Five Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
WordPress is one of the easiest and most flexible publishing environments that bloggers use for content sharing and setting up e-commerce sites for small businesses. One of the reasons why it is so popular is the prevalence of plugins for site customization, including SEO.
Here are five great plugins that help you move up the search engine rankings!
- WordPress SEO
- Simple 301 Redirects
- SEO Rank Reporter
- SEO Ultimate
- Google XML Sitemaps
WordPress SEO is a plugin that features a page analyzer and automatically checks whether the user has written meta tags including meta-description, title tags, and targeted keyword phrases. The plugin also shows the snippet of the page in Google’s search results.
Simple 301 Redirects plugin is a must-have WordPress plugin that lets the users define a destination page to 301 redirect old page. Basically, 301 redirect tells the search engines to pass the link authority from the old page to another page on the site or anywhere on the web.
“By setting up 301 redirects from your old pages to your new pages, any incoming links will be seemlessly passed along, and their pagerank (or what-have-you) will be passed along with them.”
The SEO Rank Reporter plugin allows the admin or user to track certain keywords in the website and issues a report every three days regarding progress. This plugin also notifies administrators whenever certain keywords experience major changes in search engine ranking.
SEO Ultimate is a suite of tools that feature “Canonicalizer,” which extends the work of WordPress’ native canonical features to ensure that web spiders are pointed to the primary post in case the web pages have different URLs. It has a set of files used for optimal search engine indexing.
“This all-in-one SEO plugin gives you control over title tags, noindex, meta tags, Open Graph, slugs, canonical, autolinks, 404 errors, rich snippets.”
Google XML Sitemaps generates an XML sitemap to assist search engine spiders in crawling and indexing a WordPress site. The XML sitemap reveals the backbone of a site to search engines to retrieve it more efficiently.
The Bottom Line
Although these plugins involve technicalities that can only be understood by SEO specialists, administrators can install them instantly. It may take some time for administrators to understand the functions of each plugin, but when these plugins are used correctly, the site will be more visible, which can add additional traffic.