Free Plugins 2 of 4: SEO

With this post, I’m continuing the free plugin series. You can check out the previous post here. This one is about SEO plugins, more precisely, on-page SEO and content promotion. Yet, I included Yoast SEO in the first post in the series as I consider it an essential one.

If you want to check where are your website in terms of SEO, you can use this free tool: https://varvy.com/.

Add Headers

This little plugin adds ETag, Last-Modified, Expires and Cache-Control headers to HTTP responses generated by WordPress for more efficient client-side or proxy server side caching.

It also solves one rather obscure Google webmaster guidelines compliance by implementing “If-Modified-Since” – “Last-Modified”, which lets Google know if your web pages have been updated.

The plugin does exactly what it says on the tin and it does it well. After activating and configuring it, the Kilobyte amount downloaded by Google bots decreased 10x!

The only so-called “negative” point is that it has no admin UI. The only way to configure it is by writing a PHP code snippet, but don’t worry, all the needed information can be found on the plugin’s website. It simply works.

Here is the configuration code snippet I’m using:

// options for "Add Headers" plugin
function addh_custom_options ( $options ) {
	// enable client caching for 1 day
	$options['cache_max_age_seconds'] = 86400;
	if(is_page('contact') || is_page('signup'))
		// disable caching for certain pages
		$options['cache_max_age_seconds'] = 0;
	return $options;
}
add_filter( 'addh_options', 'addh_custom_options' );

Async Javascript

Another point to consider when optimizing your website’s is to avoid using blocking resources, especially above the fold. This plugin takes care of JavaScript, making it non-blocking by using one of the two methods: asynchronous or defer execution.

To make this possible, all JavaScript must be enqueued using the standard way (via the ‘wp_enqueue_script‘ method). Most of the plugins are indeed honoring this way of embedding scripts into the HTML content.

You can also exclude scripts that are not working well in this manner. In most cases, you have to specify jquery.js in the exclusion section because jQuery library must already be loaded before any other jQuery related code.

Broken Link Checker

As it’s name indicates, this plugin checks for broken links throughout your website. It checks your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you via the dashboard or by email if any are found. It may also display the broken links differently in posts.

Easy Social Share Buttons

It’s funny, I was about to commend this sharing plugin, but this morning, just before this post was scheduled to be published, it started to behave strangely. The G+ counter ceased to display and the whole site became extremely sluggish. First I disabled only the G+ button and the site started to load a lot faster, but then I disabled the plugin altogether and the site just rocketed to the sky. 🙂

I was lucky enough to witness this behavior, but God knows how many times this already has happened, so I decided to get rid of this plugin whatsoever. Over time I have tried so many sharing plugins, that I lost count. Maybe it’s time to move on to a premium one.

For the time being, no sharing button will be displayed, so please use the URL from the address bar to manually share this post in your social network. 🙂

NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster

This is an autoposting plugin. It supports almost 30 social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, LiveJournal, Flipboard, DreamWidth, Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Plurk, VKontakte(VK.com), YouTube, App.net, Scoop.It, WordPress, XING etc.

It can be used to automatically build social backlinks to your content. Anyway, with a couple exceptions, most of your backlinks will be created exclusively to your own social networks, so the backlinks are nofollow and not transmitting link juice. They are only exposing your content to people, but Google keeps track of those too when ranking your page.

The whole process is completely automated. Just write a new post and either entire post or it’s nicely formatted announcement with backlink will be published to all your configured social networks. You can reach the most audience and tell all your friends, readers and followers about your new post. The plugin works with profiles, business pages, community pages, groups, etc. Messages are 100% customizable and adapted for each network requirements at the account level.

The free version can only publish to one account per social site and doesn’t support three of them: Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn Company Pages. The premium version, though, can post to unlimited accounts per social site.

If you enjoy reading this post, check out the next one in the series.