10 Best WordPress Plugins for SEO
Building a WordPress site is easy. Just buy hosting, install WordPress, view a tutorial, and you’re ready to roll. However, many DIY developers-cum-entrepreneurs are not using any SEO plugins on their websites. As a result, they have confusing site structures, no regard for keyword usages in titles or meta descriptions (sometimes they don’t even have meta descriptions), no image SEO, and no internal linking.
Optimizing such accounts is a lot of work, particularly if the site is not built for SEO from the start. More work means more cost and more time. Certain critical errors can diminish the chances of success, or even necessitate a complete site revamp.
The best way to avoid this situation is to use an SEO plugin. Here are the top 10 plugins that we have shortlisted for you. Use some of them, and you should be able to avoid the critical or basic SEO errors on your website.
#1. Yoast SEO
Boasting more than 1 million downloads, Yoast SEO is as essential as WordPress itself. It looks like a part of WorPress and makes it simple to optimize each page. It prompts you to select a focus keyword and include it in your title, description, body text, and elsewhere on your page.
#2. The SEO Framework
If Yoast SEO is bread and butter, The SEO Framework is egg and bacon for an SEO focused WordPress developer. Though it’s the new kid on the block, The SEO Framework has maintained a perfect 5 stars through its 3000+ installs so far. The powerful Framework automatically configures SEO for every page and allows you to adjust it globally. Recommended for you if you think Yoast is too basic.
#3. SEO by Squirrly
Squirrly is geared towards content SEO and is perfect for bloggers. It doesn’t just help you with SEO, but also with writing great content. Recommended by experts like Neil Patel and Brian Dean, Squirrly claims to boost your readership by as much as 285%. You can use it in tandem with Yoast for best results.
#4. SEO Ultimate
SEO Ultimate is for you if you already know much about SEO and want to optimize a large number of pages quickly. The powerful SEO Ultimate plugin gives you total control over title tags, meta descriptions, links, Facebook/Twitter sharing, rich snippets, 404s…the list just goes on and on. Recommended if you seriously mean SEO!
#5. All in One SEO Pack
Oh, but how could I miss this extremely popular plugin that still boasts a 4.5 rating after millions of downloads? Recommended for e-Commerce sites, including WooCommerce, the plugin helps you with XML sitemaps, canonicalization, internal links, and a lot more. It also auto-optimizes your titles for search engines by placing your keywords at the beginning of your titles.
#6. Greg’s High Performance SEO
Greg’s SEO Plugin allows you to configure over 100 separate on-page SEO elements, no wonder it’s named ‘High Performance’. You can use it if you have little else to do, other than SEO. While not strictly for the ‘techies,’ Greg’s SEO is definitely not for everybody. It takes you into deep inside the SEO characteristics of your title and head sections, allowing you to play with code and do something different than what everyone else is doing.
#7. WP Social SEO Booster
If you have a lot going on with your social media, WP Social SEO Booster can help you take advantage of your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ activity to boost your SEO rankings. It automatically configures your site with proper meta tags, Google Rich Snippets, Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Meta Tags, .htaccess file entries, and much more. You can define global settings or customize each page or post that you create.
#8. WP Smush
No site is complete without images, and not many of us are very particular about optimizing images. The free WP Smush plugin reduces the file size of your images without losing the quality, so that your site loads faster. As you may know, site speed counts towards your SEO ranking and user experience. You can also bulk-compress your image files and get rid of the headache of resizing each of them separately.
#9. SEO Optimized Images
It’s often easier to appear on Google’s first page image results if you have assigned proper ALT and TITLE attributes to your images. If you have many images that need optimization, SEO Friendly Images is the plugin for you. You can also use SEO Friendly Images, another older image SEO plugin, but some users have issues with it.
#10. SEO Post Content Links
It can be difficult to cross-link your content when you’ve a large number of posts. SEO Post plugin take the pain out of internal linking by auto-generating internal links based on the keywords and ‘Black Words’ that you provide. If you don’t already have it installed, you should.
So, what do you think? Are you using some of these plugins? Was the post worth your time? Let us know in the comments section below.
