Although the work of SEO has changed a lot in recent years, it is still fundamental for any website to obtain the desired and necessary visibility, especially when digital presence is important. And can any company today afford to neglect this important aspect? If you agree that the answer is no and you have a WordPress- based website, then this article is for you!
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How is SEO on WordPress?
WordPress is a CMS that has a huge arsenal of resources and partly justifies its success as the most used development platform in the world.
But by itself, that is, without the help of any plugin, WP already has a very good structure for carrying out SEO on-page work. Over the years, the development team has been working, among other things, to make optimization for search engines easy for users who use it.
If you do not install any plugin intended for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work, the basic elements of each page or post are already organized in order to be read by search engine robots for proper indexing. Of course, this is not enough in the fierce competition for the top positions in search results, but it is already more than many other tools offer or a simple institutional website usually has.
If you have at least reasonable notions of the subject, you should also know that just using a plugin, no matter how good it is, will not make your website or blog occupy a prominent position in the rankings. It is necessary to invest time and perform a series of other actions, such as, for example, adopting Content Marketing, since there is no point in a fantastic SEO job, on weak or insufficient content.
There are a number of factors to consider, however, our proposal here is to focus on what there is in terms of tools to develop SEO on a WP-based website. For this reason, we will cover the 8 main plugins intended for this work.
8 The Best SEO plugins for WordPress
Before we proceed, it is important to note that classifying something as better can be dangerous. Even in an area where precision is one of the watchwords, there is a certain degree of relativity, making what is good for some not so good for others.
The results obtained from the use of each plugin, tend to be quite objective, but as there are other variables that influence these results and their interpretation is always conditioned to a human evaluation and, therefore, with some degree of subjectivity, we prefer only to point out that the following plugins are among the most popular and used within the WP platform.
Therefore, there are many followers of each of the following plugins and their ordering does not imply that one is better than the other. Think of different options for the same purpose, in the same way, that you have different options for restaurants and fast foods, or clothing and accessories stores, to choose the best ones for each need.
All in One SEO Pack
Easy to install the plugin and the simplest in terms of use, the All in One SEO Pack is one of the options that usually appear in all WordPress plugin lists and not just those for SEO.
The diversity of features and functionality of SEO, may at first suggest a certain complexity in its use, but when you focus on each item and start using it, realize its practicality. Better than that, its use will help to bring clicks and contribute to good organic ranking.
It has a free and paid version, and the free version already offers everything that most sites and blogs need to conduct a consistent SEO job.
Google XML Sitemaps
SEO actions and XML sitemaps are closely related and that is why the Google XML Sitemaps plugin already has immense utility when thinking about search engines, indexing and enabling them to view the complete structure of your site and have more efficient access to content.
It is one of the oldest plugins designed for this purpose, with good support and satisfactory update level, being among the most downloaded and active, exceeding the two million active installations.
It has a language translation feature, which is an important factor, in addition to being free for both personal and commercial websites and blogs. Its operation and use is of the simplest, which is another fundamental factor since it has a small learning curve
Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin
More than 5 million active installations, is a great argument to make this plugin designed to help you do a good job of SEO on-page, appear on this list. There are even those who say that Yoast SEO is synonymous with SEO when it comes to WordPress.
Exaggerations aside, it is a fact that the operation and results it provides when used well and combined with a consistent work of Content Marketing, are very good.
Among the many features it offers, there is one that greatly facilitates the work of those who already use another plugin with the same objective and that is to import the settings of other famous plugins. So, if you change by choosing it, you don’t have to redo all the work previously done with another plugin.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
Low bounce rates, which is when visitors quickly abandon a clicked result, are a deciding factor in SEO work. That is why the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – or simply YARPP – is a plugin that at some point you need to at least test.
Along with low bounce rates, the longer people stay on yours, the better Google and other search engines rank your site. This is the work of YARPP, which displays posts, pages and other content related to the content currently visited, making the visitor see them and thereby increasing the relevance of your content.
Broken Link Checker
Among the many features and facilities that Broken Link Checker offers, one is its main brand and one that is fundamental to a correct SEO job, which is the consistency and correctness of your website’s set of links and is self-explanatory of its name.
But in addition to being just a monitor of links that may not be working, it even offers the ability to prevent search engines from following broken links and thus any possible error negatively interferes with your website’s positioning in the rankings.
Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
The analysis of your website according to Google Analytics is fundamental for any SEO work. So, integrating this important Google tool and your WordPress website or blog, alone should be enough reason to adopt Google Analytics by MonsterInsights.
The tool is free, very easy to use, and you can activate all the advanced tracking features of Google Analytics with just a few clicks.
Once installed, you have in the WordPress administrative environment itself, a Google Analytics for WordPress dashboard, with personalized reports, where you can view the most important statistics that will allow you to better understand the return that your actions provide you.
Seo Optimized Images
There is currently no way to think about SEO and not think about the contribution that images can make. More than ever, the importance of images in SEO work is indisputable and the success of this is justified in services like Instagram or Flickr, to name just two of the most famous. This is the main role of Seo Optimized Images.
With this plugin, it is easy to insert alt and title attributes that are understandable and adequately indexable in all images on your website or blog and more than that, that is optimizable for the organic results of Google and other search engines.
WP Rocket Cache Plugin
Among the many factors that are decisive for achieving good organic positioning with search engines, this is the speed of loading your site. If you, like Google, understand the importance of this factor, it’s time to consider the benefits of the WP Rocket plugin.
By adopting this plugin, you can improve the loading speed of the website pages, as well as the overall user experience. It constitutes a very used option – more than one million active installations – with a good variety of resources to configure the cache of your website, aiming at excellent performance.
Conclusion
The work of SEO is fundamental for any website, aiming to place it in the first positions of the organic results of the search engines. For that, WordPress has a very large collection of plugins that make this job simpler and with very good results.