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When you first start using WordPress, it can seem like a minefield. There are so many plugins to improve your site’s functionality and visibility that it can be challenging to know which ones to use. Essential WordPress plugins for SEO help index your site faster and improve the speed at which pages load.
Regarding SEO, performance, speed, and automation are crucial to running a successful site.
So, what are the most essential WordPress plugins for SEO? Here are three complementary plugins that you need to install immediately.
1. Google XML sitemap
Anything that helps search engines crawl and index your site is worth doing. A sitemap plugin will do exactly that. It helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com index your content faster.
When you have a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to understand the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.
Google XML Sitemaps is a free tool that supports all kinds of WordPress-generated pages and custom URLs. It provides an easy way to build the XML sitemap dynamically, and it has been downloaded over 10 million times! Once installed, the plugin will maintain the sitemap once you have completed the initial build. It will notify all significant search engines whenever you post about the new content.
2. Yoast SEO
A good SEO automation tool will cover numerous aspects of your blog. Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins due to its free option, making it affordable. There’s also a premium option for those who want to focus on the keywords used, get internal linking suggestions, and manage their re-directs effectively.
Yoast is the most downloaded SEO plugin, with over 40 million downloads! It is precious for improving your SEO score because it checks your content to see whether you’re using the keywords often enough—but not too frequently—and in the right spots.
3. WP Rocket
Page loading times are a critical ranking factor for search engines. If your site becomes sluggish, it will be unlikely to rank well. A slow-loading site is also frustrating to visitors, and they will likely abandon it for one of your competitors if it takes longer than 3 seconds for it to load.
A caching plugin can help improve speed loading times by creating static versions of your content and displaying that to your visitors.
Usually, each time a browser requests a web page, the server has to do several complex calculations to retrieve the information on your site. It requires back-and-forth queries to be sent to and from the database to generate the latest posts, header, footer, and any other text or imagery found on the website.
As most websites rarely change daily, creating static copies of your pages and serving them to your visitors reduces the server load, leading to faster website performance.
WP Rocket is a popular option with over 80,000 downloads and no coding required.
While there are many useful plugins, Google XML, Yeost, and WP Rocket are three of the best WordPress SEO plugins.
At WP Tech Support, we can handle all aspects of your website’s maintenance to enhance its performance and improve its SEO score. Our WordPress maintenance plans start at just $55 per month—a small price to ensure your website performs at its best.