This post contains affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I may receive a commission (at no additional cost to you). This helps support the blog and allows me to continue to make free content. Thank you for your support!
If you’re running a website, you must optimize it for search engines to succeed as a blogger, business owner etc.
Programmers can have nightmares while making their site or client’s website SEO friendly. If you’re using a content management system, this task is a piece of cake, thanks to the best SEO plugins.
If you’re new to WordPress CMS or if you’re site is not performing well in search engines, you should use the following WordPress SEO plugins.
Some of the plugins I’ve shared will make you aware of various issues on the pages of your website. The remaining will let your fix SEO issues you’ve found.
Best SEO plugins for WordPress
SEO Quake (Best ON Page SEO plugin)
SQ is a plugin that runs on Chrome. It is a must have SEO plugin for a website owner.
When SEO Quake is active, you can get the following details of any website in a couple of seconds:
- The number of cached pages in Google, Bing, yahoo.
- Page title, meta description, the number of internal links, external links.
- Webserver, Canonical tag, alt tags of images, text to HTML ratio, etc.
SEO Quake can make you aware of missing ALT tags on pages. It checks whether the page has a valid number of characters in the title meta description tags.
The SEO Quake plugin enables you to check keyword density of a page. It allows you to export the keyword data to a CSV file. It has an option to compare on-page SEO of two or more URLS. SQ can fetch the number of Facebook likes, Tweets, Google Plus ones a page has.
SEO Quake lets users see the Alexa and SEMRush rank of a site. It is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links can be a big problem for a site. There are offline tools for checking broken links. Frankly speaking, most of the programs are annoying.
BLC is a plugin that automatically analyzes each URL on your site to see if it returns an HTTP 200 code. If the URL is throwing a 404 error, the BLC plugin will make you aware of it.
In addition to this, the WordPress SEO plugin for WordPress also provides an option to remove the link or replace it with an another one.
Broken Link Checker saves the time of a WordPress website owner.
Redirect path checker
Redirect loops are one of worst SEO issues. The browsers may throw “This Webpage has a redirect loop” error when users try to access such URLs. The visitor may avoid visiting your site is future.
The plugin lets users find redirect loops in few seconds. It enables users to copy the data to the system clipboard. RPC is yet another great SEO plugin for website owners. The plugin doesn’t run on your site. You have to install it on the Chrome browser.
The Redirect Path Checker plugin allows you to see the HTTP response of the requested page and whether the page is returning a valid HTTP status code or not.
See robots
Many users report that their site has been deindexed by Google. Well, Google is a search bot. It analyzes HTML code and indexes pages with the meta robots index follow tags. A poorly designed plugin may add noindex meta tag to the important pages of your site. Google will noindex the page if you don’t remove the noindex tag.
If each page on your website has the dreaded noindex tag, Google will deindex it. To make sure that this doesn’t happen, you should use the See Robots plugin.
SR is a lightweight plugin that displays a green color box in the Chrome toolbar when a page has an index follow tag. If you open a page with noindex tag, the box will turn red.
Yoast or All in one SEO plugins for WordPress
AIO SEO and Yoast are two of the most popular WP SEO plugins. These two plugins have similar features. They allow you to configure meta tags, description of a WordPress site. These plugins provide an option to add no-index or index tags to thin pages of your site. They can also generate a valid XML sitemap for your site.
If you’re a WordPress user, you must install one of these two plugins on your site and configure them correctly. I am using both the plugins. Hence, I won’t say that Yoast is better or worse than AIO WordPress SEO plugin.
Google Keyword Planner
You won’t survive as a blogger or a website owner if you don’t add keywords to the pages of your site.
The best way to find keywords is to use the Google Keyword Planner tool.
This online tool allows users to find high CPC or low CPC keywords. It features an option to filter low competition or high competition keywords.
GWP doesn’t come with usage restrictions. You can use this tool for an entire day.
WP Super cache or W3TC
A site may not rank high in search engines if it takes over 2 seconds to open in the client’s browser. WordPress saves the text content of a post to a database table. When the visitor requests a page, it will fire a query to get the post content from the table.
If your site has few hundred visitors and you’re using shared hosting, the site may slow down. To avoid this, use WP Super cache or WordPress total cache plugins. The plugins prevent WP from firing the same DB queries repeatedly by making the web server serve static pages. The static pages are generated only if they don’t exist in the cache.
W3TC and WP Supercache can save server resources. More importantly, they can make your slow site incredibly fast.
Conclusion: The best WordPress SEO plugins I’ve mentioned above ensure that your site is fast and has canonical URLs to prevent duplicate content issues, meta description and title of a valid length, etc. They also make you aware of various issues produced by poorly designed WP plugins.
Image source: Pixabay
