WordPress is the most popular online publishing platform. This platform is currently powering more than 32% of the web and although it offers a lot of features and flexibility in its operating system, there is a lot of functionality missing from the core software.
In this blog we will discuss the top 5 SEO WordPress plugins that you should have on your WordPress website that will improve your search engine traffic.
1. Yoast SEO
Download: https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Yoast SEO is a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search engine-friendly as possible.
This WordPress plugin provides you with numerous features that enhances and streamlines a number of SEO activities including developing an XML sitemap, optimising meta tags and descriptions, construct search engine snippets, integrate social profiles and many more.
In the following section we highlight 3 Yoast SEO features that will optimise your website:
1. Yoast SEO will generate XML sitemaps
An XML sitemap can be simply defined as a directory of guide that holds information about your webpages. This makes it particularly important in SEO as it helps search engines to identify information that is applicable to a specific search query that has been performed. Yoast SEO create an XML sitemap for your website automatically by default.
In addition, Yoast SEO allows you to customise your XML sitemap. This customisation option offers you the ability to exclude specific content types and ultimate prevent specific pages to show up in the search engine results.
2. Yoast SEO can connect your WordPress website to Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service tool offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google search results. By connecting Google Search Console to Yoast SEO, you will have access to insights available from the Google tool within your WordPress dashboard. This includes identifying any crawl errors that you might not be aware existed in your website.
How to set up connect your Google Search Console:
- Log in to Google Search Console
- Click ‘Add Property’
- Enter your website URL
- Click the arrow next to ‘HTML tag’
- Copy the meta tag
- Log in to Word Press
- Click SEO and ‘General’
- Click on ‘Webmaster Tool’ tab
- Paste code in the Google field and click ‘Save Changes’
- Go back to Google Search Console and ‘Verify’
3. Yoast SEO Snippet Editor allows you to optimise your meta tags and description
The Snippet Editor is one of the core pieces of technology in Yoast SEO. This visual editor helps you construct your meta tags as it would appear in the search engine results page. This feature is particularly important in SEO because it enhances user’s engagement and improves your website’s click through rates. In addition, this feature has made it possible for you to enhance mobile snippets. As mobile searches are increasingly being performed, this feature improves your mobile search visibility and ultimate enhances mobile user engagement.
2. Broken Link Checker
Download: https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/
Broken Link Checker is a complete link checking solution. This SEO WordPress plugin scans through all URLs on your website and generates a complete report of all existing broken and redirected links. It is important to understand that one of the ways search engine rank websites is by crawling through their links. Broken links deters search engine spiders from crawling your website efficiently and prevent certain webpages to be indexed and not appear in the search engines results page. Ultimately this affects users’ experiences and may negatively impact your website traffic.
This SEO plugin can identify links in posts, pages, comments, blog roll and custom fields. When a broken link is found, a notification will alert you via the WordPress dashboard or by email. Furthermore, Broken Link Checker allows you to fix your broken links directly on the plugin page, so you won’t have to manually open each post to fix it.
3. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
Download: https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service by Google that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for SEO. By implementing a tracking code on your website, this analytic tool categorises your data into acquisitions, behaviour and conversions. This data can help businesses develop strategies and make more inform marketing decisions. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights is an SEO WordPress plugin that allows you to easily connect your WordPress website with Google Analytics streamlining the tracking process all within the WordPress dashboard.
Google Analytics by MonsterInsights has simplified the process of tracking important data for you. It is capable of tracking file downloads, AMP tracking, affiliated link tracking, author tracking, category tracking, custom post type tracking, custom dimension tracking and more.
Ultimately, this SEO WordPress plugin allows you to monitor your websites performance within the WordPress dashboard. Providing you access to all the important statistics in a user-friendly interface that will help you easily understand your traffic and create data driven content strategy to grow your audience.
4. W3 Total Cache
Download: https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
Site speed is a search engine ranking factor. The speed at which your website loads can impact a search engines’ ability to crawl your website as well as users’ engagement. W3 Total Cache is an SEO WordPress plugin that improves loading times by using caching rules.
In the following we highlight 4 W3 Total Cache features that will increase your website speed:
1. Page Caching
W3 Total Cache serves static pages. This is a method for converting the page generated by a user’s request into an HTML document to serve any subsequent requests to that same page.
2. Minify
Minification compresses and combines CSS and JavaScript files on your website. It removes the white space in the files making them smaller.
3. Database Caching
This feature caches the results of common databases queries to enhance performance.
4. CDN
Is a service that host static assets on multiple servers around the world. It delivers pages and website content to users based on their geographical location. This response time is reduced since the server closest to the visitor is used to serve the request.
5. WPTouch Mobile Plugin
Download: https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/wptouch/
The number of web searches performed from mobile devices has increased significantly, with 52% of online traffic was generated by mobile phones. It is essential that businesses employ a fluid one web strategy with their WordPress deployments to ensure streamlined, responsive and adaptive website experience across all platform and devices. WPTouch Mobile plugin transform any WordPress website into a mobile-friendly interface.
This SEO WordPress plugin factors in Google Mobile Test and ensure your website meets the criteria to perform well on all mobile devices. In addition, this plugin allows you to choose which browser you want to support, while also giving you the tools to customise your mobile menu. This includes a search bar in your header, rearrange elements of your websites, display blog features and many more.
So, there we go. The top 5 SEO WordPress plugins that will streamline your search engine optimisation activities all within the WordPress dashboard. By incorporating these plugins you will be able to optimise your WordPress website and ultimately enhance your overall current search visibility in search engines.
