If you want to know more about how you can optimize your WordPress plugin listing, you are in the right place. Keep reading to get advice about optimizing your WordPress plugin listing to help influence rankings within the directory.
How You Can Optimize Your WordPress Plugin Listing
Begin with Research of Keywords
Keyword research is the primary strategy that you can use to optimize your WordPress plugin listing within the plugin directory. Firstly, you need to decide on topics related to your plugin that your targeted audience is going to look for. You can use Google Ads Keyword Planner to help find keywords under each topic.
A tool like this can help give you demands of certain keyword terms and any related keywords you may not have thought about. Moz has an excellent guide for SEO if you need some extra pointers on keyword research.
Select a Name for Your Plugin Wisely
The name that you select for your plugin is going to be what it is named. It is going to be a hyperlinked title that will show up in the directory of WordPress Plugins. You have a limit of 80 characters to create and optimize a plugin name.
If you need some help, then check out the guidelines provided by WordPress Developers about picking out your plugin name. Once you have submitted your plugin, the name will become the URL. According to the guidelines, you can change the name of the plugin, but the URL is going to be permanent and cannot be changed.
What you name your WordPress plugin can significantly affect how you rank based on target keywords. One of the most significant ranking factors is your plugin’s name that you will have control over when it comes to the WordPress Plugin Directory. That is going to be where keyword research will be a big help.
It gets recommended that you target a head term. You use a phrase that is around one or two words that have a large amount of search volume. For instance, Yoast has a great example of this by using Google Analytics by Yoast. Yoast is the brand name, while Google Analytics is the head term.
The directory rankings for WordPress plugins will have an exact match bias. When doing your research, you may notice that top-ranking plugins have an exact match phrase in the plugin title ranked high.
For instance, if you search keywords based on dashboard twitter and twitter dashboard, each search will have different ranking results. The dashboard Twitter results will have the WordPress Dashboard Twitter plugin listed first, while the Twitter dashboard search will have the SkyStats plugin listed first. You will notice that their names are the search term.
Keep Short Descriptions To The Point
A short description will be a part of your content displayed under the title located in the directory results. You have 150 characters to create and optimize a description for your plugin. The description needs to be able to state the benefits of this plugin.
It would help if you used your target keyword once, but no more than twice. Adding a targeted keyword is a minor factor that will help you to rank when it comes to your plugin.
Have a Detailed Long Description for Your Plugin
A long description is going to be what gets displayed under the description section of your plugin listing. The description will get used to talking about the functions and benefits of the plugin. You are not limited to characters you can work with, so be sure to take advantage of it.
Keep in mind that this description may have an influence on if someone feels that they have enough information or not to be confident when it comes to getting your plugin.
Below is a bad example compared to an excellent example of what plugin descriptions should look like.
Bad example:
Good Example:
It has gotten recommended that you incorporate various targeted keywords into this description, but do not overboard.
When you want to know if the long description and keyword density are working on your ranking within the Plugin Directory, you can use a popular tool to check for keyword density and have the listing analyzed based on keyword searches.
When you look for WordPress Dashboard, the results will have the keyword density based on the number of times the keyword was used within the directory. It would search for dashboard, WordPress, and WordPress Dashboard as keywords.
There are multiple instances of keyword stuffing. However, there was not any evidence that the keyword stuffing had an impact on the search results. The best strategy is to incorporate keywords naturally.
Make Sure to Add Tags
According to the guidelines for detailed plugins, you should include no more than 12 tags for your plugin. However, when you search for JetPack, they have over 50 tags. The 12 tags are a guideline but not a hard limit. As long as your tags stay relevant, then it is okay to have more than 12. However, it would be best if you kept the tags relevant. WordPress default searches do ignore the tags.
Do you need to worry about tags?
There is an opportunity for you to explore tags on other listings for your plugin. You can find that you are leading users to your plugin through tag search results. Also, keep in mind that WordPress tag pages will show up in the search results. For instance, if you search for Facebook Analytics Worpress in Google, you will see that the tag pages for Facebook Analytics and Facebook analytic widgets come up.
When you look at the search engine results, see if tag pages will show up on the top results and then add those tags to your plugin. Look at the plugins of your competitors and copy their tags to gain more opportunities.
Additional Considerations For Your Plugin
You should download Velocity. This can help developers solve one thing. When searching for Google Analytics, the issue took effect immediately. After tracking this result, you may notice that the Better Google Analytics plugin has moved to the second article of the search term.
The plugin was relatively new at the time (probably two weeks ago), and its downloads suddenly surged. There are some of the most popular Google Analytics plugins, with over 500,000 active installs!
On ManageWP. org, they have a section on their website to track some of the best new plugins, which have been downloaded 100,000 times. They have their own “score” metrics, including last week’s plugin quality score, download growth, and user ratings.
Based on their metrics of the score, the number one trending plugin is Better Google Analytics. Therefore, you can have a good understanding of how upload speed ranks these top WordPress plugins.
Downloads: How many downloads? The average number of downloads of WordPress plugins is 1596 (source). We not only looked at the total number of installs but also the percentage increase in installs and found that it did not affect the ranking of the plugin.
A number of installations: We must also check whether the actual number of installations reported by WordPress affects the ranking. Since WordPress did not provide the exact number of installs, we looked at the scope. There is no obvious pattern to assert that the number of installations will have an impact.
For example, the result of the “Google Analytics Dashboard” (first list) has 80K installations, and the result of the second plugin has 400K.
Types of reviews: In the directory, there are over 64% of plugins that are ranked below five, and 6,000 plugins that do not have any ratings. If this indicator is used, we think it will be a secondary factor. However, comments may have a positive or negative impact on download speed.
Plugin updates: You may have noticed that some plugins have not gotten updated in the past two years, and those tend to disappear from the Plugin Directory. When searching for the exact name of the plugin, they will not be deleted but will be archived and appear in the search results. For example, search for “social statistics.” You will see that the first plugin, Social Stats, has not been updated in four years, but it exactly matches the plugin name.
Tracking performance is crucial. One strategy we use to track comments is to use the IFTTT recipe “WordPress plugin comment notification to email inbox.” Whenever someone leaves you a comment or review, you will be notified right away. You then have the option to respond and possibly turn negative comments into positive comments.
Release date: It seems to be an “age factor.” We browsed several search results and saw a pattern in which the best results were sorted from oldest to newest. This is not to say that the new plugin cannot get the best ranking, but if all conditions are the same, the old plugin will rank higher.
You can find the release date by going to the “Developer” tab in the plugin list. Go to the “Development” log in the “Browse Code” section. There will be an “age” column with the first publication date. You may need to browse back a few pages to find the first version.
If you have any problems? Contact us immediately. We are happy to help you in any way that we can.
