WordPress is the most favored content management system or CMS platform when it comes to blogging. The top 100 blogs of the world rely on SEO plug-ins, engineered especially for WordPress, to get their rankings boosted on any SRL. The second quarter of 2016 saw that almost 26% of all websites and 76.5 million blogs globally use WordPress.
Just using the best CMS platforms isn’t enough; you need to ensure that your content is optimized for spiders or crawlers. The most hassle-free way to do this is to opt for a plug-in that is compatible with WordPress. A search engine takes into account over 200 factors to rank your websiteamong all similar websites from around the world. These plug-ins simply make it infinitely easier and smoother to help you design search engine optimized content.
Almost all WordPress plug-ins are known for giving your control over your websites metadata and page links. Today, we are here to uphold 6 of the best WordPress plug-ins for search engine optimization.
Yoast is definitely one of the best plug-ins ever made for WordPress based websites. The Yoast plug-in is far better than the all-in-one SEO plug-ins you may have been using this far for SEO diagnostics of your website. Yoast has the power to integrate the best useful features from some of the best plug-ins like RSS Footer and Robots Meta. This is an all-rounder plug-in that takes care of a number of aspects of WordPress based blogs and websites. Let us view a few things Yoast is capable of doing for your WordPress based site:
- Set social SEO parameters
- Create a XML sitemap
- Control blog indexing
- Adding meta value for homepage and for each post
- Edit .htaccess and robots.txt
You can download Yoast today from the plug-in library of WordPress for free. Installing it and adding it to your WordPress site is also a hassle-free procedure.
This is an out of the box SEO plug-in which makes living a lot easier for WordPress site admins. This utilizes the concept of image optimization. By optimizing each and every image featured in your blog or website, you can divert a huge amount of traffic from all image search engines. This plug-in can add ALT and TITLE to all your images if they do not have themalready. The ALT tags help in describing your images to spiders. This plays a key role in matching the images to the search options a potential visitor might be looking for. The TITLE attribute has a much less significant role as compared to the ALT tag. It is, however, important to a visitor as this text automatically appears in the tooltip when the cursor hovers over the image.
The key factor is, if your images have more sensible ALT attributes, they become easier to find. Spiders and crawlers can make more sense of the image context. For example, if you have images indexed as image0001.jpeg, image0002.jpeg, xyz1.jpeg, it becomes impossible to match them to word searches. Give them more meaningful names that reflect their theme, purpose and context for successful SEO boosting.
SEO Smart Link WordPress Plug-in
SEO Smart Link is a miracle worker when it comes to SEO and rankings. This plug-in, designed especially for WordPress sites, can link keywords and phrases in your posts, comments and image tags with relevant posts, pages, tags and categories on your blog. Here are a few other amazing feats pulled off by SEO Smart Link:
- You can set up your own URLs according to your focus keywords
- You can also set nofollow attributes or set up to open links in a new window or new tab
- Experience strengthened interlinking for your site with the fully customizable options from SEO Smart Link
- You can access and edit all your SEO options from the administration settings panel
The basic working principle of SEO Smart Link is to look for keyword phrases to match the title of your individual pages and posts. Then these phrases are turned into live links. Most importantly, the matching is case insensitive and all the cases are preserved.
Broken Link Checker WordPress plug-in
All bloggers and websiteadmins are terrified of 404s. These are nothing but internal and external broken links. 404 links are simply bad news; they serve as dead ends for search engine crawlers. SEO experts always recommend removing all 404s to make your website more accessible for search engine spiders as well as visitors.
Now, the problem is spotting these broken links that may be disrupting your traffic flow. The Broken Link Checker plug-in for WordPress websites is a wonderful tool that determines all the links in your website that do not work. Here are a few of the working features of this plug-in that will simply blow your mind:
- Monitors all links of your pages, posts, comments and custom fields
- Prevents the spiders from following broken links
- All links can be searched for, filtered and edited by URL
- Sends you regular notifications vie email or Dashboard
- Gives you an option of displaying all broken links differently in posts
Keyword Tool is one of the best SEO friendly Keyword research options in the market. This plug-in helps you generate brilliant keyword ideas by simply typing in a keyword. It takes aid from Google’s auto-suggest feature for coming up with working suggestions. The top results correspond to the most frequently searched terms on the search engine. It is fast, free and quite amazing for pros and amateurs alike. This plug-in also allows you to get keyword suggestions from Bing, App Store and YouTube for brownie points.
The SEO Framework is possibly the easiest and the most downloaded SEO plug-in after Yoast. This comes with an awesome API for all users. This is light, fast and free! Here are a few of its awesome features:
- Configures SEO for each page, post, term and taxonomy automatically
- You can adjust SEO globally using this plug-in
- Has a SEO bar to help you improve the quality of your post, page and taxonomy
- Uses various metatags and scripting techniques to help your pages get ranked
- Also supports WooCommerce and bbPress pages.
This is a completely automated solution to all your SEO problems till date. The SEO Framework generates a canonical URL which is easily sharable on all social media sites.
WordPress plug-ins constantly evolve. This has its pros and cons. While you get to use new, updated plug-ins each day, it is also true that what you are using today will become obsolete tomorrow. So always lookout for newer options with better SEO abilities that can provide you with better SEO strategies for each new post and page, every day.
