Top 18 WordPress Plugins For 2017 - Lesson #8 - Amazon Affiliate Marketing Training

Key Takeaways

all right what's up everyone welcome to lesson 8 of the Surfside PPC wordpress Money course today we're gonna go over the top 18 WordPress plugins that you need for your website these are all essential for the success of your website and they're gonna help you as you build your website they're gonna help you optimize your website for search engines so basically everything from you know the security of your website the optimization of your website these things will help with so WordPress plugins there's you know if you look here I'm on the plugins page you can click you know go to the featured popular recommended favorites premium they also have the WordPress plug-in directory I mean there's gotta be thousands and thousands and thousands of WordPress plugins so basically what I've done is I narrowed down 18 WordPress plugins that I actually use and that I highly recommend for you these are going to be essential as we keep setting up videos so I'm gonna go through each one I'm not gonna install each one in front of you because this video would take an hour if I did that so what I want to like keep let you keep in mind too is if you go down to the comments section of this YouTube video if you go to the YouTube video in the info section at the comments section in the info section I'll have links to every single plug-in and I'll have them all listed so you know if you're going through the the video and you have trouble finding them I'll have links to everything right in the information part of this video on YouTube so without further ado let's get right to it so these are the top 18 WordPress plugins so I've opened each one in its own separate page I'm gonna go through them one by one first is Yoast SEO so Yoast is my favorite SEO plug-in you could either use Yoast or all-in-one SEO I prefer Yoast I think it's better so basically what all you do is once you install this plug-in you just kind of go through this step-by-step process for your website and you can SEO optimized every single page every single products different things like that so you kind of create a template for your website so that when you're publishing new things it goes out to Google and Google is able to kind of read things better you're able to optimize everything better and you can also generate your sitemap through Yoast so you can update upload your sitemaps directly to Google webmasters I'll go through that kind of in the future but Yoast SEO is my favorite SEO plugin they it is a completely free plugin they also have a lot of premium versions available and the premium versions are pretty incredible for WooCommerce so we're gonna kind of go through those too as we go but Yoast SEO completely free great plugin highly recommended to optimize your website number two is WooCommerce so will commerce basically adds the store to your website it makes it a lot easier for you to sell anything if you want to you know sell products that people can download if you want to sell physical products that you're shipping to people WooCommerce has tons and tons of functionality completely free WooCommerce connects with the plug-in we installed in the last video which was called Woo's own whose own allows us to add Amazon products directly in link right to the Amazon page with our affiliate link so WooCommerce you definitely need WooCommerce on your website that's number two so number three so we'll commerce direct checkout don't worry about it not been tested with current version of WordPress I'm using right now and we're press and it's just fine basically what commerce direct checkout lets you do is instead of having a cart page on your website when someone clicks Add to Cart on a products it actually adds it to their cart on Amazon so they go directly to Amazon you're able to send more people to Amazon using commerce direct checkout it's kind of my preferred method of you know using boo commerce websites this is a matter of preference for you but WooCommerce direct checkout highly recommend you use this you could skip the you know you see it here skip cart page redirect right to the Amazon Checkout so kind of send more people they Amazon help increase your earnings so WordPress super cache WP super cache basically it helps with the large portions of your website so it's you know says this is expensive WordPress scripts but kind of extensive you know huge WordPress files huge HTML files huge PHP files they can be cached basically on search engines and all that those types of things so you know when people are visiting your website and they leave and come back and leave and come back basically your server is able to deliver a file that's a lot than kind of rebooting your website every single time someone goes so our websites are gonna end up being pretty large so WordPress super cache is it basically helps increase the speed of your website by caching pages of your website large portions of your website when people visit them they it just pulls right out of the cache it's quicker so WP super cache just one of those plugins you add and enable and you never really have to worry about it again so amp for WordPress a mp4 WP accelerated mobile pages accelerated mobile pages is if you haven't heard about its the Google amp project you've probably seen it in search results if you search for any trending news story right now or anything there should be an amp version you know website and basically what it does is it takes your robust website and turns it into a more mobile-friendly website kind of even better than the mobile-friendly version of your website so it's faster people click on it and it loads instantly so am4 WP allows you to take every single one of your pages and quickly and easily make them an accelerated mobile page so highly recommend this you'll be higher in search result if you have you know amp pages because Google wants quickness when people are searching on mobile Google wants to get people the fastest website because you know then they're sending people to to more web sites people aren't waiting there for their website to load so amp for WP accelerated mobile pages next one is contact form 7 pretty self-explanatory so contact form 7 allows you to create a quick contact form you can have CAPTCHA there so people aren't going to abuse your contact form and it helps you so you know emails go directly to your contact form you don't have to know any code you could just easily create a contact form through the plug-in and then you just put a little code on your page and it'll display that contact form people can fill out name email you know they could they can write long things to you they can all sorts of things like that so contact form 7 my favorite contact form plug-in and you don't need to know any special code or anything it'll email right to your email and it will keep track of all your contacts on the backend of WordPress too so wordfence security this is one of those plugins it's free but they also have a premium version and you'll see here most downloaded WordPress security plug-in so wordfence helps kind of it'll keep track of anybody who tries to log into your website so if someone's trying to hack your website it'll you know keep track of any types of bots that are visiting your website if someone tries to do a distributed denial of service attack it'll cut off some of those IP addresses it'll also create a firewall for your website so pretty good a good security plug-in for your WordPress website Security's you know obviously vital you don't want to get hacked you want to lose all your information so wordfence security very good plug-in the only downside here is it's a pretty big plugin so it can slow down your website a little bit just something to keep in mind so favicon by real favicon generator pretty self-explanatory so favicon is a little icon that explained that displays next to your website at the top so it's kind of this tiny little icon here you'll see and it'll display at the top of your web page favicon by real favicon generator allows you to upload one favicon and it works across every single device you could possibly think of mobile tablet desktop so pretty self-explanatory very easy plug-in you just kind of upload your you're basically your icon or whatever your logo icon is something like that something to describe your website and it'll display it so simple three - 301 redirects probably the simplest plug-in you'll ever see but basically if as you're building pages on your website you might want to consolidate your content so maybe you have two large pages of content and they're related you want to make that one page a simple 301 redirect it's an SEO friendly way to redirect your page so if you're maybe moving content from one page to another and you want to redirect that URL to the new page you just use a simple 301 redirect very very simple hasn't been updated in ten months but it's a small plugin it's it's easy I use it on one of my larger blogs and I probably have hundreds of pages that I've redirected at this point just old products that I've removed and kind of redirected them to new product pages or things like that so simple 301 redirects even if you're not 100% sure what a 301 redirect is right now it's just a very good plug-in to have and it's um that we're gonna use as we go so add inserter this is one of my favorite ones you can insert ads Google ads Amazon ads so see it here google adsense contextual amazon native shopping ads rotating banners basically any type of ad you want to put up affiliate banners ad inserter allows you to just basically say okay i'm gonna add so you'll see some custom code up here you just add your code in there and you say you know what I want this ad to be shown on every single page at the top and it'll automatically do that right away with a click of a button you can quickly change your ad you can quickly do anything so ad inserter one of my favorite ways to basically add different ad advertisements to your website easily so next is gonna be MailChimp for WordPress haven't really gone over MailChimp yet but I will it's a great way to build your email list MailChimp for WordPress is you know quickly quickly integrated with your WordPress website just makes everything easier instead of going through wordpress and adding it to your website you just use the plugin makes a lot easier so MailChimp for WordPress this will come in handy more as we're building our email list broken link checker is helpful because you know we kind of went over to a 301 redirects earlier the broken link checker will basically look at pages all over your website and you just go into the plugin and what you say hey this link is going to a you know a 404 page this link is going to a broken link and it helps you fix that very good for SEO purposes so as your website gets bigger you're not gonna be able to keep track of every single link and broken link so this is a good way to do it next one is all-in-one schema.org Rich Snippets so schema.org so you'll see here your awesome site with Rich Snippets your awesome site comm slash Rich Snippets if you see here the reviews so four and a half stars rating 4.6 you know how many reviews there was how long the recipe takes how many calories those are Rich Snippets it's showing an image over here too they don't have that anymore but those are Rich Snippets basically it's you know information you're sending to Google that Google can read and display in their search engines so see it down here what is a rich snippet it is basically a short summary of your page in the search results of Google Yahoo Bing and sometimes the newsfeed of Facebook a nice format with star ratings author photo image etc so you know let's see if we have screenshots here all right so here's kind of a good preview if you add all these things in the Rich Snippets preview you'll see here it's you know item review this is the person who's reviewing it the website and it'll show the rating it'll show you know what the actual rating is with the stars review by you know sue J who probably owns the website what the data is the excerpt from the page will show up here so this is basically a rich snippet sometimes I don't bother sometimes they have larger ones so I know you can search you know if you search different things you'll see Rich Snippets all the time in search engines you know search any old president's search any town you might get a rich snippet that comes up so this just makes it easier you know as you're building pages it becomes harder to kind of optimize everything this plug-in does everything for you all right so the next plug-in here is SEO optimized images so we're gonna be uploading a lot of images to our website as we go one of the most important things is the alt tag so the alt tag tells search engines basically what your images so search engines aren't able to read images just like they read text so you have an alt tag so for example let's just say you have an image of a picture of George Washington you would put an alt tag George Washington just so Google kind of see okay that now we know what this picture is if you don't tell Google what your picture is not only is it bad for SEO like is it you know Google will kind of say okay this image doesn't have an alt tag at all you kind of get knocked down a peg but having an alt tag helps with your overall article you can target certain keywords with them so it's good for it's just good for SEO purposes so SEO optimized images will help you add alt tags to every single image so WP optimize WordPress optimized so basically effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency your WordPress website it's basically just a huge my sequel database and what this allows you to do so it just says removes all unnecessary data trash on spam comments all sorts of data that's on your website that you don't need it'll just automatically delete so WP optimize something you don't really need to do much with you just kind of add and and it helps delete you know it helps clean up some of the excess data in your website you don't need a kismet so I always wonder if I say this right I probably I'm probably saying wrong at kismet but it's a for blog comments it tells blog whether it's so it says ham or spam so it's it's a great plugin so it can detect spam comments you're gonna get tons of spam comments as you get into search results so kismet allows you to block them for free I've used this plug-in forever I think it comes with every WordPress website all you have to do is set it up pretty quickly and easily and then it will start putting a ton of comments into spam and that allow you just delete your comments Google Analytics for WordPress by monster and style insights so this might come this might come with your blog as well I'm not I know it came with mine as I installed it it might just be something that Hostgator installs automatically so monster insights is a great google analytics plugin it allows you to basically connect Google Analytics in your blog so you can see everything quickly and easily you don't have to kind of constantly log in to Google Analytics to go through your data you can go through it right on your website and I just like monster insights to get a good way to keep track of your Google Analytics data that you have and basically everything that's going on in your website so last but not least we have access press social share here there's tons of social sharing apps you can kind of you kind of mess with this these as you see fit but basically it's a free plugin and you can add buttons to your website you can see them over here I use so you could add these buttons to like your articles your products so people can quickly share things I usually just do Facebook Twitter and Pinterest maybe Google Plus or LinkedIn those are kind of the most popular you can also do mail you can print basically anything you can think of there's tons of social media options but it's great for getting increased social sharing on your website as you're getting traffic you want to add these sharing buttons soon as more people are gonna are gonna share everything so I'm gonna go ahead and install these plugins now on my website we just went through 18 amazing plugins we started at Yoast SEO and then tons more options so again go into the info section of this video and you can get links to each and every plug-in if you go here to add plugins and just search for certain plugins so for example let's just say I do Yoast SEO so you'll see here Yoast SEO install now quickly show you how to install and activate a plug-in so there you go install we click activate that's gonna bring me to my plugins page and show that I have the Yoast SEO plug-in now activated and I'm gonna do this for each and every single one here so next it's gonna be worse and kind of all these different things here so that's basically it I have my Yoast SEO plug-in now here you'll see kind of it along the side so why SEO dashboard search console premium so you just go through these things you connect your search console I'll go through all that as we go and thanks again for joining me today I recommend installing these 18 plugins to your website and we'll kind of go through them as we go and make sure you subscribe for more video updates