Article Note: This article “Top WordPress SEO Plugins for Better Ranking Website” was first published on 3rd July 2012. We have last updated this article on 25th September 2019 with fresh information.
You will find numerous WordPress (WP) plugins that help your business website to rank higher in the search engine results pages or SERP. Be it any website, small or multiple pages, search engines like Google play a crucial role to drive organic traffic to your site, generate leads, and turn them into your loyal customers.
WordPress is an SEO-friendly platform that you can leverage to rank high in Google’s search pages. Then, there are numerous WP plugins and you need to choose the best one that suits the requirements of your website. Whether you want to optimize your web pages, drive quality traffic, boost revenue, use Google Analytics to allow e-commerce tracking, or monitor of user management, WP plugins come with all such rewards.
WordPress plugins are tools used for greater functionality of the WordPress platform. It is a free and open-source blogging tool and a dynamic content management system (CMS) created on PHP and MySQL. Many features of WordPress includes a plug-in architecture and a template design. As per recent stats, WordPress is the most preferred CMS in use on the net.
In this article, we will share the best WordPress SEO modules and instruments that will improve the SEO of your site.
WordPress.org vs WordPress.com
People in general confused with WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Whereas from WordPress.org you can download blog software, free themes, plugins, community mailing lists, support forums, and documentation. But they are only applicable to self-hosted blogs and websites using the WordPress.org software.
However, plugins are not allowed at WordPress.com for several security reasons. Downloading software from WordPress.org is free but it should be tested in a different server before being used in WordPress.com. Mishandling a server may lead to a disastrous result and ultimate loss of your entire blog.
Recommended for you: 5 Tips for Starting a Thriving WordPress eCommerce Site from Scratch.
Why You Should Use WordPress SEO Plugins
According to an article published on HuffPost, you can use WP plugins for an enhanced blogging experience. When you are into blogging, it’s needless to say that the popularity of websites or blogs developed in WP is far-reaching. However, there are some entrepreneurs who do not know about the amazing benefits of WP plugins for their business website. Do a little research about the many benefits of WP plugins compared to other blogging sites such as Joomla or Drupal, offering plugins.
Site speed is one of the numerous significant factors in pursuit rankings. Quick stacking locales can without much of a stretch outrank more slow sites. While you are investing a great deal of energy improving your substance technique, give a portion of that opportunity to improve your site speed.
You will find approximately 29,000 WP plugins or even more. How do you ascertain which is the best one to help your website gain better ranking in the SERPs? You need to take some time out of your busy schedule and read up authority sites, journals, e-books, books, and other online literature to pick out the best SEO-friendly WP plugin. Read in to learn about the top WP SEO plugins that will help your web pages rank high in the search results.
Web search tools are a noteworthy wellspring of traffic for general sites. That is the reason our clients regularly approach us for SEO tips and modules that can help improve the SEO of their WordPress locales. Here, we will discuss some of the essential WordPress SEO plugins without mentioning any serial number. Since each plugin has its own utility and feature we are leaving it on you to do more research and check before using any of them and provide a serial number of your choice.
Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize the content of your pages, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps and loads of optimization options in between.
It is one of the best WP plugins to help your website or blog rank high in the SERPs. Without optimization, your site cannot thrive in the days to come, considering the stiff online competition. Besides, you can look up many platforms to understand how they use the right plugins for site optimization. Therefore, make the best out of SEO Yoast, the popular and commonly used plug-in for your website or blog to enhance your business visibility. The snippet preview feature, for example, will help you see how your web page would look in Google’s search results. The page analysis will let you understand the length of your blog posts, use of Meta descriptions, its presence, and whether it includes the relevant KW or not.
Talking of Yoast SEO, it is one of the most well-accepted and reliable plugins of WP website owners. It also receives regular updates to conform to Google algorithms. That is why Yoast SEO is the best and widely used WP optimization plugin for entrepreneurs.
The tool also comes with multiple features making your website or blog user-friendly and performance-oriented. It has the potential to optimize search terms and synonyms. Additionally, the plugin determines your blog’s readability and computes the Flesch Reading Easy Score. Yoast SEO optimizes the photos or images used in your blog. You can make these visuals rank better in the search results with the aid of KWs and image attributes and titles.
Features of Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most prevalent SEO module on WordPress which is as it should be. This can be found in the around 2,000 audits, with a general rating of 4 out of 5 stars. In the event that you need to enhance the SEO of your WordPress site, both by making improved content and by streamlining your site, this module might be the best spot to begin. It causes you to make better content by and large with it's Content and SEO investigation highlight.
It checks each bit of substance you compose and demonstrates to you what it looks like from the SEO and meaningfulness perspectives. Which means, it keeps the web crawler bots upbeat as well as your human perusers too! When you consider WordPress SEO modules, Yoast SEO is presumably the main name that rings a bell. It's one of the most famous WordPress plugins for periods.
When you go to deal with an individual bit of substance, you'll get another meta box where you can control that bit of substance's SEO title/depiction and social chart labels (AKA what it looks like when shared on Facebook or Twitter). You can likewise arrange some other SEO fundamentals, similar to whether to record this bit of substance.
One of the useful features of this WP plugin is giving you full control over breadcrumb navigation. It is used for setting the key categories for your blog posts, optimizing the KWs for synonyms and related search terms, monitoring readability, no possibility of duplicate content through canonical URLs, and insights into your blog content to ensure the match of the chosen KWs. The plugin also helps you with social media integration like Facebook OpenGraph to connect social sites.
It is listed under "WordPress Plugins" > "SEO". It is developed by Team Yoast. It is published by WordPress Plugin Repository. It was first get available on October 11, 2010. On April 16, 2024, it was last get upgraded.
SEOPressor
Download: Premium | Cost: $9.00/month
You know that the search engine giant Google had rolled some of the biggest algorithm updates in the last couple of years. Therefore, you need to use some advanced WP plug-in that has been developed keeping in mind the latest Google updates. You might be wondering why SEO Pressor of all things? Well, let us explain. In the course of the most recent couple of years, Google has revealed a noteworthy number of algorithmic updates including Google Panda, Over-advancement and Google Penguin, among others. Not at all like some current SEO modules that are as yet utilizing maturity innovation, SEOPressor is created as per the most recent Google calculation patterns.
The plug-in comes with numerous features that you can use to your advantage. For example, over-optimization monitoring helps you to keep a tab on your web pages if you have used SEO tips and tricks and over-optimized your business website. SEOPressor saves you from being penalized by Google. With SEO keyword score, you can keep track of your targeted search terms. Again, this plug-in determines your website’s semantic quality using its proprietary formula, SemantiQTM. The tool helps you to reinforce your related indicator for interpreting search engines.
With dynamic crawler control, you have absolute authority over how search engines crawlers navigate your web pages. Finally, with automatic smart linking, you can include KWs and links in an automatic manner to increase the average spend time on your business website and minimize bounce rates.
SEO Ultimate
Download: Free + Premium | Cost: Starting from $49.00
The plugin is best for data flexibility and versatility simultaneously. You can import and export valuable data from various sources such as third-party plugins. The features are many to use them to your benefit. Code inserter helps you integrate codes in the website footer, header, before and after adding content. The Deeplink Juggernaut will let you set up search terms automatically for which this plugin will generate internal links on your business website. With the file editor, you can change your robots.txt from your WP dashboard. Ultimate is exceptionally simple and easy-to-use, there is immense documentation accessible on YouTube. It enables you to empower just explicit highlights your need and comprehended known as modules inside this module.
The rich snippets feature will attract more visitors to your website and makes it easy for them to find your business website. The 404 monitor helps you keep track of the 404 error messages on your business website. The developer doesn’t offer help for SEO Ultimate on the WordPress discussions. Be that as it may, committed one on one email bolster is accessible when you move up to SEO Ultimate+. The superior form of SEO Ultimate likewise has restrictive new includes, definite preparing recordings and custom updates not accessible in the free form.
The title tag rewriter lets you tweak the title tags of your web pages, categories, posts and more. Social media optimizing automatically generates an open graph for web pages and blog posts. The author highlighter will help you show the name of the authored content published in Google’s search pages. SEO Ultimate gives both adaptability and information adaptability simultaneously. It’s fit for bringing in and sending out information from various sources including outsider SEO modules.
You may like: 5 Free Plugins to Supercharge the WordPress WYSIWYG Editor.
MonsterInsights – Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress (Website Stats Made Easy)
Google Analytics for WordPress is the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Of course, you could just copy the tracking code into your theme and be done with it, but then you'd miss a whole lot of features that this plugin has to offer you. All the extra data this plugin can add to your tracking is what makes Google Analytics for WordPress into the most powerful tracking tool you've ever seen.
It is listed under "WordPress Plugins" > "SEO". The name of the author is MonsterInsights. The publisher is WordPress Plugin Repository. It was first get released on September 14, 2007. It was last get upgraded on March 05, 2024.
W3 Total Cache
The ultimate swiss-army knife of caching, from the basic page caching (keeping a static copy of the page) to CSS/JS/HTML minification (making your files smaller), as well as handling uploads to a Content Delivery Network.
It is listed under "WordPress Plugins" > "SEO". The author name is BoldGrid. It is published by WordPress Plugin Repository. It was first get available on July 29, 2009. It was last get upgraded on April 01, 2024.
Broken Link Checker
Dealing with broken links can be a pain if you’re waiting for readers to report them – get ahead of the game with this plugin and automatically check all the sites you’ve linked to before they become a problem.
It is listed under "WordPress Plugins" > "SEO". The author name is WPMU DEV. It is available at WordPress Plugin Repository. It was first get published on October 08, 2007. It was last get updated on December 28, 2023.
Redirection
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.
It is listed under "WordPress Plugins" > "SEO". It is available at WordPress Plugin Repository. It was first get released on September 10, 2007. It was last get upgraded on January 27, 2024.
XML Sitemap Generator for Google
If you decide to use any SEO plugin above other than WP SEO, you are recommended to install this plugin as it is one of those things that is virtually set and forget. The plugins main function is to create and submit a sitemap, making it easier for the search engine crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve information more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages and automatically notifies all major search engines every time you create new content.
It is listed under "WordPress Plugins" > "SEO". The author name is Auctollo. It is published by WordPress Plugin Repository. It was first get published on June 16, 2005. It was last get upgraded on April 10, 2024.
Cloudflare
If you decide to use CloudFlare’s CDN service, don’t forget to install this plugin (a must). this ensures: Correct IP Address information for comments posted to your site Better protection as spammers from your WordPress blog get reported to Cloudflare Optimization of your server database (optional).
It is listed under "WordPress Plugins" > "SEO". The name of the publisher is WordPress Plugin Repository. It was first get published on October 19, 2010. On April 03, 2024, it was last get upgraded.
Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
This plugin adds an option box to the WordPress editor section, where you can specify a redirect location and type of redirect that you want, temporary, permanent, or meta. this is very good especially if you are rewriting an old post and want to redirect that post to the new one. Has many features to be explored.
It is listed under "WordPress Plugins" > "SEO". The author name is Anadnet. It is available at WordPress Plugin Repository. It was first get published on August 01, 2009. It was last get updated on June 08, 2023.
SEO Tools
This plug-in combines several unique SEO tools developed for Search Commander, Inc. and enables their use from inside WordPress. Paste the corresponding shortcode in place on the page or post where you wish to offer the tool. Tools included are URL Checker, Keyword List Multiplier, Bulk URL checker, Link Variance, RSS Feed Commander, and Landing Page Determinator.
It is listed under "WordPress Plugins" > "SEO". The author name is Cyber49. The name of the publisher is WordPress Plugin Repository. It was first get released on November 13, 2009. It was last get upgraded on November 23, 2021.
Conclusion
You will find hundreds of these WP plugins but pick the one that meets your business requirements. Most of the plugs in this article will help your website rank high in the search pages of Google.
We have written this article in association with Vergis Eva. Vergis is an experienced blogger who has written articles for several renowned blogs and websites about various uses of social media to engineer more business traffic on business websites.
Web Developer & SEO Specialist with 15+ years of experience in Open Source Web Development specialized in Joomla & WordPress development. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions".