What steps are you taking to ensure your WordPress website is friendly for search engines? If you’re unable to answer this question right away then it’s probably time for you to take a step back and reassess your current situation. Even if you have already taken some action, there’s a good chance improvements can still be made. Search engines are a major source of quality traffic that you don’t want to lose out on. In this post I’m going to discuss 5 of the best SEO plugins for WordPress and how they can help you rank better!
Although WordPress is known for being SEO friendly “out of the box,” there are so many plugins available that it can be confusing deciding which ones are worthwhile and which ones are not. Remember, these plugins won’t guarantee a jump in rankings, but they can definitely improve your chances.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – There’s a reason this plugin is one of the most downloaded WordPress plugins of all time. It allows you to easily add titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords to each post and page on your site. You can even create custom titles for your homepage, archive page, category pages, and tag pages. Best of all, Yoast SEO adds Open Graph meta data such as Twitter Cards into your posts as well. Open Graph data is important because that’s what virtually every social network out there uses. With over 2,000 reviews on WordPress, this plugin ranks a quality 4 out of 5 stars!
All in One SEO Pack – For those who don’t want to give Yoast SEO a try, the All in One SEO Pack plugin makes a great replacement! Initially released in 2007, this plugin has provided webmasters with an easy to use optimization solution for over a decade now. Best of all, you don’t need any experience to begin using it. If you’re able to read and input some data, then you’ll be able to use this plugin. Some of the top features offered by All in One SEO Pack include XML Sitemap and Google Analytics support, automatic optimization of titles for all search engines, automatic generation of META tags, and the ability to override any setting.
Google XML Sitemaps – Are you doing everything possible to make sure the content you write is getting indexed? Sure, search engine bots may find your content without being pointed to it, but wouldn’t you rather have a plan in place to be certain it gets found? Using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin will automatically create a sitemap for you, making it significantly easier for search engines to find and index. Best of all, once you create a sitemap and are comfortable with the settings, you’ll ever have to do anything else. Instead, this powerful plugin will handle everything for you by automatically updating it with content every time you create a new post or page.
Broken Link Checker – As you begin to create more new content for your blog one thing will become apparent: it can be difficult managing all of it. This is where plugins like Broken Link Checker can help. The name pretty much says it all. This plugin will check your content for broken links and missing images. If you’re lucky, you’ll never be alerted that something is wrong on one of your posts or pages. However, I wouldn’t really expect that to happen! Some other great features include the ability to detect any link that doesn’t work, the option to give broken links a different appearance in posts, and the option to prevent search engines from following broken links.
Rel NoFollow Checkbox – Every time you link to an external website you’re giving away some of your sites authority to that link. One option to avoid this happening would be to simply make all external links on your website NoFollow. Then again, that might not be best because sometimes you may WANT one of your external links to be DoFollow. This is where the Rel NoFollow Checkbox plugin will come into play. This simple WordPress plugin adds a checkbox in the insert link popup of the WordPress post editor. The popup already has a checkbox for opening links in new tabs. Once added, you can add new links into your content and easily make some NoFollow and others DoFollow.
