Supercharge Your SEO With 13 More Search-Centric WordPress Plugins
There are several reasons why WordPress has become arguably the most popular content management system in the world – more than 18% of all websites are powered by WordPress. It’s free, easy-to-use, and is extremely SEO friendly. Despite WordPress being a powerful tool right out of the box, you still have to rely on plugins to improve the functionality of your site and enhance the experience of your visitors. As you also already know, there are plenty of plugins available that can help with SEO optimization—most of which are free. We recently published a post about great SEO plugins for WordPress. But, there’s several more we hadn’t covered yet, so we mention a few more below.
There’s a lot that goes into optimizing your website and we
recommend starting with Yoast SEO. With over 14 million downloads and an average star rating of 4.6, this is a great jumping-off point and the one to rely on to whip your content into shape. It’s great at providing you with a perspective on what works and what doesn’t, through testing and grading various parts of your website’s content, giving you a preview of how your page results show in Google, and helping you clean up bad links or coding.
We can’t stress enough the importance of keeping track of your
website’s performance and trends in order to better shape your website’s content and, consequently, your business. Yoast offers two versions of their Google Analytics plugin, but we think the basic (free) version is a good place to start. With this plugin, you’ve got a snapshot of Google Analytics that will allow you to keep track of your site’s activity—all within your WordPress portal.
When it comes to blogging, the more metadata you add, the better. This plugin
will find ways to link regularly occurring keywords and phrases within your blog posts, pages, and comments, ultimately keeping the separate pieces of your website interlinked with one another.
Did you know that many of the JavaScript libraries distributed on WordPress are
also hosted on Google’s AJAX libraries API? This matters because it could hinder the performance of your site by slowing it down. This plugin assists with taking a load off of your server and so your WordPress site runs faster.
Conclusion While there are more than enough WordPress plugins to help give your SEO a
little boost, remember to download them from trustworthy authors – checking out reviews and when the last update occurred can tell you if they are trustworthy or not. The last thing you want to do is to jeopardize the security of your site.
Except for that friendly reminder, if you have had any success with the plugins
mentioned, please share your experiences in the comments. And, if I forgot to include an awesome SEO plugin, please share!