One of the three legs in the SEO stool is code and content on your own site, and WordPress on its own is relatively SEO-friendly.

But for many sites, it just isn’t enough to have the extreme basics – and the deluge of SEO plugins for WordPress show that both developers and site owners want to know how to do it right. In most cases, you don’t need a plugin, just a few good code snippets.

These snippets range from clearing out cruft in your wp_head() to using custom fields instead of bloated plugins to changing settings in your server files to speed up your site.

By using the snippets that work for your site, you can increase search engine traffic and give both robots and your site’s readers the experience they want to keep them coming back.