Top 3 Must-Have Google Plugins for WordPress

• 02 June 2011
• in: Blog,WordPress Resources

I will not waste to explain what is WordPress and what is Google. As I assumed all who read this blog will be average or experienced WordPress users that is concerning on their SEO and ranking in Google Search result. So, I will write about the simple top 3 Google plugins that all WordPress blog must have without modifying their themes code.

1. Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast

Simply by just searching the keyword for google analytics on the search box will return you with a list of analytics plugins but how many of them are really useful or really good? After countless installation, I have finally decided that the Google Analytics plugins developed by Yoost de Valk is the best of all. Yoost has developed quite some plugins and many of them are really useful and I will cover more of them on our next blog release.

By the way, if you have not signed up for a Google Analytics, please do so at http://www.google.com/analytics/

The Google Analytic plugins allows you to track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews. Below are the features of the plugins on how it worked.

Firstly, download the plugins from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/ and upload it to your plugins folder or simply search it from the plugins archive on WordPress dashboard and activate it.

After you activated your the plugins, you will be prompted to activate which Analytic Profiles to work on your website statistics via Google Analytics API.

It even has the option for enabling extra settings Google Analytics advanced users that know how to work around. I will try to cover that part soon.

What I love the most about this plugins is the feature where it allows usage of custom variables in Google Analytics to track meta data on pages. It support for the following custom variables without ruining your own original statistics.

• Author
• Single category and / or multiple categories
• Post type (especially useful if you use custom post types)
• Logged in users
• Publication Year
• Tags

2. Google Sitemap Generator

Unlike other sitemap generator plugins, this sitemap will submit your XML  sitemap to not only Google but Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com. Even though Google may be the mostly used search engine but we still can’t deny the drive and traffic from other search engine.

This plugins also will help to generate the sitemap of all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. This is helpful for some unique permalinks styles that was purposely SEO.

You can even download the zipped XML to your local machine and store it as a backup. Since Google Webmaster allows the feature for uploading the sitemap manually, we can use the downloaded XML from the plugins and upload it and get instant update on our sitemap without waiting for the indexation by Google bots.

But there is bad news for WordPress multisites users,  whereby it is not support this currently stable version.  Anyhow, the beta for multisite is out.Feel free to try out the new Beta version which fully supports multisite WordPress if you really need it.

3. Google Website Optimizer for WordPress

Now this is the plugins for tracking and optimize your landing pages (as posts or pages) using the Google Website Optimizer without needing to edit the HTML code of the theme. Simply by tracking or understanding your landing page especially for e-commerce site, will help to improve the sales or revenue.

This may sound simple but you might need to understand that each human may have different taste and interest, we can’t study this kind of human behaviour just by referring to statistic of pageview or numbers of traffic. Through the Google Website Optimizer feature, we will get to choose 2 or more variation of page and find out which one gives us more profit or sales through A/B testing.

A/B Split & Multivariable Testing will allow you to identify your most effective site elements. Test everything from individual copy blocks and images to complete page layouts.

Just register yourself on http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer and start to find out which type of wordings, images, layout and many other element may affect your sales opportunity.

If you are running on A/B Experiment or testing, you will need to get prepare on your original page, minimum of one variation page and one conversion page.

What is original page?

• Original page is the default landing page of yours where it will be the page where your ads or your links directed to.

What is variation page?

• Variation page is the optional page where you wish to test on its performance in accomplishing the goal that varied in terms of layouts, wordings, images and etc.

What is conversion page?

The conversion page may refer to a goal of your website. If you an e-commerce owner selling some stuff via WordPress, you will create variation of pages for testing and the conversion is the page where you would most probably put the page of payment completion or the thank you page.

Just generate your javascripts on from Google Website Optimizer and fill in the box on the post/page box as below

Fill in the box as it instructed and start conducting your experiment and find out which page will gives you more revenue or reaching the goal most efficiently.

There you go, the top 3 must of Google plugins for WordPress.