Plugins are one of the things that make WordPress so much fun as well as making it easy to optimize your blog for the search engines. I recently signed up for Google Alerts (not sure why I hadn’t signed up for this sooner…and if you’re not signed up, I’d highly recommend it!) and set my alert on the word ‘WordPress’. I receive a number of alerts each day on WordPress from various blogs or sites. One of the alerts I received today was on a video of Joost de Valk (yoast…look him up and check out how MUCH he does online and for WordPress). He’s created multiple plugins for WordPress and also has a listing of basic plugins you should have for SEO on your blog. I have a tendency to go for the plugins that have a little ‘punch’ to them….visually- which isn’t always the smartest thing to do! You can have the fun, flashy plugins, but they won’t do you any good if no one comes to your site!
One of the basic plugins he recommends is the SEO slugs plugin. I’ve just installed it, so I’m curious to see how it works and how it helps. It will definitely help on a couple other of my sites.
What this pluggin does is it takes any post title that is long (or basically a sentence) and removes the stop words. For those of you who don’t know, stop words are like ‘the, a, and, it ,is, etc. You obviously don’t want any of these stop words in your domain name, but sometimes it’s hard NOT to use them in your post title.
Here’s an example of how it works from a post on another one of my sites:
The post title was ” Learning to pause with your kids..” – with the SEO slugs plugin, the post title would look like this:
learning-pause-kids. Which is much easier for the search engines. Such a simple little plugin, but SO important.
The post SEO Slugs plugin appeared first on Grow Your Business with WordPress | WordPress Business.