Best WordPress Plugins to Rank for SEO
- SEO |
Getting your site to rank in the SERPs is becoming more and more difficult as Google's algorithm grows increasingly complex. As of 2016, the algorithm uses over 200 variables to determine what rank your site deserves in the SERPs.
Of course, most of these factors are a closely-guarded secret because otherwise everyone would be trying to game the system.
However, there are certain factors known to help improve a site's ranking, such as effectively optimizing your content to make it search engine friendly. Some of these things are difficult to do manually, though, which is where WordPress SEO plugins come in.
WordPress SEO plugins help you optimize your site by pointing out what you need to do to improve their search engine friendliness, and making it easy for you to do so.
Here are some of the best WordPress SEO plugins that will make your site and content more search engine friendly.
Yoast SEO
The WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast is one of the most popular plugins available and has been downloaded more than a million times. It is also one of the most complete SEO solutions available for WordPress for free.
Yoast SEO comes with an extensive range of features, including adding SEO titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords to every page on your website. You can also create a custom title for your site, archives, category and tag pages.
This plugin also creates an XML sitemap, pings search engines whenever you add a new post and even offers a little social media integration by enabling users to ensure the correct title, description and image are shown on Facebook through OpenGraph meta data, and also allows the addition of Twitter cards in WordPress.
Yoast SEO has an extensive list of features, which you can see here.
All In One SEO Pack
Another extremely popular SEO plugin is the All in One SEO pack, which is really beginner friendly. You don't need to customize anything on it as the default installation provides sufficient optimization to make it more than effective.
Once you become more familiar with SEO and the plugin, you can customize your settings and options as you see fit.
The features it offers are relatively the same as the ones included in Yoast, with the main difference being that All In One SEO Pack claims that it's the only plugin that can effectively be integrated with WordPress e-commerce sites. It also generates meta tags automatically and helps to optimize titles to improve rankings.
For a complete list of features or to download All In One SEO Pack, visit this page.
SEO by Squirrly
SEO by Squirrly is a great plugin that helps you optimize your content for search engines as well as readers. You get SEO advice as you write your blog post and there are indicators that turn green to let you know that you've covered the SEO parts.
It also gives you weekly analytics for your different posts and pages. It's pretty much the ideal plugin for anyone looking to improve rankings without having a clue about SEO.
If you want to check out SEO by Squirrly, you can find it here.
WP Social SEO Booster
Optimizing for social media is essential nowadays. Not only does Google also use social signals to determine the rank of a page in the SERPs, social media can also be an important source of traffic. The more your site and posts are discussed on social media, the more traffic you will get and the higher your will climb in the SERPs.
WP Social SEO Booster is a comprehensive plugin featuring a wide range of options to allow you to optimize for social media, including by implementing rich snippet tagging for all your content, optimizing your posts for Facebook OpenGraph and adding Twitter meta tags, among other features. And the best part is that this is done automatically.
This is a free plugin and works perfectly with other SEO plugins such as WordPress SEO by Yoast, All In One SEO Pack and more.
You can check out WP Social SEO Booster here.
SEO Friendly Images
This is another great plugin that allows you to take advantage of another important SEO factor, namely the images on your site.
If your images are properly optimized, you can significantly increase your traffic levels as well as your ranking. Optimizing images requires adding effective ALT and TITLE attributes, which the search engines can understand. This way, your images have the potential to show up in Google Image Searches, providing with an additional source of traffic.
The SEO Friendly Images plugin automatically updates images with all the right attributes, according to various options you set. So, if the images you posted don't already have their ALT and TITLE attributes set, the plugin will do it automatically. It will save you a lot of time, especially if you have a lot of unoptimized images.
SEO Friendly Images can be downloaded here.
SEO Internal Links
Everyone knows the importance of internal linking, but it can be a pain to do. Especially if you have to go back through dozens or even hundreds of pages to do it.
The SEO Internal Links plugin can save you a lot of time because it can automatically link various keywords and phrases that appear in your posts and even your comments with the corresponding pages, categories, tags or posts. It also allows you to set specific URLs to be used for specific keywords or phrases.
And don't worry about getting a penalty for too many internal links because the plugin will only link out the first instance of the keyword or phrase it finds.
To learn more about what SEO Internal Links can do, check it out here.
Even if all you know about SEO is that it could help you improve your site's rankings but have no clue what it involves, these plugins can make your life much easier because they will guide you through what needs to be done for better SEO. Of course, SEO veterans will also find them extremely useful because they automate a number of processes, saving you time and aggravation.
Of course, most of these factors are a closely-guarded secret because otherwise everyone would be trying to game the system.
However, there are certain factors known to help improve a site's ranking, such as effectively optimizing your content to make it search engine friendly. Some of these things are difficult to do manually, though, which is where WordPress SEO plugins come in.
WordPress SEO plugins help you optimize your site by pointing out what you need to do to improve their search engine friendliness, and making it easy for you to do so.
Here are some of the best WordPress SEO plugins that will make your site and content more search engine friendly.
Yoast SEO
The WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast is one of the most popular plugins available and has been downloaded more than a million times. It is also one of the most complete SEO solutions available for WordPress for free.
Yoast SEO comes with an extensive range of features, including adding SEO titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords to every page on your website. You can also create a custom title for your site, archives, category and tag pages.
This plugin also creates an XML sitemap, pings search engines whenever you add a new post and even offers a little social media integration by enabling users to ensure the correct title, description and image are shown on Facebook through OpenGraph meta data, and also allows the addition of Twitter cards in WordPress.
Yoast SEO has an extensive list of features, which you can see here.
All In One SEO Pack
Another extremely popular SEO plugin is the All in One SEO pack, which is really beginner friendly. You don't need to customize anything on it as the default installation provides sufficient optimization to make it more than effective.
Once you become more familiar with SEO and the plugin, you can customize your settings and options as you see fit.
The features it offers are relatively the same as the ones included in Yoast, with the main difference being that All In One SEO Pack claims that it's the only plugin that can effectively be integrated with WordPress e-commerce sites. It also generates meta tags automatically and helps to optimize titles to improve rankings.
For a complete list of features or to download All In One SEO Pack, visit this page.
SEO by Squirrly
SEO by Squirrly is a great plugin that helps you optimize your content for search engines as well as readers. You get SEO advice as you write your blog post and there are indicators that turn green to let you know that you've covered the SEO parts.
It also gives you weekly analytics for your different posts and pages. It's pretty much the ideal plugin for anyone looking to improve rankings without having a clue about SEO.
If you want to check out SEO by Squirrly, you can find it here.
WP Social SEO Booster
Optimizing for social media is essential nowadays. Not only does Google also use social signals to determine the rank of a page in the SERPs, social media can also be an important source of traffic. The more your site and posts are discussed on social media, the more traffic you will get and the higher your will climb in the SERPs.
WP Social SEO Booster is a comprehensive plugin featuring a wide range of options to allow you to optimize for social media, including by implementing rich snippet tagging for all your content, optimizing your posts for Facebook OpenGraph and adding Twitter meta tags, among other features. And the best part is that this is done automatically.
This is a free plugin and works perfectly with other SEO plugins such as WordPress SEO by Yoast, All In One SEO Pack and more.
You can check out WP Social SEO Booster here.
SEO Friendly Images
This is another great plugin that allows you to take advantage of another important SEO factor, namely the images on your site.
If your images are properly optimized, you can significantly increase your traffic levels as well as your ranking. Optimizing images requires adding effective ALT and TITLE attributes, which the search engines can understand. This way, your images have the potential to show up in Google Image Searches, providing with an additional source of traffic.
The SEO Friendly Images plugin automatically updates images with all the right attributes, according to various options you set. So, if the images you posted don't already have their ALT and TITLE attributes set, the plugin will do it automatically. It will save you a lot of time, especially if you have a lot of unoptimized images.
SEO Friendly Images can be downloaded here.
SEO Internal Links
Everyone knows the importance of internal linking, but it can be a pain to do. Especially if you have to go back through dozens or even hundreds of pages to do it.
The SEO Internal Links plugin can save you a lot of time because it can automatically link various keywords and phrases that appear in your posts and even your comments with the corresponding pages, categories, tags or posts. It also allows you to set specific URLs to be used for specific keywords or phrases.
And don't worry about getting a penalty for too many internal links because the plugin will only link out the first instance of the keyword or phrase it finds.
To learn more about what SEO Internal Links can do, check it out here.
Even if all you know about SEO is that it could help you improve your site's rankings but have no clue what it involves, these plugins can make your life much easier because they will guide you through what needs to be done for better SEO. Of course, SEO veterans will also find them extremely useful because they automate a number of processes, saving you time and aggravation.