If you are a novice to start a blog on WordPress, you may not understand the concept of WordPress SEO. However, you cannot ignore the benefits from WordPress SEO practices. To do great SEO practices, you can make your sire increase exposure in current search engines’ search result rankings. Higher ranking means higher possibility to make money from your blog.
Speaking of WordPress SEO practice, we have to say that you cannot realize it well without easy-to-use WordPress SEO plugins. In this field, you can find a wide range of plugins available! However, different types’ websites on WordPress need different plugins. A reliable WordPress SEO plugin just right for your purpose is hard to find and need time to test.
To save more time for you to focus on WordPress SEO practices, we have carefully select 12 best WordPress SEO plugins after reviewing hundreds of WordPress plugins. You can compare the following SEO plugins and take great advantage of them to get their rankings higher than ever before. Please be patient and learn one by one by following us.
Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins, which is designed for improving your WordPress SEO by writing quality content and having a completely optimized site. With great functionality, this plugin has voted for 4.7 out of 5 stars and got over 9,000,000 downloads so far.
As many webmasters and SEO marketers recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast for beginners and newbies, how to install and configure this plugin for their specific websites? In this tutorial, we carefully guide readers to set up and customize this plugin so that they can easily take advantages of all the awesome built-in features to boost your WordPress SEO and improve the page rank.
Awesome Features
Many users may hesitate to utilize this plugin at first. So let’s overview its awesome features and you can easily understand why you need it.
- The snippet preview allows you to see a rendering of what your post / page will look like in the search results, to increase your site rankings, as well as the click through for organic search results.
- The Linkdex Page Analysis functionality checks simple things you are hound to forget.
- It allows you to write meta titles and description for all tags, categories, custom taxonomy archives, giving users the option to further optimizations.
- It gives users the ability to control which pages Google shows in its search results and which page it does not show.
- The great functionality that automatically creates XML sitemaps and tells search engines of the sitemap existence if you check the box.
- It offers RASS optimization and allows you to edit your .htaccess and robots.txt file for better SEO.
- SEO and Social Media are heavily intertwined, coming with a Facebook OpenGraph implementation and supports Google+ sharing tags.
- And so on.
Install WordPress SEO by Yoast
In order to make use of these advanced features, you should first install this plugin on your site. You can download this plugin from WordPress.org community or just install it in the admin panel. Login into the Dashboard, go to Plugins -> Add New, and enter the WordPress SEO by Yoast in the search box, then click to install and activate it. Once finished, there is an SEO menu added in the left menu bar.
Configure WordPress SEO by Yoast
At present, we are going to configure the plugin for specific needs. Log in to the SEO Dashboard, and then you can set the general settings, choose to allow tracking of this WordPress install’s anonymous data and disable the advanced section of the WordPress SEO meta box. As well, you can verify different Webmaster Tools here.
Then, we will carefully introduce the configuration and optimization of each part.
Titles & Metas
Title and meta are two essential parts of the post, which are seen at first sight when visitors search for some content. Click the Titles & Metas to edit the title settings. First, you will reach the General tab, where you can configure some site wide general settings. We do not recommend you to rewrite titles automatically. On the other hand, you can add a custom title for each post by hand. Besides, we recommend you utilize meta keywords tag.
Then, you can configure the homepage settings.
Here, you can configure the title for each post. WordPress SEO by Yoast automatically enters title template variables for all post types and leaves the description and other fields blank. However, we suggest you to set the title by hand, only keeping the natural title and remove the sitename.
Social
In the next, we are going to customize the social settings as social network is one of the most widely used promotion channels. By default, Yoast WordPress SEO allows you to integrate your WordPress site with Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You can just enter your account link into it and set the image URL, description, and you can easily combine your site with social medias.
XML Sitemaps
It is the easiest and fastest method to use sitemap to notice search engines that your content is changed and tell it how to arrange the posts. Thus, WordPress SEO by Yoast comes with great functionality, making it’s super easy to create and add XML sitemaps in your site. Go to SEO -> Sitemaps, select the checkbox to enable its functionality, and then, you can go to set the general settings and user sitemap.
There are still many configurations, such as permalinks, internal links, RSS, import & Export, and so on. These aspects are very familiar with the above settings as well as the general settings, you can learn about them by yourself. Otherwise, you can add your questions in the following commment and we will answer you as soon as possible.
SEOPressor
Generally speaking, SEOPressor is and all-round WordPress SEO plugin, which is the most powerful one ever built. Its great functionality enables you to manage every page and post on your site, as well as customize the post formats. In simple terms, SEOPressor can cover the whole site!
With SEOPressor, there is a built-in keyword research feature allowing you to check out long-tail keywords. Besides, the drag-and-drop tool is included for helping you to quickly insert keywords into content with 1 click. Comparing with other keyword research services and tools, you can save around 17minutes that you may spend performing it in each post.
SEOPressor also comes with powerful algorithm for page and post analysis. It will calculate your content SEO state, and then provide you with a rating on 100% base. During this analysis, SEOPressor will examine your H1/H2/H3 tags.
SEOPressor indeed comes with rich features. Besides page analysis, SEOPressor also checks both inbound and outbound links. Even the images in your post or on your pages will be checked to know if it includes alternates and title tags. If you need to add alternative post, there is also the functionality for you to assign the title hook in setting page so as to automate that task.
The internal linking also comes with SEOPressor. So, you can easily assign a particular link with a certain word or phrase. After you do add that, no matter when you publish that post, those phrases or words will be automatically hyperlinked.
What’s more, SEOPressor also allows you to add Facebook open graph or Twitter metadata tags on website so as to make it more social friendly. Its built-in rich snippet support also allows you to compose an unlimited review, and then it will be automatically made schma.org compatible!
All in One Pack
This is an advanced SEO plugin specifically designed for magazines, online business, eCommerce and bloggers. By far, it has received more than 14 million download and average 3.8 rating on 5 bases. Considering its popularity and pretty rating, we think All in one SEO should be listed here.
Michael Torbert is the developer of All in One SEO plugin. He also provides professional version with add-ons. This pro version will come with a series of free advanced features that you will not get from a free version, like installation and premium support.
Provided that you are just a beginner to blogging and know nothing about SEO practices or seldom perform on-page optimization, then you need to use All in One SEO plugin. All in One SEO plugin includes many powerful features for on-page SEO.
For example, it can generate the meta description and keywords for your posts, and optimize titles with the best practices. Both are done automatically. Moreover, you can even easily add the alternate tags for each of your image included in your posts.
Additionally, as a professional SEO plugin, All in One SEO also comes with the extensive support for those eCommerce sites. By making use of built-in advanced algorithms, this plugin can also help you get rid of panda penalty for any duplicate content on your blog.
Overall, we really think All in One SEO is a pretty solution for but only those novices but also the advanced users.
SEO Friendly Images
According to a study on Google search results, there are about 15% searches performed on Google, which are all related to graphics and pictures. So, at present, your site should need a professional image SEO plugin on your site. SEO Friendly Images plugin is the right one, which can boost your visitors.
As we all know, not every blogger or content writer understand the importance of image optimization. This is the problem we and you are facing. You need to be aware of that all search bots cannot feel, but can just read your text. To make them know there are images in the post, you need to offer these bots the alternate text as well as the title tags, which are the things they can understand and read.
Besides, maybe you can step forward a bit in the means of adding description and caption for images. To fulfill this, you have done enough for your image-rich site. In this circumstance, SEO Friendly Images plugin can be used well to make your image optimization practices.
It can automatically help you to add title tags and alternate to every image in each individual post. SEO Friendly Images can also use the post titles as keywords to perform them. Even better, with it, your W3C/xHTML can be valid.
Ultimate Video SEO Plugin
Supposed that you are a blogger owing a video blog and trying to improve the organic traffic, the Ultimate Video SEO plugin can help you a lot. It can automatically generate schema.org video markups and then assist to show the video thumbnails on the search result page.
Actually, Ultimate Video SEO plugin is a simple and easy-to-use tool for novices. You do not have to make any serious setting after you installed it on site. Just go straightforward to create new post. However, you will find there is a new field on the bottom of your editor, which enables you to add videos, its details as well as its thumbnails.
It comes with a great feature allowing you to automatically fetch your video SEO detail from respective video hosting services. Moreover, this plugin also can generate the video sitemap that can help search engines index your new page. That’s how Ultimate Video SEO plugin make your videos rank higher on SERP, so as to attract more organic traffic.
By far, Ultimate Video SEO plugin can support most popular video hosting sites like Dailymotion, Youtube, and Vimeo.
WP Social SEO Booster
The SEO plugins we have talked above are all good to social friendly of your site, but they are not special for that purpose. Now, we are to introduce a professional one, WP Social SEO Booster that is all for making more social friendly website.
Do you know that Google is considering social signal as one of the criteria to rank pages on the SERP. As for website owners, you should also think about making your site more social friendly. So, it is very important to add the social media sharing icons, Twitter metadata and microdata, and use Facebook open graphic tags as well as Google authorship.
WP Social SEO Booster can make you perform above tasks easily and effectively with few clicks. More importantly, this plugin also integrates with powerful SEO plugin such as Yoast and All in One.
Besides, you can even add rich snippets with this plugin. Facebook open graphic, HTML5 Boilerplate optimized .htaccess, and twitter meta can all be automatically added by it. WP Social SEO Booster also can add prop tags to all post titles. It can make your posts more Google plus friendly as well.
Squirrly
This plugin is to make sure your content optimized for both readers and search engines; it is also an easy-to-use plugin for you, even though you have little knowledge about SEO. It will provide you with the real-time suggestion to make your post optimized better when you’re writing and editing it. That’s how Squirrly help you to obtain higher search result rankings and always to keep your readers engaged.
Squirrly will provide you the related SEO stats and SEO audits every week, and then help you find out the best keywords so as to make your site obtain more traffic. Besides, Squirrly can also be compatible with another great WordPress SEO plugin, Yoast, to make better SEO efforts.
Even better, Squirrly can also inform you that whether the content is good to your SEO effort. If the plugin show the content with 100% green, then you can publish it, because it is in the best state for your SEO.
SEMrush
As for pro bloggers, SEMRush is a reliable tool, which can help you effectively get the insights and analytics from your competitors so as to improve your SEO.
SEMrush is one of paid plugins, but it can also provide you with huge return. With SEMrush, you can learn the organic keywords you are able to rank for, know the traffic you are able to gain, receive the analysis on your competitor’s ads strategies, and much more. All these information can help you get make get much more helps in SEO practices.
Google Sitemap
Google Sitemap is a powerful but simple SEO plugin. It allows quickly creating and submitting the sitemaps to Bing Webmster and Google Webmaster tool. The .gzip files often used by Google can also be generated.
Apart from the ease-of-use, Google Sitemap also supports diverse post formats. It means that if your WordPress theme supports custom style for content such as gallery, video, and quote, then this plugin can also include those content formats into your own sitemap. This is one of the prominent features included with Google Sitemap.
Google Keyword Planner
As the giant in the search engine field, we believe there are no any other people or search engines knowing more than it. Therefore, if you are trying to make sense the keywords you should use for better SEO, then Google Keyword Planner should be the first option among plenty of related tools.
Actually, Google Keyword Planner is the totally free plugin, offered to those Google advertisers. Everybody can use it free of charge. At the very beginning, this plugin is developed to display the suggested keywords to advertisers so that they can offer them to with their ads campaigns. As for you, you can also use it to get the optimal keywords suggestions for their posts and pages.
Specifically, Google Keyword Planner helps advertisers or you those bloggers to obtain the right keywords by offering them or you a number of results, the estimate of search volume, as well as difficulty level. As a blogger or content marketer, this data is very useful to help find out your keywords with high advertiser interest and search volume, making your keywords easily outrank from other websites.
Broken Link Checker
It is hard to get rid of broken links, especially for those long-standing websites or blogs. You should always check your links regularly to find out and promptly fix those broken links, because they can not only lead to bad online experience, but also have bad effect on your SEO.
Now, you must need Broken Link Checker, a free WordPress tool, which enables you to find out your broken links located on your own WordPress website. Then, you can easily fix them even without any editing the post.
This easy-to-use plugin only has one downside that it can consume your server resources, and then make your server slow down. Du to this, there are some WordPress hosting providers deciding to block it on their servers, like WPEngine.
SmartCrawl
This is one of the optimal WordPress plugins from WPMUDEV. Generally, it comes with 4 major features, including sitemaps, Moz integration, Automatic Links, as well as Title & Meta tag customization. What’s more, to attract more customers, SmartCrawl is developed with user friendly interface and easy setup, which can save much time for you while you are publishing your pages and posts.
Conclusion
As for bloggers as well as content marketers on WordPress websites, you should make full use of various WordPress plugins to make their site and ranking get up to another level. You can choose from above 12 WP SEO plugins that are selective chosen according to the download numbers and customer reviews. Learn them one by one and carefully test them to choose the best for your WordPress sites. Then, you could be patient to wait for search rankings increase by using them.