There are countless tools you can use to promote your blog across the Internet. Getting traffic back to your site is important. But, even more important than having swarms of traffic is turning that traffic into dedicated readers and customers.
As a travel blogger you probably have a lot of different business goals, but a well functioning site will play a role in all of those. Below we highlight five different plugins you can use to get the most from your travel blog.
1. Yoast SEO
This plugin should be used no matter the style of blog you’re running. This plugin simplifies the SEO process, so it’s much easier to optimize each post for keywords you’re trying to rank for.
Trying to do SEO without the help of Yoast is much more difficult. Download Yoast SEO to simplify your SEO efforts and have your site ranking faster.
2. Geo Mashup
Since you run a travel blog, chances are you want to give people as much information about your destination as possible. One great way to do this is to provide a map of your recent visits. You can do this by using the plugin Geo Mashup.
This plugin allows you to insert a customizable map using the Google Maps API anywhere into your site. A must have for those looking to create in-depth destination posts.
3. W3 Total Cache
Your website needs to be fast. But, spending time trying to optimize your codebase and do all the necessary tweaks will do nothing more than give you a headache. Luckily, there’s a plugin that can handle all of the technical stuff for you.
It’s called W3 Total Cache. Essentially, this plugin will minify your codebase, so it loads quickly and performs much better.
If you want your travel blog to compete, then you’re going to need to provide a great user experience. This plugin will help you get there.
4. Revive Old Post
What happens when you have a lot of older content you want to share and promote, but don’t want to spend a ton of time searching through your archives?
You use the plugin called Revive Old Post. This plugin will automatically connect to a variety of your social media profiles and promote your older content for you. You can automate the tweet/share messages, as well as, how often your content is promoted.
This is a great time saver and allows you to work smarter, not harder.
5. Ewww Image Optimizer
There are dozens of image optimizers you can use to reduce the file size of your images, without compromising quality. This is very important if you want your blog to feature high quality images, but you don’t want your loading time to be impacted.
Slow loading sites don’t rank as high in Google as their fast loading counterparts, and having images that take too long to load tend to turn off your readers.
Ewww Image Optimizer will easily optimize every image that you upload to your media library. This saves you time from having to do it manually and will definitely please your readers.
There are probably hundreds of plugins you can use to grow your travel blog. However, we’ve found the plugins above to be very effective. Try them out and let us know what you think.
If you don’t want to deal with downloading your own plugins and monitoring your traffic, consider optimized WordPress hosting from HostGator - we’ll take care of the heavy lifting so you can focus on your travel! Click here to get started.
Any plugins we missed in the collection above? Share your favorites in the comments below. Happy travels!
Kevin Wood writes about technology and human potential. You can find him at his virtual homes Wooden Writing and Counter Culturist.
Great list I’m using Yoast SEO and W3 Total Cache plugin on my site. It works fantastically.
Thanks
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