According to data published by Internet Stat Lives, Google receives more than 66,000 searches per second on any given day. People are increasingly asking Google questions. However, even after such a thirst for knowledge, why aren’t many websites offering the correct answer exposed to the audience?
I have always found Google to be the gatekeeper of endless traffic and leads. Search engines are the primary source of organic traffic for websites on the internet. The world’s most popular search engine, which alone accounted for nearly 80% of all global desktop search traffic in 2017, only allows content that offers the best user experience to appear among its top results.
This raises the importance of WordPress plugins that ensure effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Ten plugins can help you outrank the competition by making your website or blog search engine friendly.
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
Rated the #1 WordPress SEO plugin, Yoast SEO is the best solution to optimize your site for search engines. This helps bloggers attract more visitors from Google, Bing, and social media. This plugin adds specific functionalities to the site that help improve the site’s position among the organic search results. This widely used plugin offers features like XML sitemap, On-page analysis, and more. Yoast SEO is a free plugin. However, I would advise you to opt for Yoast SEO Premium since it provides more keyword optimization per page, Google, Facebook, and Twitter previews, and one year of free access to 24/7 support.
2. All In One SEO Pack
Another most popular WordPress SEO plugin, All In One SEO Pack, has an almost equivalent fan following and powerful features as Yoast SEO. All In One SEO Pack was created in 2007. Since then, this plugin has been downloaded over 45,000,000 times. This easy-to-use SEO plugin, which works out of the box, optimizes a WordPress site for SEO. All in One SEO Pack is an all-inclusive SEO package loaded with lots of features and options to optimize WordPress sites. The plugin automatically optimizes titles for search engines and generates META tags too.
3. WP Meta SEO
Maybe your content is excellent. But it will be useless unless people can find it. And the way to make it visible is to ensure that Google finds your site worthy of its top results. If you analyze closely, you’ll see that SEO is a set of rules that bloggers need to follow to increase the chances of their website reaching the highest point on the ladder. WP Meta SEO is a powerful WordPress SEO plugin that offers functionalities like bulk edit of website meta, image, file name, Google analytics tracking, redirecting 404 errors, internal broken line checker, and bread crumb generator making your site and content SEO friendly. The plugin is easy enough for beginners to understand and advanced enough to meet the needs of experts. After installing WP Meta SEO, the web owner gets complete control over their website’s SEO.
4. SEO Ultimate
A plugin that gives bang for your buck, SEO Ultimate can easily earn a place in a blogger’s top plugins list. This plugin is versatile and data flexible. SEO Ultimate optimizes the content to rank higher on search engines and get more targeted traffic. It also can import and export data from other sources, including third-party SEO plugins, which sets it apart from other plugins.
5. Premium SEO Pack
A well-known search engine optimization plugin boasting an endless list of SEO features like image optimization, social sharing, local SEO, SERP position, rich snippet, and more, Premium SEO Pack has more features than All In One SEO and Yoast SEO combined. It is a highly recommended SEO plugin. The plugin helps increase the SEO value for all web pages and gives webmasters complete control over how they would want their website to look on search engine results and social media.
6. SEO by SQUIRRLY
Being a blogger, I accept that not all of us are SEO experts. However, we still want our blog to top the search engine rankings. This is where WordPress SEO plugins come to our rescue. SEO by Squirrly helps you find the best keywords for your site and write great content that ensures readers’ engagement, which in turn helps to improve the Google rankings. This plugin provides you with SEO-related stats and weekly SEO audits. In the words of the co-founder of Kissmetrics and Crazy Egg, Neil Patel, “Squirrly is more than an SEO tool – it’s a complete content marketing suite.”
7. W3 Total Cache
Until now, I had been discussing plugins that directly optimize WordPress sites for search engines. However, some plugins indirectly offer features that improve a WordPress site’s search engine rankings. As you know, SEO and web performance go hand in hand; improving the site’s performance by making it quick and user-friendly can, therefore, significantly help to improve search rankings since Google has always preferred a user experience. And, you cannot afford to miss W3 Total Cache if you want to improve the performance of your WordPress site.
8. Redirection
Redirects are highly common on the internet. It sends users and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally requested. A 301 redirect is the most efficient search engine-friendly method for webpage redirection. Redirection is WordPress’ most popular redirect manager that manages 301 redirections and keeps track of 404 errors. It tidies up any loose ends your site might have with permalinks. This helps reduce errors, which ultimately improves the website’s search rankings.
9. SEO Internal Link Plugin
You may not realize it, but internal links are an extremely important part of overall optimization for a WordPress site. Internal links connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. The internal links guide search engines to visit and index other important pages and posts on your site. Bloggers should know how to use internal linking best to benefit their blog. It is best to take advantage of the SEO internal link plugin that links keywords and phrases automatically in posts and comments with corresponding posts and pages to create a cycle of positive SEO.
10. Rankie
Do you want to monitor your site’s rankings on Google? Rankie is a great SEO plugin that helps website owners track WordPress rankings on Google, keeping a close eye on each keyword position. This WordPress rank checker plugin uses the best technique to give you complete reports about the website that helps you monitor your site’s rankings.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of SEO plugins. I would recommend that you research more on plugins to understand how multiple plugins can be effectively used to improve search rankings and overall site performance and user experience.