Online marketing can be a minefield of bad advice, shady tactics and wasted money. Many times it seems like everyone, and their dog, is some sort of online marketing “guru”. So how does a website owner know how to improve their online marketing?

Thankfully for WordPress website owners there is a huge marketplace of plugins that help you get your online marketing in shape. We’ve put together some of the favourites that have gotten our customers some amazing results.

Yoast SEO Plugin

If we’re talking WordPress plugins for online marketing you cannot go past Yoast’s SEO plugin. Amazingly comprehensive, Yoast is the King when it comes to optimizing WordPress for SEO.

Yoast just brings all the essentials into one simple, easy to use plugin so that you’re always on top of your SEO. Highly Highly recommended.

SEO Rank Reporter

If you’re going to invest time in SEO you need to have a good handle on how well your rankings are going. SEO Rank reporter checks your rankings every 3 days and you can monitor all your progress from WordPress itself.

SEO Friendly Images

Search engines can’t understand images so they need alt tags to make sense of it all. SEO Friendly images gets all your image tags in order to make sure your pages are tightly themed and also are searchable on image search. Simpel tool but pretty essential.

SEO Smart Links

SEO smart links is a great tool that allows you to automatically create links whenever certain words on your site are used. You can use it for linking to other content across your site or placing affiliate links.

SEO Smart Links also enables you to place no-follow attributes on certain links. Overall a really tight plugin for helping manage linking on your site.

Broken Link Checker

Nothing annoys more than clicking on a link only to arrive at a broken page. Broken link checker checks all your links and if anyone of them is broken you’ll get a dashboard notification or email. Pretty sweet.

Best of all you can edit broken links from within the plugin. You don’t have to go to the specific page.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Once a visitor comes to your site you want to keep them as long as possible. The more engaged they are the higher the chance of conversions (purchase, email signup etc). Yet Another Related Posts helps by displaying other interesting content from your site at the bottom of posts.

Instead of reading a post and leaving, visitors will be prompted to dive deeper into your content and engage further. This plugin just works which is why it’s used by so many.

Gravity Forms

Building forms on your WordPress site can sometimes be painful or cumbersome. That isn’t the case anymore with Gravity Forms. Build gravity forms that work and drive up your conversions.

Use Gravity Forms for everything from free downloads through to contact us forms.

MaxA/B

AB testing is a MUST for every website. If you’re not testing you’re probably failing more often that you know. MaxA/B makes running an AB test really simple.

It works with any WordPress theme and results are calculated in real time! If you want higher conversions you need to be testing!

What Would Seth Godin Do?

The modern day master of marketing, Seth Godin, has a plugin made in tribute to some of his ideas around treating new visitors to your website differently to returning ones.

This plugin allows you to give custom messages to new visitors so that you can drive actions like subscribing to an RSS feed or newsletter. Really handy for converting visitors.

WP Greet Box

Building on the Seth Godin idea (see above) why not greet all your visitors based on where they came from? For example Twitter traffic gets a special greeting while LinkedIn traffic gets another.

It’s another great way for customizing the experience for different visitors and driving attention to your calls to actions.

Optin Skin

OptinSkin is a really powerful plugin that allows you to skin call to action boxes that increase conversions. The interface is pretty simple and will help almost any WordPress owner create some eye catching conversion forms. Worth checking out if you want to convert more of your traffic.

PopUp Domination

PopUp domination is one of the most popular pop up plugins around and there is a good reason why. It’s been proven by many to drastically increase email sign ups.

If you’re driving traffic to your site you need to maximise it by getting as many emails as possible. PopUp domination helps you do that easily and effectively.

So there it is, 12 really powerful WordPress plugins that will give a real lift to your online marketing efforts. What other plugins have you found really useful? Share your recommendations!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure to subscribe to WP Mayor’s RSS feed.