9 Plugins to Improve Your Blog’s Usability & SEO

Installing WordPress and Creating a Blog may not be enough to gain visibility. There are some Plugins you need to install in order to improve the usability and SEO of your blog. Here are a few plugins that top the list, most of these being absolutely free.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

This is one of the most important plugins to install. It is very easy to use and if you haven’t already used it, you should install Yoast’s Google Analytics plugin too.

Simple URLs

This plugin facilitates tracking of outbound links and controls them completely. You can even add Disallow: /go/ into your robots.txt file to prevent any kind of authority from passing through that link. This is a great plugin to install if you happen to have affiliate links on your blog. It can help in calculating the conversion rate by estimating the number of clicks and the number of purchases that actually happen through these clicks.

RB Internal Links

This plugin provides adequate help with internal linking. It relates the post ID to the internal link. In case there is a change in the URL, it will be updated automatically. This will make sure the 404 error does not appear and ensures the visitors do not reach any page that does not exist.

NextGen Gallery and Lightbox Plus

These are two plugins that work simultaneously. With these two plugins you will be able to manage your image gallery without causing any hindrance to your on-page SEO. You have options to change the behavior of these plugins too. They are very flexible and work very well with the different themes of WordPress.

Widget Logic

This is a wonderful plugin for your widgets. Once you install this, you get an extra option for each of your widgets, with which you can define the exact place where your widget should appear. You can control what content appears on what section of your site.

Members

If you have many users accessing your website, you will need this plugin to define the roles of such users. You will also be able to add additional user roles. It has a few easy-to-use widgets as well as shortcodes with which you can limit the content depending upon the role of the user.

Use Google Libraries

This is a great plugin to save on your bandwidth and improve the performance of your site. It uses compressed version of your script by substituting your JavaScript libraries with Google’s own CDN. This saves on bandwidth, keeps using compressed versions of the scripts, and increases the chance that a user already has these files cached and therefore increases the general performance of your site.

W3 Total Cache

This is a caching plugin which is both comprehensive and powerful. You can also use this to test your settings so that there are no issues once you enable and deploy it.

Gravity Forms

This is one plugin that handles all kinds of procedures from form generation to management. It is a great way to handle basic contact forms, contact forms with email routing, MailChimp Integration, Content Creation and more.