9 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
If you're using WordPress for your site, you might want to consider how to maximize your SEO potential. SEO is, basically, the art talking back to search engines and people in a way both can understand. If your understanding of SEO is just having your websites use specific keywords to gain the top rankings in search engine results, then you're in for a treat
With more than 4 million WordPress site reviewed to date, we've noticed a few key SEO factors that our WordPress users struggle with. So we've put together this list SEO plugins to help you with your technical and on-page SEO.
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast is by far the most popularly and widely-used SEO plugin in WordPress. And for a good reason! It ranks top 3 in the most widely used WordPress plugins of all time. It offers some of the best functionality you could ever wish for in an optimization plugin and is very easy to set up. It's highly recommended for anyone who wants to optimize his site quickly, easily and cheaply.
This plugin offers an SEO page analysis which gives you a score based on a keyword used by your page. WordPress SEO by Yoast also lets you know if your page is well-optimized for its SEO indicators. Also, this plugin has a social media integration feature to optimize your content for social media sharing. That's just the free version though!
The premium version of this plugin, on the other hand, optimizes your pages for multiple keywords. It also allows you to set up 301 redirects, find 404 errors, and check optimization for multiple keywords per page.
With Yoast, you'll be able to churn out higher quality content "“ complete with keyword and page analysis. Each page and posts Title and Meta descriptions can be added individually and customized.
The plugin will also generate XML sitemaps automatically and allow you to add schema markup to your website. Remember, however, that this plugin will not do the SEO on your behalf. Rather, it will provide you with the recommendations needed to effect data-driven optimization on your WordPress website.
There are more tools available when you use Yoast. They've created several extensions for their plugin that fits your more niche needs such as...
- Ecommerce
- News
- Local SEO
- Video SEO
You can go check out their site and see what other goodies you can optimize for your site.
2. MailChimp
While email marketing does not impact SEO directly, it can make an impact based on how you approach your email campaigns. If it helps increase engagement, social media shares or new vs. returning visitors, your newsletter can help drive searchers to your blog posts, ask your subscribers to share your post and keep them coming to your site.
With that said, the most popular plugin, MailChimp, lets you send emails and newsletters to a list of subscribers. Generally seen as strictly an email marketing tool, this plugin has a potential for SEO!
The MailChimp plugin for WordPress allows you to create sign-up forms for willing email subscribers of your blog. These sign-up forms are good looking, user-friendly, and most of all, optimized for mobile users. The MailChimp plugin also offers add-on plugins that can help your site for SEO.
One example of that is the MailChimp Activity plugin. This plugin allows you to review the day-to-day changes to your newsletter service. This may help you formulate strategies for optimization of your blog.
3. Sumo
Just like MailChimp WordPress plugin, the Sumo WordPress plugin can help drive engagement and clicks to your site. It is a highly unique plugin. It is a one set package deal that offers different apps your marketing needs, including SEO!
Sumo's Wordpress plugin offers a list of apps that you can choose to download and add to your site. However, there are two apps that you should definitely decide when you need to optimize your site for SEO...
Content Analytics and Social Sharing.
Content Analytics lets you see how much of your followers read your entries by tracking how far they actually scroll. This measures how engaged your audience is with your site and how valuable they find your content (people don't scroll through pages that waste their time). Heatmaps tell you if/where people click, another good measure of engagement.
It also tells you the best place to start your conversion optimizations.
Social Sharing is an app that enables you to optimize your site for social media sharing. Social signals have increasingly become important towards your website's search ranking. You can also integrate your MailChimp account with Sumo.
4. WordLift
We've seen chatbots all over the web, and most of us have used voice search by this point. Both of these technologies use natural language processing powered by artificial intelligence to find answers, perform tasks and learn as time goes by. However, this data by itself isn't all that powerful, unless you know how to connect each individual piece together.
That's what WordLift's WordPress plugin does for your site.
Join Web 3.0 with WordLift
This plugin has an incredibly friendly user interface that allows you to write good content that is readable to both humans and machines. It also categorizes your entries by letting you decide between categories and subcategories of the interface. Help search engines understand your pages with semantic content optimization and reach a more qualified audience.
With the help of NLP, AI and machine learning innovations, the plugin is able to guide you to create content that is targeted to the appropriate audience. WordLift helps by organizing your content with the help of data and enriching your website with images, links and data visualization widgets.
For a more"¦ practical... benefit, look at it this way: using semantic markup might be a ranking factor, and even if it's not, sites that use semantic markup can see an almost 20% improvement in organic traffic.
5. Broken Link Checker
Ever had cases of broken links, images, and redirects? Then Broken Link Checker is the one for you!
How do Broken Link affect SEO?
It's important to understand that search engines crawl your site is following your site links, both internal and external. So broken links can cause major headaches for SEO.
Learn how you can identify broken links using Google Search Console as well.
As the name implies, the Broken Link Checker plugin allows you to analyze your pages and detect broken links, redirects and broken images. Through this plugin, you can edit broken links automatically without updating your page, preventing search engines and users from getting lost due to 404 errors. You also have the option to make broken images be seen differently on your pages.
While this plugin may not be able to help you generate keywords, optimize content or build links for SEO, it still helps to optimize your site. This plugin is very helpful in creating anchor links, which is part of the diverse art of SEO.
6. W3 Total Cache
If you want to increase your rankings in search engines like Google, then this plugin is a must-have for your blog!
The W3 Total Cache plugin has many features that enhance user experience and SEO of your site. This plugin reduces the download time for features such as content delivery network as well as web server performance. With these perks, W3 Total Cache saves you at least 80% of bandwidth being used to load your pages.
It's no secret page speed is a ranking factor, so reducing users' wait time has a direct impact on your site's performance in SERPs.
You can read our Ultimate Guide to Increase Your WordPress Site Speed with W3 Total Cache and Cloudflare for more information on how to use this plugin to help your WordPress site speed.
7. Schema App
The Schema App plugin enhances your SEO by adding Schema.org's structured data markup to your pages, similar to what WordLift does.
The more information you provide search engines, the better your site will be. If you have a blog on your site, you can add structured data to include entry in a top stories carousel and rich result features such as headline text and larger-than-thumbnail images.
Adding structured data to specify information about your website will also help pull data into Google's knowledge panel results. This is especially helpful for people looking for:
- Store locations
- Contact information
- Opening hours
- Payment methods
Whether your site is an ecommerce, blog site, food/recipe site, etc, you'll want to add structured data to each page and post you create. The example below have structured data regarding product the site is selling, you can also perform a full SEO audit for each of your pages with WooRank to make sure all your SEO plugins are being implemented correctly.
If you want to add markup to your site manually, you can use WooRank's Metadata Tool to copy and paste it on your homepage using the Schema App plugin.
Learn more about what other structured data you can add on your site.
8. SEO Squirrly
Here is an all-in-one SEO plugin that is perfect for SEO beginners!
SEO Squirrly is an SEO-beginner-friendly plugin that guides you in creating human-friendly, well-optimized content! It uses social intelligence to help you make high-quality content.
As a big bonus, it also provides copyright-free images, so you don't have to surf the net for them anymore! Other than that, this plugin reports the areas of improvement regarding SEO on your site!
What really makes this plugin friendly for beginners is that it helps you learn about SEO strategies with email training. For those techy enough, this plugin allows you to create XML sitemaps for Google and Bing.
9. Mopinion
Mopinion is a free feedback form plugin which enables users to capture suggestions, bugs and compliments, and collect visual feedback (screenshots) on individual page elements. This is all possible when your visitor clicks on the feedback button that is visual on your website. The feedback form is completely customisable, meaning users can change or add feedback questions, add their own design or logo, choose their own language and set up triggers for actions such as exit intent.
Once feedback is collected, it will be immediately available on a personal Mopinion account that is created upon downloading the plugin. Alternatively, users can receive feedback alerts straight in their email inbox.
Applying SEO in your WordPress Blog
These top 9 SEO plugins for WordPress have helped countless bloggers optimize their websites and gain more traffic. Indeed, they have proved their effectiveness, so we hope that their reputation exceeds your expectations.
Hope you enjoyed reading and good luck with your SEO!
Feel free to share some comments or recommendations! We love to hear good and honest feedback from you!