The SEO game has become more complex with time, and it requires a lot of technical knowledge to truly master it. Moreover, many of the processes are constantly subject to changes as search engine algorithms evolve, and this happens almost at a daily basis.
The best way to keep up is to have the best and easiest to use SEO tools. These help automate most of the processes and also give you a heads up every time Google significantly changes the way they rank pages.
WordPress has become the most used content management system, and hosts nearly 30 percent of the internet's websites. If you're one of the many who use WordPress as your primary content management system, take a look at these eight powerful plugins that can help ease your SEO tasks and improve search rankings.
1. 404page plugin
A well designed and customized 404 page is a perfect solution to treat all those error pages that frustrate the users and degrade the overall user experience. The 404page plugin allows you to create a custom 404 page with ease. The best part? It doesn´t create any redirects or additional server requests.
What it offers:
- Easily creates a custom 404 error page
- Sends a 404 signal to search engines so they can de-index the page
- It does not create any additional server requests or redirects
- It is compatible with the most used WordPress Themes
2. All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack solves most of the problems website owners face while optimizing their sites without a hassle. It is a favorite among those who don´t really know much about SEO as it starts working right out of the box. It can be a bit intimidating at first as it displays all its options on a single page, but after you start reading them, they all turn out to be quite intuitive.
What it offers:
- Easily submit your sitemap to Google and Bing.
- Google AMP support (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
- Support for Google Analytics.
- Create advanced Canonical URLs to improve SEO value.
- Whenever the site is updated, the plugin automatically sends notification to search engines about changes to your site.
- Free SEO Integration for e-commerce sites, including WooCommerce.
- The plugin is secured and automatically generates meta tags.
- Compatible with many other plugins.
3. Yoast SEO
This is perhaps one of the most popular WordPress plugins that is used to optimize an entire website. It shares some of the traits of All in One SEO Pack, as it is intuitive and starts working right away, but its interface is a bit more departmentalized.
What it offers:
- Easily generate sitemaps and improve your site navigation by using breadcrumbs, improving your user experience.
- Automatically generates title and meta descriptions, and provides internal linking suggestions.
- The snippet preview feature shows you how your post or page will look in the search results both on desktop and mobile.
- Optimize your webpages for targeted keywords and synonyms.
- With the help of the bulk editor, you can make large scale edits to your site.
- Ability to utilize Local SEO and full support for Google Maps marketing campaign.
4. AMP For WordPress
Site speed is more important than ever in the Google ranking algorithm. The AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) initiative was born to help people have faster load times whenever they visit a website from their mobile devices. In a nutshell, AMP plugins create lighter versions of your website for mobile viewing.
AMP For WordPress is a nice plugin that lets you to easily create a stripped version of your regular HTML pages. AMP loads faster and helps to improve the overall user experience. When you activate the plugin, all posts on your site will have dynamically generated AMP-compatible versions that will be accessible by appending /amp/ to the end your post URLs.
What it offers:
- Includes all file types in the stripped version.
- All types of content are embedded.
- Full customization of your AMPed version.
- Tracking from the most important analytic tools.
- Compatible with many other SEO tools mentioned in this article.
5. Premium SEO Pack
Similar to Yoast SEO, this SEO plugin helps increase the SEO value for all of your pages and handles meta tags, sitemaps and social media snippets. However, more experienced users might find it lacks many of the features that are now considered standard.
What it offers:
- Automatically add SEO titles and descriptions to each of your pages based on a pattern.
- Add social media schema such as Twitter card codes and Open Graph images for each of your posts.
- Nofollow and Noindex options are displayed for each post.
- Choose the preferred URL using the Canonical link option.
- Works with Woocommerce and other E-commerce plugins.
- Includes a 404 monitor and W3C validator.
6. WOT Cache
WOT is a professional cache plugin that optimizes your WordPress speed. It saves a version of your website in the browser´s cache, drastically reducing load times. WOT Cache completely optimizes your website without requiring any technical knowledge whatsoever.
What it offers:
- Guarantees page caching, which helps to load the page faster resulting in higher conversions and sales.
- Automatically optimizes the images on your site.
- Helps with file compression and Gzip compression which helps to save the bandwidth.
- With the help of lazy load, videos and images are loaded only when the user scrolls down the page.
- Handles browser caching and entire database optimization.
7. Redirection
There might be several instances where a need for proper redirection can’t be avoided. With the help of the Redirection plugin, you can easily manage 301 redirections and keep a proper track of 404 errors. This improves the overall user experience and the result is increased rankings.
What it offers:
- Set conditional redirects based on a certain criteria.
- Easily view all the redirects happening on your site as the plugin maintains a hit count for every redirect.
- Provides support for both APACHE & NGINX.
8. SEO Internal Links Plugin
Proper internal linking is one of the most important parts of SEO. If your internal link structure is strong, then it helps in proper flow of the Page Rank which in turn increases the page authority of the linked pages resulting in higher rankings.
What it offers:
- Simple configuration and you can set your own keywords.
- Support on all modern browsers and works with most of the cache plugins.
- Easily set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.
- With the help of the administration settings panel, you can easily interlink your blog posts.
Conclusion
For new website owners, it is difficult to choose the right tools. One common impulse is to grab them all and start trying. Of course, just having them all installed would be an overkill at best, or could even be counterproductive at worst. You must choose the ones that best work for your particular website needs, and those that have the best synergy between them.
If you are still undecided, or really want to make the most of your SEO tools, then consider consulting professional SEO experts to shed some light on this subject.