SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become an integral part of the digital marketing strategy. If you have a website, then SEO is the technique of getting the best rankings on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) organically for your desired search terms.
If you have a WordPress website and you want to optimize it, then you should install relevant SEO plugins. These plugins will help you to boost your website rankings.
Here is the list of 5 must have SEO plugins for your WordPress website.
1. Premium WordPress SEO Pack:
The name itself suggests that this SEO plugin comes with sturdy features and tools to enhance your website ranking. This plugin is certainly worth the price. It has the ability to provide customized SEO support to different website pages. In fact, it also manages the order of pages on the SERP. Additionally, there is a feature to improve the look of social media postings. It is compatible with other plugins like Squirrly SEO, WooCommerce and WordPress Multisite. In addition, this plugin also has an option for on or off page optimization.
Key Features:
• Facebook Planner to post on Facebook.
• Monitoring of 404 errors if the visitors find this error on any page.
• Manages the insights for page speed on desktop and mobile screens.
• Image optimization with Alt tags and Title attributes for SEO friendly images.
• Backlink Builder to find other similar website options for creating links to your website.
• W3C Validator to help you with the regular checks for schema markup for posts, pages, and custom classifications.
• On-page SEO to update your website page with post-preview or admin top bar.
• Pattern SEO to set a perfect pattern for each post type and custom post type.
• Supports the Open Graph Markup and Twitter card support with Social Optimization.
2. Yoast SEO Plugin:
Yoast SEO plugin is one of the best options for free SEO WordPress plugins. The numbers for Yoast plugin are very impressive. It has more than 5 million active users along and 4.7 out of 5 user rating with more than 15K reviews.
This plugin doesn’t stop at just improving your website’s on-page SEO, it has more to offer. In addition, this SEO WordPress plugin also takes due care of technical optimization of your website. It has a range of features to cater to your website’s SEO needs. Thus, it is also known as all in one SEO WordPress website plugin.
There are few things to note before you decide to use this SEO plugin for your website. This plugin sometimes may decrease your website speed. Apart from that, you may have to incur some extra costs for additional add-ons and upgrades. The premium version of this plugin is available if you need extra features.
Key Features:
• Breadcrumbs to provide internal linking and simple navigation for users.
• Optimization for Meta tags and Title tags for determining page position on SERP.
• Multisite compatibility with XML Sitemaps support and options to copy settings from blog to blog.
• Simple Website SEO Analysis with monitoring of content’s length, meta-description, and use of focus keyword. You can easily understand the analysis with red and green signals.
• Snippet Preview to get a better idea about the actual look of your website results on SERP.
• Social Integration through Facebook Open Graph Markup tool to link SEO and social media.
• Blog analysis through simple red and green signals.
3. SEOPressor:
SEOPressor is not available from download from the WordPress plugins dashboard but you can download it from the official plugin page. Google has been updating its search algorithms on a regular basis to provide the best possible search results to users. SEOPressor plugin is regularly updated to provide best results in the face of these changes from Google. This makes the plugin one of the top contenders among desirable SEO plugins.
The only limitations of this plugin is complex user interface which may be intimidating for beginners and lack of a free version.
Key Features:
• Automatic Smart Internet Linking that automatically adds internal links to preserve leads and decrease bouncing rate.
• Dynamic Crawler Control to have complete control over the spiders traveling through the website.
• Regular checks for over optimization by monitoring the excessive use of focus keywords as this can be a negative factor in SEO.
• SEO Score for Keyword by checking the optimization rate of 3 primary keywords (maximum).
• Gives a readability score for your website content.
• Helps to enhance LSI keywords for better rankings of the website.
4. W3 Total Cache:
W3 Total Cache is mostly installed to compress Javascript, HTML, CSS and feeds. Apart from that, it helps to cache static content. This plugin has a remarkable feature of CDN to decrease the download time of webpage. It works with any type of web hosting service and enhances the overall performance of the WordPress website. With more than 1 million users it has been scored 4.5 out of 5 based on more than 3900 user reviews.
Key Features:
• Progressive Page Rendering for faster interaction.
• Saves Bandwidth up to 80% with options like minify and compression.
• Compatible with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
• Extends site caching with caching of feeds and search results page.
• In-built browser caching.
5. Schema:
Schema is an all in one SEO plugin that supports major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. It works well in making WordPress web pages stand out on search engine result pages. Its rich snippets feature integrates elements like photos, ratings, and author into search results for increased click-through rate. This plugin has more than 70k users.
Key Features:
• Compatible with all types of content
• Facebook compatibility with perfect formatting of information with shared Facebook links.
• Enhances the click-through rate of the website.
• Compatible with all major search engines.
Each of these WordPress plugins are regularly updated by their developers to provide best SEO results. Most of them provide a free version along with a paid version with additional features. This allows users to trial the interface and compatibility of the plugins with their WordPress websites and make a decision to purchase.