Search engine positioning is surely one of the most worrying topics for anyone who ventures to create a website to start their own business on the Internet. If you have also created your website with WordPress, an additional concern will be to find good SEO plugins that help you optimize your pages as well as possible.
Well, it’s time to say goodbye to these concerns now. Here is everything you need to know about SEO plugins for WordPress!
SEO is a fundamental part when it comes to promoting your website. Thanks to this marketing technique, we can appear in the top positions of Google to get those long-awaited visits we seek for our blog or website. Therefore, if we neglect an aspect as important as SEO in our site, we will be losing a lot of visits and money.
However, we should not be scared yet. We can still remedy this failure, thanks to the plugins that WordPress offers us. With them, we can optimize our site for the leading search engines without having to have extensive knowledge of SEO.
I have tested all the plugins I’ll talk about below, and I think they are the best on the market.
Logically, and as they say: “Each master has his book,” and, in this case, in particular, I mentioned the SEO plugins that best suit your blog or website.
Let’s check them out!
1. Yoast SEO
Having this plugin in your WordPress is COMPULSORY. Thanks to it, you will be able to configure the main SEO parameters of your website without the need to be an expert. You could say that thanks to Yoast, the democratization of SEO in WordPress is a fact. Yoast is the SEO plugin most used today by WordPress lovers. This tool will allow you to optimize your site based on some guides that the plugin offers. Following these indications, you will get the best SEO for your website. There is another plugin with similar characteristics, and that is the direct competition of Yoast SEO. The plugin in question is called the ‘All in SEO Pack.’ With it, you can also optimize your website, although in my opinion, more complexly.
My recommendation is the following:
- For beginners: Yoast SEO
- For the most experienced: All in SEO Pack
2. Google XML Sitemap
If it is important to optimize your website, it is more important to have a quality sitemap. Note that in it, you indicate all the URLs you wish to index. Both Yoast and All in SEO Pack offer you the possibility to create your sitemap without installing another additional plugin. However, a specialized plugin will always be better than a generic plugin. With this tool, you can create simple, but above all, COMPLETE sitemaps of your website in the best possible way. Undoubtedly, Google XML Sitemap is the best plugin to configure every one of the points that every good sitemap must have.
3. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is THE BEST CACHE PLUGIN IN THE MARKET. All experts agree on it despite there being other excellent options; I stand by WP Rocket. In fact, Luis Villanueva and his agency analyzed several WordPress cache plugins, obtaining real data on which was the best plugin for this task. After this experiment, they claimed that WP Rocket was the most effective cache plugin of all, even though none of them could be perfect at the SEO level.
4. All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets are those boxes that appear at the top of Google and that serve the user to answer your questions as quickly as possible. Getting the Rich Snippet of our website to be displayed for a specific search is synonymous with visits to our website. Therefore, we cannot let this reef escape, and we must configure the Rich Snippet of each of our posts. For this, you will simply have to install this plugin and fill in the fields required for each post.
5. One Press Social Locker
Social networks significantly help our SEO positioning. Therefore, the more the likes, retweets, and the diffusion of content on social networks, the better it is for our site. As if this were not enough, a good performance in the RRSS will not only improve our SEO but also bring visitors and potential customers to our website. The operation of this plugin is simple. A part of our content will be hidden until the reader clicks on one of the social buttons that the plugin offers us. In this way, we will get our social networks filled with likes, retweets, and followers on autopilot. I advise you to hide the most important information of the post with this plugin. In this way, you will attract the readers to the content that really interests them.
6. KK Star Rating
Have you seen the little stars that appear next to the webs in Google? Installing this simple plugin will get that “effect” that improves our CTR substantially. It will seem silly, but this technique will improve our web positioning, thanks to the high impact generated by this effect on the CTR. Also, these stars can give the reader the feeling that we are experts in that particular topic and that our post will be of utmost use. As an extra trick, I recommend you vote for yourself from different IPs. With this, we will get a good ratio of stars/votes.
7. Broken Link Checker
Having broken links on your site is a negative factor at the SEO level. It is true that this kind of failure can be considered as “minor” errors in the eyes of Google. However, if the number ‘404 errors’ is high, it will weigh the positioning of your website. As we do not want to neglect anything when optimizing our website, we are going to remedy this little bug with Broken Link Checker. This tool does an audit on the incoming and outgoing links of our own web page, detecting those broken links or 404 pages. Thanks to Broken Link Checker, we can know which links are weighing our web positioning and remedy it appropriately.
8. Redirection
If with the previous plugin we have detected the broken links or 404 pages on our site, with Redirection, we will finish fixing this class of failures. Some of these 404 pages may appear due to the deletion of old posts or the rename of these. To avoid having to check and correct all the inbound and outbound links manually, every time we edit the name of a URL, there is this plugin. For this, we will simply redirect. In this way, when someone visits the old URL, he/she will be automatically redirected to the new URL or to the address he/she wants.
9. WP Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Let’s talk about the images now. These files, in general, slow down the loading time of our website in a significant way. Therefore, it is essential that the images on our website weigh as little as possible without losing quality. For this purpose, this plugin was invented. With it, all the images uploaded to our site will be optimized so that they weigh as little as possible in an entirely automatic way. If we decide that this option is not for us, we can compress our images before uploading them to our WordPress manually. With the online tool offered by the web compressor.io, we can reduce the size of our images without the need of any plugin. However, this process is manual and will take us longer than the previous one.
10. BJ Lazy Load
As we have seen, the images can slow down the loading of our website with the consequent loss of readers. Did you know that a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load loses 40% of its traffic? Surely now, you are more concerned about this issue. To solve it, we have the perfect ally. With BJ Lazy Load, you will get your website to load only the content that the reader is viewing. In this way, the web will not load completely unless the reader requires it. This plugin will save resources and improve the loading speed of our website.
Conclusion
With the correct configuration of these plugins, the ‘SEO On page’ of your web page would have a configuration optimal enough to start positioning in Google. However, everything does not end here. SEO is a whole world and is based on many more factors, not just ‘SEO On page.’ If you are interested in knowing more about this field, there are many blogs and YouTube channels that talk about this branch of marketing. In fact, SEO is more fashionable than ever, and every day, new SEO tools appear with which to improve our website.
So, do not let fear enter into the unknown and give SEO a boost!