If you have a WordPress blog, you may have already discovered these four plugins, but if you have not, I highly recommend you add them to your website. I was originally going to title this post Ten Plugins I Cannot Live Without, but the article would be too long. So well just start with these four.
The first is Broken Link Checker. I have always believed that a good part of SEO is having a site that is appealing to Google on a technical as well as an informational level. That is to say, I dont think youll do as well in Google if you have 100 broken links on your site than you would do if all of your links actually worked.
Remember: Google crawls every word on your site, as well as then crawling every site that you link to. If you have a mortgage or real estate website, but all of your links go to porn sites, you probably wont rank very well for real estate no matter how well your content is written.
Googles goal is to provide information. Why should they send visitors to your site if your site contains bad information, i.e. broken links.
Download Broken Link Checker here.
Cookies for comments is a plugin that inserts a harmless cookie onto a commenters machine, which then has to be verified before the comment is accepted. Since about 99% of spammers arent actually commenting, but having bots do it automatically, this eliminates spammy comments better than anything else Ive used. Akismet is worthless, in my opinion too easy to beat.
You can .
The last two plugins work very well together; a onetwo punch against people who will rip off your content.
For search engine purposes, having original, informative content on your website is the single most important thing you can do. By this point, everybody knows that, right?
But if you have good content, you can bet that somebody will steal it. It used to be that your competition would steal your titles and keywords only. (And they still do that, believe me.) However, now that keywords have been determined to be utterly useless by most SEO experts and thank God for that people will just steal your content.
So I use WPCopyProtect. This will disable text selection and right clicking on your blog. I love it. Check out my post on the Arizona Association of Mortgage professionals right here. (The link will open in a new window.) You will notice that you cant select the text or even right click to try and save an image.
Go ahead, try to right click on my logo
Of course, this is hardly foolproof. If anybody wanted to steal my content they could just look at the source code of the page; which I am sure 80% of content stealers would know how do do. But there is a way to even prevent people from looking at your source code! Yep. I can tell you how to make your content 100% uncopyable, but still readable and crawlable by Google, but I havent figured out how to do it in WordPress. So that is going to have to wait.
However, the last plugin allows people to use your content and helps your SEO at the same time. Its called Embed Anything. If you follow that link, it will take you to a site that asks you to register in order to download the plugin. Dont worry, its free to register and download.
Once the plugin is installed, a little button is added to your posts that allows your visitors to get an embed code, to insert your content into your page the same way you would do it with a YouTube video.
When somebody embeds your great content into their site, two good things happen:
1. Google does not crawl (can not crawl) the embedded content. You wont be penalized for having your article all over the internet and neither will the person who uses your content.
2. The website that uses your content creates a link back to your site.
This is wonderful incentive to write good content! If you are a mortgage broker licensed in only one or two states (or at least you do most of your business in one particular state), you would want mortgage brokers all over the country to embed your content. It helps their site because they are supplying their visitors with quality content and it helps your site rank well with Google.
Everybody wins!
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