Here are My Top 5 WordPress SEO Plugins
One of the sure-fire ways of speeding up or boosting your SEO rankings is by finding an awesome host for your WordPress site. However, there is a flood of SEO plugins out there, making it pretty challenging to find one that best suits your WordPress needs, as an SEO consultant I’m always on the lookout for
Therefore, I have put together a list of my 5 best SEO plugins so that you don’t have to go through the hassle of testing each plugin you find. But, always keep in mind that a worthy SEO plugin must easily help your WordPress site generate the right Meta tags and descriptions depending on your preferred keywords. Continue reading to learn more.
1. Yoast SEO Plugin
You must have come across the Yoast SEO plugin as you scour the internet for the best WordPress SEO plugin. It is easily the best SEO plugin out there and you will see why shortly.
Yoast SEO plugin ranks among the best SEO plugins in the market because it comes with a host of amazing features that will come in handy to enable you to come up with content that is not only search engine-friendly but also easy to read.
There are a lot of things you can do with this SEO plugin, some of which include:
- Schema markup
- Creating titles and meta description templates
- The verification of the website’s Webmaster Tools, including Yandex, Bing, Google, and Baidu
- Optimizing your AMP pages
- Creating an XML sitemap
- Offering support for ‘index’ content
- Breadcrumbs control and language support
It is important to mention these are general site-wide features. On the page level, there are a host of other instrumental features. For instance, the plugin adds a unique meta SEO box to every page and post. Therefore, you can choose to set custom meta descriptions, canonicals, title pages, meta robots tags, and Open Graph tags.
Since the plugin is free, you can get a premium version that comes with advanced functionality like content insights, redirect manager, and internal linking suggestions starting from $89 per year (£65 roughly).
2. Redirection Plugin
This is one of the simplest WordPress SEO plugins you can ever get. It is great for the implementation of the 301 redirects, tidying up any loose ends, or keeping track of all the 404 errors. Since it is one of the simplest out there, it only follows that its usability is quite friendly too.
However, you should keep in mind that this redirection plugin works best if your site has only a few redirects to those that have thousands of redirects. The best thing about this plugin is arguably the fact that you don’t need any Nginx or Apache knowledge to create and manage your redirects.
Furthermore, it supports regular expressions, which means that you can use it to create redirect patterns that will easily match a wide range of URLs. Also, keep in mind that you can use the plugin to monitor posts and pages for any automatically created redirections or permalink changes.
Other worthy features the plugin offers are:
- Nginx and Apache support
- Full logging
- Conditionally redirect
- Import and export
3. Schema Plugin
The Schema Plugin is yet another excellent WordPress SEO plugin that you can take advantage of to enhance your site’s presence in search results. The plugin will automatically implement valid schema.org markup to your WordPress to Google recommended format like the JSON-LD format.
Therefore, the Schema.org markup is ideal for improving your site’s overall appearance in search results, which significantly leads to higher conversion rates and click-through for your business. Furthermore, the plugin is designed to work on standard WordPress installation because it can dive into its hierarchy and come up with the ideal schema.org markup across your content.
The plugin mostly takes care of pages and posts, especially on freshly installed WordPress. Moreover, it automatically outputs schema.org markup for categories, posts, pages, blogs, taxonomy archives, and tags, among others. It will also help you to tailor your markup to suit any type of content.
In a nutshell, some of Schema plugin’s key features are:
- Ease of use with minimal settings
- Extensible functionality via other extensions or plugins
- Output JSON-LD format
- Testing valid markup in Google
- Structured Data Testing
4. WP Fastest Cache
When you render a page, you essentially use MySQL and PHP. This means that your device will need CPU and RAM. Therefore, if your site experiences too much traffic, your system will need lots of CPU and RAM, which makes the rendering of the page a lot slower. That is why your WordPress site needs a cache system WordPress SEO plugin like the WP Fastest Cache to prevent rendering your page again and again.
WP Fastest Cache will help generate a static HTML file and goes ahead to save it. This means that some users reach to static html page. Since you will be reducing your page’s load time using this cache system, you will be essentially improving your SEO ranking on Google.
Furthermore, the setup itself is pretty straightforward because you don’t have to make any alterations to the .htaccess file. The modification will be automatic. Some of the key features of the WP Fastest Cache include:
- Blocking cache for a specific post or page using
- Short Code
- SSL support
- WP-CLI cache clearing
- Enabling and disabling cache option for mobile devices
- Cache timeout
- Mod_rewrite
- Deleting all cache files upon the publication of a page or post
5. WP GMB Auto Publish
Yet another WP plugin, but this one is designed to let you publish your posts, create custom pages and posts automatically from your WordPress straight to your Google My Business (GMB) page. You can also use the WordPress SEO plugin to schedule your posts, which is pretty interesting.
Over the years, a lot more people are appreciating the power of creating content on GMB, especially for SEO. Since it is easy to create new content than forget, the WP GMB Auto Publish plugin will help you create more content without the need for any additional operations.
Furthermore, it is free, lightweight, and pretty effortless to use. You can also use a default share message plus an action type for every post. It is also possible to filter the items you wish to publish in terms of categories.
Since it uses GMB API, your post’s featured image will be used as GMB’s post image automatically. Also, the post link will become the call to action link in GMB.
To Wrap Up
As a site owner, it is vital to learn to use SEO plugins, such as those 5 listed in this post. They will enable you to stay on top of your game, especially in terms of meta descriptions and optimizing content to rank for your preferred keywords and many others.
