WordPress is a great platform for building your site. But once you are on the web, you need to tell people that you have arrived. Enter- SEO. You need to make your WordPress site search engine friendly and you can do the same by using various WordPress plugins. These little widgets can get you better search engine rankings, and here is a list of the prominent SEO plug-ins.
The Best WordPress SEO Plugins:
1. All in One SEO Pack –
The effectiveness and popularity of this pack will be evident to you, when you Google WordPress plugin, and this will come right on top. With this plugin you can automatically optimize your WordPress site by generating meta tags. The plug in will make Wordpress use by default your blog tagline as your Meta description and keywords. You can easily optimize web page title, post titles, descriptions, URL structures and tags for each post. With the All in one SEO pack, you can customize each post/ update on your site to make sure that their relevance is understood by the search engines. Other features include-
- Automatically optimize your titles for search engines
- Advanced Canonical URLs
- Page Navigational Links Can Be Fine Tuned
2. WordPress SEO – This is another all inclusive SEO plugin, that does the work of 8 plug ins. It includes a snippet preview that lets you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords. Not to forget the XML sitemaps, and many other things.
Other features include Google analytics, breadcrumbs, building the canonical tag etc. Here is a list of its features:
- Post titles and meta descriptions
- Robots Meta configuration
- Canonical
- Breadcrumbs
- Permalink clean up
- XML Sitemaps
- RSS enhancements
- Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
- Clean up head section
3. Scribe SEO – Scribe SEO is a paid plug-in that analyzes your post for keyword focus, gives you information about it and suggests improvements from an SEO perspective.
Here are some of the essential features.
- Optimize content faster
- Choose great keywords
- Preserve reader engagement
- Build quality links
4. Google XML Sitemaps– This WordPress plugin generates an XML sitemap so that the search engine spiders can crawl and index your WordPress site better. The XML Sitemaps give a clear view of your site’s structure to the search engines. Google XML Sitemaps also support other engines like Bing, Yahoo!, by notifying them every time a post is created. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime and all the time you post something new. It also pings Google about the same. In this pug in , you may set it to write a normal XML file or a zipped file. There is the option of building the sitemap manually. Other features include:
- Calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments
- User interface to customize all parameters like priorities etc.
- Generates sitemap automatically
5. SEO Rank Reporter– As the name gives a hint, this WordPress SEO plugin lets you find certain keywords in your site, and track their prerformance. You get a report every three days, fully detailed with performance graphs, so that you know how are they doing. In case of a major fluctuation in any keyword’s ranking, you will get an email notification. This is a list of its primary features:
- Email notifications for ranking fluctuations
- Download a full CSV file containing all of your ranking data.
- List of keywords that drive traffic to your website and add them to the rank reporter.
- Search using other Google Country URLs (e.g., google.co.uk)
6. Redirection Plug In – This plugin lets you control 301 redirections, to keep track of 404 errors and also correct them. You can manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a file or a post. You get a regular expression support. It works with WordPress and that is why Apache .htaccess is not required. Other prominent features include:
- 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
- Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
- Full logs for all redirected URLs
- All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
- Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!
7. Robots Meta -This plugin comes loaded with many features, like- automatically generating meta tags, optimizing page and post titles for search engines. Most importantly, it helps you in avoiding duplicate content. You can add noindex, follow robots Meta tag in your pages to prevent the search engines from indexing them. Other features include:
- Prevent duplicate content by stopping the indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages.
- You can also prevent the indexing of your comments feeds.
- You can easily edit the .htaccess and robots txt file within your wordpress admin panel.
8. SEO Friendly Image – SEO Friendly Image is a WordPress optimization plug-in which adds alt and title attributes to all your images. These image tags W3C and lead to better traffic. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according to the options you have set. If you have taken optimizing images for search engines seriously, their accessibility, and search engine indexability is increased a lot.
9. SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links is a WordPress SEO plugin , links the keywords in your new post/page to the previous ones. You can set up your unique keyword sets with matching URLs, with SEO Smart Links. . With this plug in you can set “No Follow” attributes and open links in new browser windows or browser tabs.
10. WP Super Cache – Site speed is now a ranking factor, and your WordPress Site plug in lets you cache your site. Use it to reduce load time and get better ranks. The plugin serves cached files in 3 ways- Mod_Rewrite, PHP and Legacy Caching. Of these, most users will opt for Mod_Rewriting as it is the fastest but PHP caching is almost as good and recommended too.
There are other plugins too, but these are the ones that will make your WordPress site, search engine friendly fair quickly!