The 5 Best WordPress Plugins for SEO
There’s no beating around the bush: search engine optimization (SEO) is your key to unlocking massive gains in website traffic and sales. If you own a business that strives to create a web presence, this likely comes as no surprise to you. Any company worth their salt knows that effective digital marketing is key in today’s fast-paced, high-tech consumer market.
What you may not know is that there are a ton of tools that can help you achieve greatness, and they’re ready to deploy today. If you use WordPress for your website, you’re sitting on a treasure trove of SEO tools that can seriously change the landscape of how you do sales. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the 5 best WordPress plugins for SEO.
These are the plugins that have great reviews and have proven their competitiveness in the complicated field of optimization.
Yoast SEO
If you’ve heard of any plugin on this list, this is probably it. Yoast SEO allows you to take total control of your optimization, from setting a keyword to editing the metadescription that appears on your Google result. It also tracks your language and readability, to help you write for the audience that the post is intended for.
It’s so easy to use (as long as you understand what Google wants) and puts your own SEO success in your hands.
Google is a fickle beast and it wants everything just so. Yoast can help you get all of those details correct, so that you’re appearing higher in the search results and people are visiting your site more often.
Broken Link Checker
Few things are more frustrating for customers and browsers than clicking a link that they think will solve the problem they have, only to find that it’s outdated or not working. Broken links stop traffic dead in its tracks, as visitors to your site have to backtrack to where they were in order to begin their search for answers anew.
The problem is that it can be quite tedious to go back through all of your content and pages to check that every single link is still working. That’s where Broken Link Checker comes in. This WordPress plugin does the tedious work, so you can focus on repairing and updating broken links.
All in One SEO Pack
If you already have some experience with SEO and want to get down to every nitty, gritty detail, All in One SEO Pack might be your best bet. Users beware: It definitely looks and feels a little overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be an SEO guru.
Just a few of the features include:
- XML Sitemap support – submit your sitemap to Google and Bing and improve your SEO
- Support for SEO on Custom Post Types
- Redirect attachment pages to parent post
- Automatically notifies search engines like Google and Bing about changes to your site
- Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
- Nonce Security built into All in One SEO Pack
- Automatically optimizes your titles for Google and other search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
Squirrly SEO Plugin
On the opposite end of the spectrum from the All in One SEO Pack, Squirrly SEO takes the journey into SEO greatness slowly, with tutorials and reassurance along the way. According to their fact sheet, “49,000 users had a +285% increase in traffic, compared to their average traffic before using Squirrly SEO.”
Just because it’s for beginners doesn’t mean that it’s not a heavyweight in features. It brings everything that Yoast has to offer to the table, along with a Social AI program that helps you create “human-friendly” content and weekly check ins that let you know how much you’re growing.
There are also some pretty impressive add-ons, like Squirrly Social. This powerful social media tool guides you in curating content that is relevant to your business and interests, schedules out social media posts from your blog content, and a reshare feature that resurfaces content when it’s going to be most impactful.
WPtouch Mobile Plugin
If there was a second most critical aspect of digital marketing, it’s certainly mobile optimization of your website. According to OuterBox, 62% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months. Additionally, 80% of shoppers used a mobile phone inside of a physical store to either look up product reviews, compare prices or find alternative store locations.
Even more importantly, Google recently implemented serious consequences for sites that were neglecting mobile optimization, which can take a serious toll on your ability to effectively perform SEO.
The WPTouch Mobile Plugin helps you get your site mobile ready. It applies a simple theme to your website that is mobile friendly, then allows you to customize various pieces of your site to your liking. It’s a great quick-fix that will appease Google until you can get onboard with a digital marketer and developer to optimize your site completely.