With millions upon millions of blogs and websites on the internet, you would think that making sure your website can easily be found would be an insurmountable task. However, it simply comes down to search engine optimization (SEO), which can be considered as a cross between an art and a science.
You can write the highest quality, most engaging content for your readers on a daily basis, but if you don’t have good SEO then your website will never grow in size. It can automatically generate invoices for the data entry company, and sometimes uses ready-made templates, making your life easier.
Fortunately, WordPress has some excellent plugins which are purely dedicated to SEO which can help search engines discover your content, index it, and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.
Here are 9 of the very best WordPress SEO plugins:
1.Wordpress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast has been one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins for a while now. It is widely considered as being the best plugin available to WordPress users when it comes to search engine optimization. Many people install this plugin when their site is completely new and find that it works so well that they never need to change it.
2. Automatic SEO Links
Automatic SEO Links allows a website owner to choose a phrase or word for automatic linking (both internally and externally), choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, set anchor text, and more. A feature of this plugin which users find invaluable is that it will only do these things for the first time the word or phrase appears in a post, therefore you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing – increasing return visitors numbers.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
Every website or blog needs a sitemap. Search engines will be notified every time new content is added, will crawl your website, and then index the content. Despite this plugin’s name, a sitemap is actually created which can be read by Bing, Ask, and Yahoo.
4. Redirection
At some point, it is often the case that you will need to move a page from one area on your website to another area. However, the last thing you want to happen is to lose that page’s search engine ranking. Redirection makes sure this does not happen by helping you with 301 redirects, capturing a log of 404s so you can correct them, setting up a RSS feed for errors, and more.
5. SEO Friendly Images
This is widely considered as being one of the best WordPress SEO plugins for images. It can automatically update images with the correct TITLE and ALT attributes for SEO purposes. If your images currently do not have TITLE and ALT tags already set, this plugin will add them according to the options you set. Images provide an excellent source of traffic and with the correct TITLE and ALT tags, search engines will properly be able to index them.
6. SEO No Duplicate WordPress
Everyone knows that search engines dislike websites with duplicate content. In fact, search engines hate duplicate content so much that if lots of pages of duplicate content are found, your whole website can disappear from a search engine. To make sure this does not happen, SEO No Duplicate allows you to state which version of the post you want search engines to index whilst ignoring the others. This is certainly one of the most useful WordPress SEO plugins for website owners.
6. Simple Tags
Simple tags is a very popular plugin which focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts. At times it can be difficult to think up appropriate tags to use. This is where Simple Tags comes in by offering you tag suggestions, mass tag editing, auto completion of tags as you type, and much more.
7. SEO Title Tag
Title tags are one of the most important elements of SEO to make sure that search engines know where to place your posts. Unlike other WordPress SEO plugins, SEO Title Tag allows you to add tags to your main page, all other pages, and even on any URL anywhere on your site.
8. Meta Robots
The easiest solution to adding robot metadata to any page you want on your website is by installing and downloading one of the best WordPress SEO plugins available- Meta Robots. You can use this plugin to add robot metadata to prevent indexing of your login page, disable author and date based archives, prevent indexing of search pages, and to make any links on your front page “nofollow.”
9. Platinum SEO
Platinum SEO offers users several more features than other WordPress SEO plugins. These include automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, post slug optimization, auto generation of META tags, help in avoiding duplicate content, as well as a range of other features.
