin XML sitemap different? Well, it talks to your SEO plugin unlike the others. So if you “noindex” a page from showing in Google, it may still be in your sitemap, so may still show in Google.
With the WordPress SEO plugin, your sitemap also looks good. Humans can read it because it uses an XLST stylesheet. And because the sitemap is built into this plugin, there is no need for a separate sitemap plugin!
6. RSS enhancements
Some plugins only allow you to add content to the beginning, or the end of posts in your RSS feed. This plugin allows you to add content to both so you can link back to your blog and the specific blog post. This is useful when you have a lot of people scraping content from your blog.
7. Edit your robots.txt and.htaccess
Editing these files has never been easier. You can update them from the file menu.
8. Clean up head section
This helps keep the section of your blog clean and neat. Free of unnecessary code.
9. Canonical URL
Google says “A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.” The WordPress SEO plugin sets the correct canonical URL on each of these pages. Which means Google won’t miss the pages that you want them to include in their index.
10. Breadcrumbs
You can determine which taxonomy (a way to group things together) to show for each post type. For each post, page and taxonomy, you can specify what title to use in the breadcrumb path it appears in. All to give you greater control over your breadcrumbs.
11. API Docs
The WordPress SEO plugin comes with its own set of actions and filters. A full list is included. This is just fancy stuff for developers.
In Summary
The WordPress SEO plugin makes the whole process of optimizing your pages for SEO (the right way) easier. The interface is easy on the eye and user friendly.
There are a lot of advanced features which you can use to specify the pages you want (and don’t want) to show in Google. There is no need to configure and install a separate sitemap plugin as it already has one built in.
The WordPress SEO plugin has everything you need (and more) to optimize your blog very well for SEO. And this helps to increase traffic.
