Best WordPress SEO Plugins for Google Ranking
Looking to get your WordPress SEO off on the right track, but disturbed by the full range of SEO plugins available?
WordPress is well-known for being SEO friendly. Numerous WordPress SEO plugins can help your site get rank. For instance, there are about 49 pages of results “SEO” in the WordPress plugins directory when you search. There are 20 plugins on each page, so that’s about 980 plugins, which is quite stressful to choose from them.
Most often than not, people keep asking what the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that are recommended are. The reason being the fact that search engines are a significant source of traffic for most websites on the internet.
In this article, we will explain the ten must-have SEO WordPress plugins that has proven and can help transform your website into an entity of an SEO powerhouse. Some of these tools offer similar functionalities and will improve your chances of SEO success. Optimizing your website for search engines can propel your site to rank higher in search results and significantly grow your business.
Let’s dig inside!
Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is undisputedly the most popular WordPress SEO plugin presently available. This plugin has gathered over 27,000 reviews, with 5+ Million Active Installations. Among the SEO plugins that offer a complete website optimization tool that helps you improve your website, Yoast SEO is the best.
Yoast SEO permits adding SEO titles and descriptions to all posts and pages on your website quickly. Yoast SEO proves to be the best plugin when it comes to both creating better content and optimizing your site if you want to improve your WordPress SEO. It works based on automatically generating an XML sitemap for all your website content, making it easier for search engines to crawl your website. It also allows you to easily import all your SEO data if you have already been using another SEO plugin.
Many features make Yoast SEO outstanding and straightforward to setup. Yoast SEO ensures you’re always on the right track. It takes by hand with each aspect of your site’s SEO, thanks to its simple, yet detailed approach.
Top features of Yoast include
- Page analysis tool
- Technical WordPress Search Engine Optimization
- XML Sitemaps functionality
- Guidelines that tells you what to focus on
For more details, see a complete guide on how to install and setup the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress on the Yoast SEO site
Rank Math is a trusted and user-friendly WordPress SEO plugin gaining popularity each day. This plugin not only helps you to optimize your website for search engines and social media but also pulls off the rare feat of being a feature-packed plugin.
As a way of simplifying and making your SEO setup easier, it offers a setup wizard that takes you through the installation process and allows you to import data from other SEO plugins. The Rank Math plugin delivers an exceptional UI interface, and likewise, you can easily add meta title, description, and Open Graph metadata to your blog posts. You can also generate an XML sitemap, Google Search Console integration, and control access to plugin features based on user roles.
Key Features of Rank Math
What does Rank Math have that other SEO plugins like Yoast and the other competitors don’t have?
- Google Search Console integration
- Redirection that covers 301, 302, 307, 410, and 451
- About 14 types of loaded snippets markup
- Facebook and Twitter Card previews
- 404-error monitor, which searches for visitors hitting 404 (dead) pages and then prompts you to know the URLs and number of times they’ve been hit.
Eliminate these errors simply by redirecting or reinstating the dead page or removing the internal link to the 404. Rank Math even informs you of the URL from which a user was visiting so you can see where the link was clicked. The plugin allows you to use all your existing settings from Yoast or All in One SEO Pack if you want to migrate to RankMath.
3. All in One Schema Rich Snippets
This is the most popular schema markup plugin that gives your site eye-catching results in search engines. All in One Schema Rich Snippets makes your website stand out by supporting reviews, events, people, products, recipes, software apps, videos, and articles as Schema content types.
Notably, it helps your website become more visible on searches, increases the number of clicks on specific content, and makes your content more attractive. All in One Schema Rich Snippets works seamlessly with existing WordPress SEO plugins . Optimize your website by adding that Schema metadata to your website with the help of All in One Schema Rich Snippets.
Have you ever thought that the speed of your WordPress website impacts your search engine rankings? Many people underrate just how vital it is to provide a lightning-quick experience for users. Google stated that site speed is a ranking factor, so this isn’t something you want to take with levity hands.
If you have a sleepless night on how to improve your website speed, it’s the time to consider a plugin calledW3 Total Cache. W3 Total Cache is notable for being the fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. It speeds up your WordPress website by reducing its download time, which makes your page load exceptionally fast. Studies show that a website that loads slower (with just 100ms in load speeds) can cause visitors to prefer your competitors, which in turn hurts your business.
As the only web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) WordPress plugin, W3 Total Cache is free, easy to use, and usually compatible with the most shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server hosting plans. It is the complete performance solution for optimizing your WordPress Website. With simple installation and configuration, your site is ready to experience 10X speed improvement.
As mentioned earlier, one major factor in search rankings is site speed. That’s why it is crucial to monitor your website speed & performance to ascertain; it’s not affecting your SEO. And the simple way to improve your website speed is by enabling caching.
WP Rocket is a premium and the best WordPress caching plugin available in the WordPress directory. It lets you set up caching without involving any technical skills. WP Rocket can easily be set up by both experience WordPress users as well as beginners.
As the most potent caching tool, WP Rocket caching, make sure your website loads blazing fast, which is vital in improving SEO rankings and increase conversions. These are made possible due to its wide range of options and automatic optimization features.
To create custom post templates, Navigate to Listings>Listing Items>Add New. Using Elementor, you can set up your listing item. It gives a drag and drop view, feel free to choose whatever you want in. Varieties of Free options basic, general, WordPress, listing elements is possible with Elementor.
As the name suggests, Broken Link Checker looks for broken links on your website — both internal and external. Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to detect any broken link on your WordPress site. Your site’s SEO can significantly affected by broken links, and these issues can create a bad experience for your users.
As you create more and more content, check your site from time to time for broken links and fix them. Because the Broken Link Checker runs in the background continuously, it can check for broken links from time to time and notify you by email. This plugin keeps a watchful eye on your website, and you have the time to focus on what you do best, such as creating content, while you don’t have to worry whether broken links are working against you. Also, it offers an option to prevent search engines from following these links.
Top Features of the Broken Link Checker plugin include:
- Links monitoring in posts, pages, comments, and even custom fields.
- Identify any link that doesn’t work.
- Broken links are giving different appearance in posts.
- Prevents Search Engines from following broken links.
The plugin requires no technical skill to use and yet it’s powerful. Broken Link Checker plugin has more than 400,000 active installs and a high rating, so it’s a reliable plugin to use. However, the only downside about this plugin is that it slows down your WordPress hosting server, which affects your website and uses a lot of bandwidth. Some hosting providers already block this plugin. The best check is to run it now and again and then deactivate in between. Alternatively, you can use the Ahrefs tool for broken link detection because it helps make sure your website is always fast (based on experts’ recommendations).
Note: Lay hands on a free plugin known as Redirection. It can help you implement 301 redirect broken links to an appropriate page on your website.
One of the great ways to increase traffic from search engines is by creating optimized alt tags. We get easily caught up in optimizing our content that we neglect the importance of images. Adding alt tags manually to an existing blog with a lot of images can be next to impossible. You must ensure that each image is optimized correctly, as this will improve your search rankings, while also helping drive traffic through Google Images search.
With the help of the SEO Optimized Images plugin, you can automatically add SEO (optimized) Friendly alt and title attributes (tags) alt to your images in less than 5 minutes. All you need to do is activate the plugin, and it will automatically add applicable alt tags to all the images. Besides, SEO Optimized Images plugin can add alt tags to all the existing images and newly uploaded images. It takes you to simply deactivate the plugin, if you want to remove the alt tags, and the alt tags added by the plugin. SEO Optimized Images plugin is light to use because it does not create additional database entries and does not increase the site load time. It also supports WooCommerce Images.
Gone are the days where you’ve to wait for your webpages to load inch by inch. But presently, if loading takes more than a second, visitors move on to other competitors. Nobody wants to waste time. That is why having optimized site images increases your SEO rankings and makes your visitors stick with you. ShortPixel is an easy to use, lightweight, install-and-forget-about-it image optimization plugin that can do the magic. It compresses all your past and new images as well as PDF documents with a single click.
Features of ShortPixel
Optimized images mean healthy user experience, improved PageSpeed Insights, or GTmetrix results, boosted Google PageRank, and more visitors. ShortPixel significantly reduces image file sizes to improve your website’s performance and SEO ranking using a highly powered compressing and optimizing features. It uses advanced compression technology to reduce image sizes by up to 90%. Take advantage of high-quality images optimized by this plugin.
Whether it’s JPG, PNG, GIF, PDF, or WebP, ShortPixel makes sure your images remain the original version of themselves without losing quality. Resulted in smaller images are no different in quality from the original images. Another added advantage is that it’s a free plugin that is easy to use with no technical skill. It is comprehensive, constant, supported, and regularly updated by the team of developers who created it.
It’s time to ultimately increase your sales by optimizing any image or PDF document on your website, which leaves your website’s SEO ranking increased and also increases the number of visitors.
ShortPixel is becoming a popular choice when it comes to image optimization and PDF compression with over 200,000 active installations — according to WordPress. You can freely convert any JPEG, PNG, or GIF (even animated ones!) to WebP for more Google love. Simply compress JPG, including its variations such as JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, PNG, GIF (still or animated) images, and also PDF documents with ShortPixel.
10. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
Improve your website’s SEO strategy by gaining insight into your website visitors, top keywords, and other similar data with Google Analytics by MonsterInsights.
MonsterInsights is a plugin that allows you to install Google Analytics in WordPress and shows simple, readable, and insightful reports inside your WordPress dashboard. You don’t need to rely on your best guess to make your marketing decisions. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights shows you where your users are coming from, the activities of users on your website, your top content, and more. You’ve insight about other marketing data you must track on your website to grow your business. WooCommerce SEO can also be tracked with the help of Google Analytics by MonsterInsights by knowing which products are popular and where you are losing customers.
With approximately 11 million downloads and feature-rich tools, Google Analytics by MonsterInsights helps you to increase your website traffic. You can review your Analytics data from your WordPress dashboard without jumping back and forth between your website and Google Analytics. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights platform is right there in your WordPress.
Top features of Google Analytics by MonsterInsights include:
- Simple installation with the use of Google Analytics API or use a Gmail account to link it.
- Access to a simple, and comprehensive data metric dashboard within WordPress.
- Tracking of outbound and internal links.
- Demographics and interest reports accessibility.
WordPress Google Seo Author Snippet Plugin
A powerful plugin that includes micro data with extended authors social profiles. Micro data is highly recommended by google than micro data. Also don’t mix up both micro data and micro format as by google guidelines. So if you use plugins that includes micro format please avoid this plugin or uninstall the other one.
Google SEO Author Snippet Plugin will turn your site to shows google structured data in search results. This Plugin is specially built for SEO and social perspective of WordPress sites. Allows admin to enable / disable which social profile to be shown. Each author can display their social profile links next to “posted by author” detail or leave it empty to show nothing. Also registered users and authors can display social profiles in comments
google, plugin, admin, comments, twitter, links, author, custom, dashboard, Facebook, google+
Requirements and License Details
Requires at least: 3.4
Tested on: 3.4.2
Stable tag: 1.0.0
License: GPLv2 or later
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
Google SEO Author Snippet Plugin gives you both SEO and social advantage.
- Allow authors to display their social profile links next to “posted by author” detail.
- Includes google+ profile with recommended rel=”author” tag.
- Includes Facebook, twitter and Linkedin profiles in micro data (schema / snippet view / google structure data)
- And also can add their geo-location details in micro data.
- Can disable one of these by leaving it as empty.
- Also both registered users and authors can display their profiles in comments.
SEO and Social Advantages
- SEO benefits to increase your rank by default.
- Displays your content in search results as google structured data, increase CTR.
- Real social advantage makes users to go social.
- Encourage users to register even to comment a post.
- Keeps social lovers stay in your site as to get build their social relationships.
- Serves as a great resource to find and build social networking.
- In overall reduces the bounce rate. Turns every visitor into a unique and frequent user.
Planned Feature and Recommended for WP admins
Can display a list of authors and users with their social profiles in a page or post. This will serve like a Social Profile cum user directory. You can use an existing plugin for now. As we have planned to add this in future release. And that will be within couple of weeks. Also encourage your visitors to register to get listed here. Or lock this content for registered users only. Don’t forget to keep a catchy social share buttons on top and bottom of content to get viral. By this you can gain more free traffic.
Some crucial updates and features are going on at Smackcoders. Can expect an outcome within a couple of weeks. Please check back again. If you have a feature request mail us. Support and Feature requests. Have request and ideas. Mail us immediately we can implement in our near future release.
