BLOG

11 Essential WordPress plugins to skyrocket your On-site SEO

Ensuring your WordPress website integrates all critical search engine optimisation recommendations can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be with the best SEO plugins for WordPress.

We have already explored the best WP marketing plugins to supercharge your website, and we thought it would now be an excellent time to take a look at some of the best SEO Plugins for WP.

Optimising your WordPress SEO will help you rank higher than your competition and stand out in SERPs.

3 Key elements to successful WordPress SEO

Your website integrates in-depth keyword research.

Keyword research might seem obvious, but one element of successful on-site SEO is keyword research and integration. Without properly researched keywords matching a persons search intent, your content and website will never get found by search engines.

Solution: Install a plugin such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math so you can properly set up SEO metadata and integrate keyword research into your website.

Your website solves common user problems.

You can try and stuff your pages with as many keywords as you want, but if you are not producing informative content or selling a product designed to solve a problem, you will struggle to rank your website in the long term.

Content or Products designed to solve problems get higher conversion rates and increase engagement with your brand. When people engage with your website, it sends out positive signals to Google, indicating you solved the user’s problem, ranking you higher.

Solution: Rethink your content or product strategy and solve real-world problems for users and provide genuine value.

Your website provides a good user experience.

In May 2020, Google announced they would start measuring a users page experience when determining how to rank a website but, what does this mean for you and your website?

pie chart stat

It means that Google now measures user experience statistics about your website, such as speed, visual stability and interactivity of your website. They packaged these metrics into three key stats;

  1. 1. Largest Contentful Paint – LCP Measures the perceived loading time of a webpage or website by looking at how long it takes for the largest element on the page to appear.
  2. First Input Delay (FID) – Measures how quickly a user can interact with your page. It’s an accurate measure of when your website is fully interactive.
  3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Measures the visual stability or “shifting of elements” on your page when your website is loading.

Solution

You can install W3 Total Cache to optimise WordPress.

By caching your commonly loaded assets such as CSS, Javascript, Images and your WordPress database, you can decrease your loading times by reducing your LCP and FID.

If you are suffering from Cumulative Layout Shift, you will need to assess your website’s advertising units or images. Bad CLS is typically caused by images, logos and videos ‘shifting’ their height as the website loads.

Let’s take a look at the best free SEO Plugins for WordPress that will skyrocket your SEO.

 

11 SEO Plugins for WordPress to Catapult Your Rankings

There are thousands of plugins available on the WordPress repository that claim to optimise your WordPress website. Still, only a handful of SEO plugins for WordPress are worth their salt and installing on your blog.

seo plugins

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is a plugin for WordPress Speed optimisation and works to speed up your website by caching commonly used files and assets on your website.

  • Object Cache
  • Page Cache
  • CDN Cache
  • Support for multiple memory caches such as Red or Memcache

It is an all in one WordPress speed optimisation plugin that will handle every aspect of caching on your website, such as browser caching (gzip), object caching, page cache, cdn integrate and also support for multiple memory caches.

Broken Link Checker

Broken link checker for WordPress works in the background, searching and scanning for broken or dead links on your website.

It works on both your internal links and links out to other websites. It’s always on and runs anytime someone comes to your website.

Broken Link checker is the perfect way to ensure all of the hyperlinks on your website are valid.

Yoast SEO

This plugin is one of the longest standing and best SEO Plugins for WordPress and has a huge, die-hard following including myself.

Yoast Key Features

  • Optimise every aspect of your website SEO
  • Set Meta Titles
  • Set Meta Descriptions
  • Integrated Sitemap Generator
  • Schema Markup for Organisation
  • Manage Robots.txt from admin
  • Manage HTACCESS from admin

Yoast SEO provides extensive SEO functionality out of the box totally free. Yoast does offer premium features for a small monthly cost but it’s not essential to get the most out of this plugin.

Rank Math

This is a plugin very similar to Yoast in terms of its functionality but I think it’s a little more powerful and also easier to use for the average WordPress user.

Rank Math Key Features

  • All of the features included in Yoast
    Keyword Suggestions when writing posts
  • Suggested Internal Links
    Optimise Articles for Multiple Keywords
    SEO Health Scanner from WP Admin

I recently switched over to Rank Math and I am still using it as of writing this article. It has really impressed me and I will likely continue to use it over Yoast.

Optimising content for multiple keywords and getting relevant suggestions without leaving my dashboard is like bread and butter and makes producing SEO optimised content that much easier.

All-in-one SEO

In the spirit of giving you plenty of choices, All-in-one SEO is similar to Yoast and Rank math and provides almost identical functionality to Yoast. However, I still feel like Rank Math takes the lead.

Still, it’s worth checking out.

All-in-one Rich Schema Snippets

If you frequently post how-to’s, recipes, or reviews and are not leveraging Schema.org markup on your website yet, you are potentially missing out on a stream of organic traffic.

Rich Schema works by providing searching engines more context about your content, allowing them to provide relevant results to users, thereby increasing your click-through rate (ctr) from SERPs.

Rel NoFollow Checkbox

Rel NoFollow checkbox allows you to control where your domain authority is flowing by providing a checkbox to NoFollow all links on a page.

Wait, What is nofollow?

In SEO, there are two main link attributes called Follow and Nofollow. These attributes control where the flow of link equity goes (or doesn’t in this case)

1. A follow attribute, or more commonly known as DOFOLLOW, will tell search engines to follow the link and pass link juice. Follow attributed links are what everyone wants.

2. A nofollow attribute tells search engines to ignore a link meaning, that search robots will ignore these links and continue to crawl the page.

Now, I am not saying you should install this plugin and nofollow every outbound link you have – no. Instead, use this plugin carefully to control the flow of domain rank, especially when linking to less savoury websites.

Sucuri

While not strictly related to WordPress SEO, getting hacked can get your website penalised by
Google because you didn’t catch it in time.

If Google detects a hacked website, it warns users to enter from search and, in extreme circumstances, will remove your website from search.

Key Features

  • Security Activity Auditing
  • File Integrity Monitoring
  • Remote Malware Scanning
  • Blocklist Monitoring
  • Effective Security Hardening
  • Post-Hack Security Actions
  • Security Notifications
  • Website Firewall (premium)

Sucuri will analyse your website files in real-time, checking for any changes or variations. If it finds malware on your web server, it will alert you and offer ways to clean it up and quarantine the files.

Image SEO Optimizer

I know I am forgetful, what about you? I tend to forget alt tags when I am writing very late at night, which is where Image SEO Optimizer comes in handy for me. It takes the hassle of optimising my images for search engines.

This plugin will optimise the alt tags of your images and make sure none are left empty. Image alt tags are a vital ranking and accessibility feature you shouldn’t overlook when optimising your WordPress SEO.

If you have existing images that need optimising, Image SEO Optimizer will allow you to bulk process your image library for free in bulk.

Redirection

It can be tedious to edit your HTACCESS file every time you want to redirect a post, page or custom post type on your Website.

Redirection will allow you to set up permanent 301 and 302 redirects from the WP admin dashboard with just a few clicks.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

SEO has changed a lot over the years and has moved away from stuffing keywords and properly measuring a users page experience. A part of a users page experience is making sure they always have somewhere to go or something to do on your website after reading an article.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin or YARPP as it is more commonly known will allow you to put highly relevant content right below your blow posts.

You can insert related posts automatically or manually via PHP, allowing you to make sure your readers always have something to read next.

Leave a Reply

Comment policy: We value comments and the time that visitors to our blog spend to give feedback. Please note that all comments are manually moderated and any deemed to be spam or promotional will be deleted.