The Best SEO Plugins to use on your WordPress Website
Plugins make life easier for a web marketer and anyone interested in SEO, but knowing which works best and which are just a huge waste of time, is important if you want to make the most of your online advertising experience.
Running any kind of website that is not SEO friendly just results in a lost opportunity which could so easily be avoided if you knew how to harness the power of SEO and SEO plugins, in particular, to enhance the performance of your website and as such, start reaping the rewards that online marketing most certainly presents.
And it all starts with your Content Management System.
Everyone working in the world of web design and SEO knows that the best chance of getting a website to rank well on Google is to have a WordPress Content Management System (CMS).
Sure, the other CMS systems are pretty good and can be used to effectively implement an SEO strategy, but a WordPress system is just cleaner, faster, and easier to work with. Along with being super easy to customise and navigate, when using WordPress, your plugin options are almost limitless.
Such a content management system allows you to access the plugin catalogue which currently includes some 55Â 000 plugins for users to choose from.
What are plugins?
Plugins are readily available when you use a WordPress site and most plugins are available for free use.
But in order to choose the right plugins, you need to make sure that you know what a plugin is so that you make the best choice based on your needs.
A plugin is essentially a tool that is installed on a website to improve performance as well as the overall look of a site.
When you use plugins, you can bypass the need to have complicated knowledge about coding and plugins can also fit into those gaps in design that some themes can have.
Need a different type of menu? Install a plugin. Need to have a gallery that your theme doesn’t have? Use a plugin.
You can have more than one plugin installed at a time, and this will allow you to fully optimise your website without any delays or need to pay out any more money.
Word of Warning
There is absolutely no doubt that plugins make like easier for designers and marketers, but there is definitely such a thing as having too many plugins.
While the upside is that plugins give you more range to be creative and to improve the SEO you are doing, the downside is that having too many plugins can really slow down your website.
And then there are those times when your plugins could overlap and be so incompatible that they end up causing the website to give you an error.
When this happens, it can take time to fix the problem, as you will have to go through every plugin until you have found the problematic plugin and removed it.
And then, you might find that after removing too many plugins, your site is either sluggish or simply not performing the way that you expect it to.
The best way to make sure that you seamlessly integrate the right plugins into your website to boost the SEO potential is to make sure that you only use the best plugins, those proven to be the most effective.
Free vs. Paid Plugins
If you are new to using plugins, you might keen to learn that there is an actual difference between using free plugins and using paid-for ones.
While most plugins are free to use and are easily found in the seemingly endless list of plugins found on WordPress, there are other versions that offer premium status to users and will often have features that will only be available once unlocked.
These premium plugins will generally have a free option, which will give you just enough features to make the plugin useful to you but perhaps not enough to give you the full experience, should you wish to have it.
Premium plugins come with licenses and this can be limiting if you intend to use the plugin across a variety of websites, and premium plugins can also provide you with more security features, access to assistance from the developers, access to all of the latest updates, and additional ways to improve your SEO.
Whether you use paid for or free versions of the plugin is entirely up to you and whatever it is that you are trying to achieve.
Experience has taught us that using free plugins is just as effective as using paid-for ones, and with each plugin showcasing its number of downloads and reviews, you can quite easily tell the difference between which plugins are better than others.
A Quick Note on Plugin Installations
Installing a plugin is incredibly easy, no matter what your level of experience is. So long as you have access to the backend of your website, or the file server, you can install your plugin using just a few clicks.
Alternatively, the absolute easiest way to install a new plugin would be to ask your developer or designer to do it on your behalf.
But if you are doing it on your own, these are the quick steps you can take to install your plugin.
- When you log in to your website, you’ll be looking at your dashboard. Here is displayed all of the internal workings of your website and it is also the place where you will install your plugin.
- On the left-hand panel, move your mouse down until you see the title “plugin”. When you have hovered over this title, you will be given a few submenu options, one of which says “add new”. Click on this option and you will open up the WordPress plugin catalogue and you will first see all of the general plugins as well as a search bar.
- If you know the name of the plugin you are looking for, you can type it in there and the plugin you are looking for, as well as related options, will appear on your screen. All you need to do is click “Add” and then once the plugin is on your site, you will need to click “install” to activate it.
The other option, which requires a little more know-how and skill, is to download the plugin from the plugin creator’s website, and then upload it to your website via your fileserver.
You will need login details for your file server, and you will also need a programme that will allow you to upload the plugin.
FileZilla is a popular and free programme used to upload themes and plugins and there are plenty of online tutorials which will help you figure things out.
A word of warning though, if you intend to upload plugins this way, is that if you upload to the wrong file, you could crash your website.
This is not the end of the world and can be easily rectified if you just delete the plugin, but if you are new to this, it could make you panic. If you are doing things on your own, it is best to add plugins via the website dashboard. It is far simpler to use this method.
WordPress Plugins for SEO
Now that the technical stuff is well out of the way, it’s time to get to the more important thing, which is choosing the best WordPress plugins to improve your website’s SEO.
SEO plugins are easily available, and while there might be (literally) hundreds of them available via the WordPress plugin installation port, some are better than others.
When you are choosing the plugins, there are two ways that you can go about it.
Firstly, you can start by reading articles like this one, which is used to explain which plugins are best and why they are considered to be the best. Then you have the second method, which is to read the reviews and have a look at how other users have rated the plugin based on their experience.
Both methods work incredibly well on their own, and they are potent together, but if you want to be sure that the plugins you are using are the best there are, it helps to actually be able to test the plugins yourself.
Reviews and ratings can quite easily be faked, so it is often best to rather do an experiment, even though that method takes up a lot of time.
So, based on reviews and our own experience in the world of SEO, these are the plugins that we swear by.
1.    Yoast
Any list of this kind has to start with the one plugin that is without a doubt the most popular, and most useful SEO plugin: Yoast.
Yoast allows you to perfectly SEO each of your website pages according to the keywords that you want.
When you have Yoast installed on your website, you will be able to optimise your pages by having an easy-to-access place for your meta descriptions, SEO titles, and URLs. The plugin will also analyse pages for you so that you can see where you can make improvements.
This helpful analysis will ensure that you tick all of the boxes and make sure that everything is in line before the page is published.
Yoast is also able to generate a sitemap for you, which is a must as it will help Google to trawl and rank your pages and the plugin goes a step further to allow you to set your site up for Google’s Search Console, which enables you to determine how well your website is performing.
Yoast has an impressive 4 out of 5-star rating and so far it has some 2000 reviews.
If you are new to SEO and you are looking for a good starting point, Yoast is it. The layout is super simple and even someone with limited SEO experience will be able to get a handle on things.
Since it is free, you really have no reason to not install it.
2.    Google XML Sitemaps
With a sitemap featured on your website, you will be in a better position to have your site correctly indexed by Google.
Google will trawl and index your site whether you like it or not, even if you have requested that Google not do so. But if you want to give your site the best possible advantage and if you want to have more control over guaranteeing that the site is given a boost, then you need the Google XML Sitemap plugin.
There are many ways to create and install a sitemap, with the plugin above being just one example of a tool that you can use.
With the Google XML Sitemap, you can automatically generate the sitemap and then sit back and never worry about it again, as the plugin will continuously update the sitemap itself, as new pages are added to the site.
There are quite a few options to go through when you are setting up the plugin, but the basic option should be good enough for most websites. And if you really don’t want to get too technical with the plugin, you can always just leave it on its default settings and let the plugin decide how things will roll.
To get the most out of this plugin, you can manually submit the generated sitemap to Google using your Google Search Console account.
3.    Broken Link Checker
There is nothing more frustrating for a website visitor, or more damaging for your search engine rankings than having broken links on your website.
Managing a website is no easy task. As you add more and more to the site, keeping track of all of the new pages, and all of the new links, can be daunting. If you end up with more than 100 pages on your site, the task is not just daunting, it’s downright impossible!
To make your life easier, add the Broken Link Checker plugin.
This one will go through your website and alert you to any problems. This plugin is fantastic because it will allow you to focus on other aspects of the running of the site, while it will keep an eye on whether or not your links are working as they should.
4.    All-in-One SEO Pack
This plugin is very much similar to Yoast and it is often used in the place of Yoast.
It has a rather different user interface but it will provide you with more or less the same features as Yoast so it is not necessary to have both plugins active.
If you do have both, you might get confused as the backend of your site will have too much going on.
As with Yoast, you will need minimal experience to use this plugin and it will provide you with all of the areas to place your data, such as metas and titles.
Other helpful features of the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin include XML Sitemaps and Google Analytics, and they can help prevent you from adding duplicate content to the site. One thing to keep in mind is that it will override any other settings you might have.
With this plugin, you will also be given full control over how you choose to structure your SEO.
You will be able to leave the plugin on its default settings or you can get stuck in and create a fully customised setup for your needs.
5.    W3 Total Cache
One of the most important website factors for SEO is speed.
Fast-loading websites are a must, not just for Google but for users as well. People want a website that quickly gives it the information they are looking for and a slow website will generally have people turning away.
To speed up your website, W3 Total Cache is a fantastic website plugin to have. When the plugin has been fully configured, the website can see a 10x improvement in its performance, which is something that the site developers proudly boast about.
The plugin works by minimising the website’s CSS and JavaScript, and it also caches the site’s pages and its posts, leading to fast speeds.
6.    All in One WP Security & Firewall
Websites that perform best are those that are completely secure. Security is a huge trust factor and secure sites are given preference by Google and are of course preferred by website users as well.
Considering how many risks a website faces, it is important to make sure that your website is as secure as possible. While WordPress is a secure CMS system and even though most hosts will provide a security certificate along with the hosting package, it doesn’t hurt to have additional security in place, just in case.
A few of the features that the All-in-One WP Security and Firewall plugin is best known for include its password strength tool, its ability to detect accounts with the same login passwords and user names, and it is able to stop user enumeration.
The plugin is also able to provide a security score chart so that you can see the strength of the protection and make changes where necessary.
7.    Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Otherwise known as YARPP, this plugin is designed to detect which content on your website is too similar. It doesn’t just detect identical copies of content but it also displays similar content.
Google is against the use of similar content as repetition is not useful for users and it doesn’t contribute anything of value to the web.
Google is all about making sure that whatever is added to the search engine is unique and although you might find it difficult to consistently create content that is unique, it is necessary for you to do so if you want to be sure that your SEO is correctly done.
With this plugin, you will not only be able to determine which pages and posts are too similar to be used, but you will also be able to give your website visitors a better user experience as the plugin displays the best posts and lists them in such a way that they are easy to find and easy to view.
YARPP will help to lower the bounce rate on your website and by doing this, you will also see your SEO performance begin to improve.
8.    Image Optimization for SEO
One aspect of website design and SEO that is too often neglected is the website’s images. The photos or graphics that you use on your website can be a powerful SEO tool.
With the Image Optimization for SEO plugin
, your problems are answered. This nifty tool will optimise your images and help to drive your customers to you via an image search. This plugin will also guide you when optimising your images so that you don’t end up making mistakes in the future.
This plugin is, like every other on this list, made to be incredibly user-friendly and even if you are completely inexperienced, you can easily work this one.
9.    Schema Pro
One up-and-coming rank factor is the rich snippet.
This is that little snippet of information that appears in the search results when you Google a keyword or a phrase. The big deal about rich snippets is that they make the website look like it is the preferred provider of whatever it is that is being sold and in many ways, this works as a trust factor.
With this tool, you will be able to display star ratings and reviews on your pages, which can be really helpful when it comes to encouraging people to support you.
Before you upload Schema Pro, make sure that you don’t have a plugin capable of doing something similar already being used, as they could easily clash.
10. Redirection
This plugin is pretty darn fantastic when it comes to quickly fix problematic links. You can use the broken link builder to identify your broken links, but if you don’t have time to fix them all, you can use this plugin to redirect broken links to more suitable pages, so that your website visitors are not turned away by errors.
The Redirection plugin is a quick fix and since these breaks usually happen when you haven’t maintained the site or looked at it for a while, it’s worth having a plugin like this to protect your site from broken, unsightly links.
