WordPress is undoubtedly one of the best blogging platform, and with the help of plugins you could add unlimited functionalities and features. Today, I will be sharing few best WordPress SEO plugins which are completely free, and will help you to optimize your blog for search engines. I will also share some of the alternatives, and will suggest which SEO plugin you should stick to. One major problem with SEO plugins are, there are so many options available, and it creates confusion for newbies. When ever you install a new plugin, make sure you read the complete description and use only which you need to use, and make sense. I won’t recommend you to install all the plugins listed below, until you know how to use them properly.
In this best WordPress SEO plugins list, I will be recommending few of the best and free plugins which are available from official plugin repo. In upcoming articles, I will do a detailed writeup on how to use these below mentioned SEO plugins. So let’s go on with our list here.
WordPress SEO plugins to improve Search engine ranking:
You must have heard that WordPress is SEO friendly, and it’s not completely true. But, when you compare WordPress SEO with many other existing platform, WordPress is far superior in terms of search engine optimised platform, and with the help of many plugins, you could take the complete SEO of your WordPress blog to next level.
This is so far one of the best SEO plugin for WordPress, as it offers great deal of control of your blog SEO. You might have heard of many plugins like All in one SEO, headspace and many others, but SEO by Yoast is far better than any of the plugin which you heard. Yoast is one of the well-known WordPress ninja, and his work with this free plugin is incredible. He integrated many of his existing plugins like Robots meta, RSS footer and many other in this plugin directly. You can control the over all no indexing/doindexing of your WordPress blog, and you can optimize single post for search engines using this plugin.
Configuring WordPress SEO by Yoast is quite technical, and a newbie might find it little difficult to understand every settings offered by this plugin. I recommend you to read this guide, which will help you to configure this plugin without any issues.
To help search engine bots crawl your blog effectively, a sitemap file is very crucial. XML sitemap plugin feature is also available in above plugin by Yoast, but I find this plugin to be better and it gives more control for creating your blog XML sitemap. The best part is, this plugin automatically adds your new posts/pages in the sitemap, and it require to be configure just one. All you need to do is, install Google XML sitemap plugin, generate your sitemap> Submit site map to Google and bing, and forget about everything. A good practice is to add a sitemap link in your blog footer and in your Robots.txt file. Similarly you can useUdrina image sitemap plugin to create a sitemap for your blog images. You can checkWordPress blog sitemap here.
You must be wondering why a plugin which speeds up your blog is doing in a list of WordPress SEO plugins. Reason is: Google consider loading time of your page as a ranking factor. There are many cache plugins like Super cache, hyper cache out there, but W3 total cache gives you more control, and helps any WordPress blogger to improve the overall loading time of the site. The plugin offers cache features at many level (Page cache, browser cache, database cache), and you can quickly integrate it with any CDN network you use. The configuration might be tricky for first-timer, but once you have configured the plugin properly, you could see a drastic improvement on your blog loading speed.
Dead links are bad for search engines, and broken link checker plugin helps you to identify all dead links from your blog. It might not be very useful for a newly installed WordPress blog, but if you have an existing old WordPress blog, this plugin will simplify the process of identifying broken links and fix them with one click.
Do you know you could get decent traffic from Image based search engines? Search engines like Google and bing, relies on Alt text in images to identify and rank an image. A good practice is to use a meaningful name before uploading image. For example, even if I add a WordPress logo image in this post, I have renamed the image as WordPress-SEO-Plugin-jpeg. SEO friendly image plugin convert your image name as Alt text, and thus put your image SEO on automation. You can also use WP smsuh.it plugin along with this to compress the size of image, and again it will help in faster loading of your WordPress blog.
Have you noticed star-rating in Google search? If you are running a review based WordPress blog, star rating will help you to get higher CTR in Google search. Using Author hreview plugin, you can quickly add star rating in Google search based on Schema.org. This SEO plugin is not for everyone, but for bloggers who do lots of reviews articles.
These are many of few SEO plugins for WordPress which will definitely improve your over all WordPress blog SEO. Many premium SEO plugins are also available, but for now lets install these free once, and if you face any issues installing or configuring them, feel free to ask me via comments. If you wish to add few more WordPress SEO plugins, do let me know via comments.
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