We’ve spoken before about how a company blog can help attract new leads to your site and convert casual site visitors into longterm customers, and today we’re going to take a look at a few plugins that can boost your blog to the next level.
You can catch up on our previous posts about improving your company blog here:
- What is the Difference Between a Website and a Blog?
- Five Tips to Improve Your Company Blog
- WordPress Spelling and Grammar Checkers for Your Blog
Whether you’re looking to improve your reach on social media or use your blog to interest visitors in other areas of your website, here are five WordPress plugins that will help elevate your blog and add value to your website.
Related Posts
Developed by AddThis, the Related Posts plugin helps you put your most relevant content in front of your readers by recommending posts related to the content they’ve enjoyed reading on your blog.
What sets Related Posts apart from similar plugins is its design, which gives you full control over the look and layout of your related posts. You can opt for the traditional display at the bottom of blog posts or try something different, like on-page scroll, hover boxes and various sidebar options.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
This one manages to make it into almost every list of recommended plugins we share but for good reason; it’s the best SEO plugin we’ve used for WordPress. WordPress SEO by Yoast generates a box underneath each new post you create that’s crammed full of SEO options, including a focus keyword, SEO title and meta description. You’ll also receive a Page Analysis report that grades your post on common SEO elements, including post length, internal and external links, and keyword density.
Click to Tweet
Simple but effective, Click to Tweet is a fantastic plugin to encourage social sharing. The plugin allows you to select spotlight quotes from your blog post that readers can share on Twitter in just a few short clicks. For those who want to use high quality blog content to reach a new audience, this is a must-have.
Note: Click to Tweet hasn’t received an update recently, so we do always recommend taking this into account before installing.
SumoMe Site Growth
The SumoMe Free Tools to Automate Your Site Growth doesn’t have the most inspiring name but the plugin’s content and capabilities are definitely worth a try. The suite of features have been designed to convert casual readers of your blog into dedicated subscribers, with the ultimate aim of growing your website.
Some of the included features are Share, which makes it simple for readers to share your blog content across social media, Highlighter, which operates in a similar way to Click to Tweet, and Image Sharer, which allows users to share your blog images on social media.
Editorial Calendar WordPress Plugin
We’ve spoken previously about the importance of consistency when it comes to running your company blog. How often do you post? What sort of topics do you cover? Who is your target audience? It’s important to keep those three questions in mind when you plan future blog content.
The Editorial Calendar plugin provides an easy to use space where you can plan out your content for the next week, month or even year. It’s simple but effective and definitely recommend for those organisations who want to implement a regular blog schedule.
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We’d love to hear what your favourite WordPress blog plugins are, so don’t forget to leave a comment below letting us know your top picks.
