Traffic and SEO Tools
There are a number of cool modules that help you grow your network, monitor site traffic, and enhance your site’s commenting system.
Site Stats
Jetpack comes with a free module called Stats that allows you to monitor general site traffic including key insights about search terms, referrers, top posts, geographic locations, and popular times. This module is like a slimmed down version of Google Analytics without the additional HTTP request required to load Google Analytics. The module also does not conflict with GA so you can run both at the same time if you desire. If you upgrade to the PRO version of Jetpack, you can also integrate your Google Analytics data directly into your data.
Related Posts
This is a great feature. You can enable more intra-linked content on your blog by suggesting related posts at the bottom of your posts page. Encouraging your users to view more content will certainly increase your SEO and the Related Posts module does this by employing a sleek layout utilizing your post thumbnail and headers.
Sharing and Liking
Sharing buttons are essential to any website, and are a major component in increasing your brand’s presence. Jetpack seamlessly incorporates all of today’s major social networks in modern ‘share buttons’ that can be displayed on your posts, sidebars, and pages. You can even use your own custom buttons!
SEO Tools
This awesome tool is part of the Jetpack PRO plan, costing $29/month. The SEO Tools allow you to customize how your content titles appear in search engines. You can decide what order items like ‘Site Name’ and ‘Tagline’ appear in searches as well as the separators between them. You can also modify your front page’s meta description, your individual post and pages meta descriptions, and also see a live preview of how these elements all look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and WordPress.com. Lastly, you have access to a free website XML Sitemap which makes search engines happy.
Monetize Your Site
WordPress employs WordAds for your site. You can signup and begin displaying ads on your site instantly. You can also view stats and earning on WordPress.com in real time. The ads are optimized for WordPress sites and display ads based on geographic location and locale. This feature is part of a Jetpack Premium plan which is $99 annually, so factor this cost into your potential earnings when deciding to monetize your site. Granted, the Premium plan offers a lot of benefits such as the modules we are discussing here.
Google Analytics
As part of the Jetpack PRO plan, you can add your Google Analytics tracking ID right into Jetpack. Just copy and paste and instantly begin tracking in-depth reports about your site’s traffic. While Jetpack’s Site Stats serves as a great ‘at-a-glance’ review of your site traffic, Jetpack makes it easier for you to harness the power of Google Analytics without uploading any files or extra overhead.
Site Verification
Site verification is not necessary to have your site indexed on popular search engines like Google or Bing, but it does give you access to these search engines’ webmaster consoles. What this means for you is that you can manually identify what these search engines are recording about your site. This feature is free for all Jetpack installations and makes verifying your site for Google, Bing, and Pinterest as easy as adding a line of code from the Jetpack Dashboard.
Automatic Publishing
One of my favorite Jetpack features, you can automatically post to multiple social networks by using the Publicize module that comes with every free Jetpack installation. Publicize allows you to link a variety of popular social accounts to your site’s blog and then at a click of a button you can update them all at once. If you upgrade to a paid plan you gain access to the Re-Publicize feature which lets you share existing content to all connected accounts.
XML Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps are important because they are written for search engines and aid the engine in understanding your content. With Jetpack’s XML Sitemap feature your site will automatically provide an up-to-date sitemap of your public posts and pages to Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, and others. You can also add new Custom Post Types to your default Sitemap, and the Jetpack XML Sitemap feature will automatically turn off if you use a different XML Sitemap plugin. Lastly, the feature will generate a News Sitemap specifically for Google News. This feature comes free with all Jetpack installations.
Wrap Up
The Traffic and SEO Tools included in Jetpack are excellent additions to any site and make publishing your content that much easier. Next up I will discuss the Backup & Security options included in Jetpack.
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