Essential Plugins Your Blog Needs

Every blog needs plugins to help fortify its functionality and availability for search engines. You can access some plugins free while some others come at a premium. If you are running your blog on WordPress you will have free access to many essential plugins that can add functionality to your blog. Knowing the service you want from plugins is important before you decide on which to install. There are a variety of plugins you can install depending on your blogging experience and the level of dexterity you’ve at blogging. What you choose to install is determined by the type of functionality you want for your blog. That is what digital marketing experts recommend.


 
Here are a few plugins of choice for many bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that has links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. These get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your site visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Backs up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox. It helps to make sure your blog is safe in the event of a crash, security compromise or file corruption.
W3 Total Cache: Helps you create static pages of your web pages to enable your website load faster. Fast loading websites are search engine friendly.

Plugins are really essential to enhance the functionality of your blog. In digital marketing world, the competition is so stiff that any little thing you can do on your blog to give you some edge no matter how little over your competitors is always highly welcome. That is where plugins become really essential. They manage to help out providing such little essentials to enhance your blog. If you want to go far as a blogger, it is wise not to ignore them.


 

Why Your Blog Needs a Good SEO Strategy

It requires a bit of technicalities to set up a good blog. Experts advise that no one should try to learn everything about blogging at once and right from the word go. The process is gradual and takes some bit of learning on the job.  It is best to begin with and to learn from the basics as you make progress in your blogging efforts. Once you begin and start getting some results, it acts as the tonic and motivation to encourage you to learn more and to do more. One of the things you’ll learn along the way is SEO strategy which from my own experience appears to be the hardest part of blogging. Every blogger really needs it because without it, search engines will tend to ignore your blog in its entirety. If that happens, your blog loses out in the much needed traffic which search engines would’ve been sending to it.
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No doubt Search Engine Optimization, SEO, involves a bit of technicalities which experts can help you with if you are not too sure you can handle it on your own. It is very important you get a good SEO strategy in place. How the search engines find your blog and send traffic to it depends hugely on your SEO strategy. It is about the most challenging aspect of blogging and it must be done right at all times because a huge percentage of the traffic expected in your blog will be sent by search engines. Simply put, SEO is a way of playing around with and position keywords in your blog posts to enable them rank high in search results. The higher they rank, the more people find them and the higher traffic your blog gets. You can use web tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest and the likes to research keywords to know what people are searching for most and how best to use such keywords in your posts to take advantage of these popular searches. That is how SEO works.

When you are getting started as a blogger, it is very essential to have a good SEO strategy. With it in place, search engines will be sending you free and high-quality targeted traffic. This is about the best organic traffic you can get on the internet. You cannot afford to miss out on it. A good SEO strategy positions your blog in very good stead to receive this traffic steadily. If you are not too sure of what to do, don’t allow the technicalities involved to discourage you. There is a way out. You can arrange to work with WordPress because it has a content management system which is optimised for search engines by default. With a good web-hosting, lightweight theme and SEO WordPress plugins, it helps you to find your way around many technicalities involved in developing your own SEO strategy. With your blog linked to WordPress, you are all set to receive organic traffic courtesy of search engines.

That is one SEO problem resolved. The second is how to research the demand for various keywords related to your blog niche. This is where you’ll need to sign up with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. These tools will help measure your traffic inflow and even the sources of the traffic. They let you know exactly what keywords people are using to find your blog posts on the internet. As part of your own SEO strategy, these same popular keywords can be deployed to write more content for better search results.

Aside Google Search Console, you can also take a look at other keyword research tools to find out which works best for you. Some of such user-friendly tools are:

Google's Auto-Suggest: As you type in a keyword in Google, it will automatically show you suggestions for longer tail keywords. These keywords are showing up because people are searching for them in Google. The reason Google is suggesting them to you.
UberSuggest: A free keyword research tool.
Ahrefs: A keyword research tool for deep researches.

Last line! Even though SEO is a blogging technicality, you should not allow all the technical analysis to demotivate you. In blogging world, you can always manage to find your way around many technicalities even if you are a newbie. What is important is to first have a blog running. Along the way, you can learn about more technical things and how to go around some of the technicalities. That is what all bloggers are doing in our highly saturated and competitive blogging world.