Traffic is the most important part of any online business. More traffic means more sales.
There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to your website, but what’s better than getting free visitors from Google who are ready to buy whatever you sell?
So, In this article, I will talk about The Best SEO Plugins For WordPress.
You will not only learn why you need SEO Plugins, but you will also find out the very best SEO plugins that we know and recommend.
But, before we dive in, I will answer a question that I am asked very frequently by beginners:
What is an SEO Plugin?
There are thousands of WordPress plugins that perform thousands of different tasks.
One of those tasks is Search Engine Optimization.
If your site is not search engine optimized, all the content you write will just go wasted.
There is no reason to create content on your website if it goes completely unnoticed.
If you want more and more people to notice your content, you need your site to be search engine optimized.
But there are a lot of technical actions that you need to take in order to make your website fully Search Engine Optimized.
And most of the bloggers like me aren’t that good at writing code and editing their WordPress themes.
This is where SEO Plugins come to help.
They handle the technical part, make it easy for you to create SEO Optimized Content and also offer tools that help you better optimize your content for search engines.
For example, adding structured schema markup to your blog posts can help you get better CTR and higher search engine rankings:
Adding structured schema markup data to your blog posts manually can take hours or even weeks if you are not good at writing code.
On the other hand, if you use an SEO Plugin for the job, the same task can be completed in minutes within a few clicks.
There are a lot of tasks you need to perform in order to optimize your website for search engines. Adding schema markup is one of them.
What To Look For in an SEO Plugin?
Before you install any SEO Plugin, it is really important that you check if it includes all the features you will require.
For example, if you are buying an SEO Plugin for a review site, you will need to check if the plugin you are about to buy contains the following features:
- Support for rich snippets.
- Support for Schema Markup.
- Support for User Aggregated Ratings, etc.
There are thousands of SEO Plugins available. That’s why I created the following list of the best WordPress plugins available on the internet:
The 5 Best SEO Plugins For WordPress
1. YOAST SEO
No list of SEO Plugins is complete without this plugin.
It is one of our favorite WordPress plugins.
It is one of the most popular and the most recommended SEO Plugin for WordPress.
It not only helps us write better content, but also handles the technical part of SEO.
We use it on our blog, recommend it to everyone and install it on all blogs that we create.
It comes with built-in support for Open Graph metadata which turns our links into rich objects on Facebook when shared:
It is one of the best SEO Plugins available and comes with hundreds of features.
YOAST SEO’s Content Analyzer is one of our favorite features. It analyzes our content and offers suggestions to improve it.
We highly recommend you to install and use this plugin on every website you create.
It helps us get better results from your SEO efforts.
Read this article to learn how to setup it properly.
Features:
1. Analyzes your content and offers suggestions to improve it.
2. Automatically generates Search Engine Optimized XML Sitemaps and updates them as soon as you create more pages.
3. Support for Twitter Card metadata turns your links into cards when shared.
4. Post title and meta description editor to help you write better title and meta description for your blog posts.
Price: FREE
2. WP Rich Snippets
WP Rich Snippets adds Structured Schema Markup to your pages. It is one of the best Schema plugins in the market.
Structured Schema markup allows search engines to better understand our content.
It will help you gain rich snippets in Google search results which will result in better CTR and higher search engine ranking:
It also helps us create better-looking review pages without writing a single line of code:
It also supports user aggregated reviews allowing your visitors and users to leave reviews.
So, if you write reviews on your blog, this plugin is a must have.
Features:
1. Get more traffic and better CTR with rich snippets.
2. Create better-looking review pages without writing a single line of code.
3. Support for more than one data type including Articles, Reviews, Recipes, Products, Organizations and Restaurants.
Price: $69 per site
3. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that checks our site for broken links and missing images and notifies us about them.
Broken Links are a bad SEO Signal. When Google finds broken links on your website, it assumes that the website is not actively maintained and updated. It is bad for SEO.
Search engines hate websites with outdated content, and broken links is a sign of outdated content.
This plugin helps us update broken links and missing images by notifying us via email and dashboard.
As you can see in the screenshot below, Broken Link Checker found 12 broken links on our site:
Now, we can either take action in bulk or manually edit pages and fix the links.
It not only saves our site from SEO penalties but also improves the user experience.
Features:
1. Monitors links in your posts, comments, and pages so you can fix them as soon as possible.
2. Notifies you of broken links via Email or Dashboard.
3. Option to make broken links look different in your content. For example, changing their color to red.
4. A lot of customization options to make it work your way.
Price: FREE
4. SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a free WordPress Plugin that allows us to optimize images in our articles for Search Engines.
It allows us to add title and alt attribute to the images in our content.
If you have read my article on Image Optimization, you know the importance of optimizing your images for search engines.
If you have a lot of images without title and alt attribute, you can configure this plugin to automatically add title and alt attribute to your images:
The alt attribute of images (HTML) allows search engines to understand what the image is about.
Search Engines regard lack of alt tag on images as a poorly optimized content.
It is really important that you optimize your images for Search Engines as it will not only help you gain traffic from image search, but will also help you target more keywords.
Features:
1. Adds options to manually add title and alt tag to images when you add them to your posts.
2. Automatically adds title and alt tag to images missing them based on configuration.
Price: FREE
5. Redirection
Redirection is a free WordPress Plugin.
As the name implies, it allows us to create 301 redirects:
If you change the location of a page, you are required by search engines to 301 Redirect the old page’s URL to the new page URL.
It also monitors 404 errors allowing us to find broken pages and set redirects for them.
It also makes it possible to create custom redirect URLs.
For example, you can use it to create redirects for your affiliate links.
Features:
1. Monitors for 404 errors and creates a log. It helps you find all broken links in your blog.
2. You can redirect non-existing URLs as well. For example, affiliate links.
3. Offers different redirection options like redirection to random pages, redirection based on login status, etc.
4. You can choose the redirection code (301, 302, 404, etc.) for all the redirections you create.
Price: FREE
Conclusion
This brings us to the end of this article.
I hope this article helped you understand what SEO Plugins are and why you need them.
All the plugins listed above are the ones that we use ourselves and recommend.
YOAST SEO and WPRichSnippets are one of the plugins we just can’t live without.
They are a must have if you run a niche affiliate site. We install and use them on every WordPress site we create.
What’s your favorite WordPress SEO Plugin?
Have any questions or feedback?
Feel free to speak your mind in the comments section right below this article.
your work is appreciated.My work is going smoothly with time saving, this is because of your blog.Setup Yoast SEO.Keep it up.Thanks a lot.
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