WordPress SEO via Plugins – Video Above
Search Engine Optimization is one of those topics that seems to always be a hot topic of discussion and for good reason. Owning a website can open the doors to communicating with millions of people all over the world or it can be like an empty desert where no one is around.
One of the biggest factors is if your website is ranking well in the search engines. Getting on page one of Google is no easy task, especially for highly competitive keyword rich phrases.
While the topic of Search Engine Optimization aka SEO may seem to be too difficult or large of a topic for an everyday blogger or small website owner to focus on, there are actually a few key aspects that if handled correctly, can make a difference in time.
Well Coded Website
If your website is properly coded with html5 semantic markup and rich snippets/schema markup, the better the search engines will understand the purpose and value of your website. This is vital and needs to be a priority. The beauty is there are a lot of great themes and plugins that can help you achieve this.
Performs Well in The Browser
It’s important that your website performs well in the browser. This means load fast. By loading fast, the better the chance your website will be viewed and shared by website visitors.
Fortunately, there are many ways to ensure your website loads fast. This is a topic I’ve covered in the past and will continue to revisit since this aspect of managing a website is always evolving.
Create High-Quality Content On a Consistent Basis
This is the absolute most important aspect of SEO. Without this, your long-term SEO goals can’t and won’t be achieved. I’ve written on this topic several times and also created several videos on my channel that focus on this. Revisit them if you need a refresher.
- How To Write The Perfect Blog Post
- SEO Tutorials for Beginners
- How To Speed Up WordPress with a Simple Code Snippet
- How To Make a WordPress Website that’s SEO Ready
Those are just a few resources you might find useful.
Drive Traffic To Your Website
In the early days of your website, this is really the only way to ensure traffic to your website. This aspect centers around sharing your latest articles on social media and with your email list. This will help introduce your website to those you’re already connected with and hopefully, they will help your article and website go viral or at least semi-viral during the early days of your site.
Rinse & Repeat – Don’t Give Up
People give up way too fast. For some reason, people think that getting on page one of Google is easy. Unless you’re going to pay for Google Adwords, organic SEO takes serious effort and time.
So just keep creating high-quality content on a consistent basis and make sure to make it easy for people to share your content on the social platforms that matter for your niche.
Top 10 SEO Plugins for WordPress
The purpose of this article is to introduce you to what I consider to be the Top 10 WordPress Plugins for SEO. This list can easily be extended to 20 or more plugins but then it wouldn’t be a top 10 list.
There are a few plugins that everyone has heard of and then there are a few that you might be hearing about for the very first time. I will start with the plugins you might not have heard of and then finish off with those that dominate the WordPress SEO space.
SEO Post Content Links
This plugin is focused on SEO Internal linking (page, post, category). It Automatically improves the SEO for your website since it links to related content on your website. SEO Post Content Links support internal linking for all languages.
It’s an easy plugin to configure and is one I feel can definitely benefit your website rankings. SEO Post Content Links
SEO Squirrly
SEO Squirrly is for the NON-SEO experts. Get Excellent SEO with Better Content, Ranking, and Analytics. For Both Humans and Search Bots. This plugin is used by 30,000+ WordPress websites and has been featured by key people in the SEO industry. It’s more of a content marketing suite vs just a plugin.
It provides features that will ensure your articles are fully SEO Optimized. SEO By Squirrly helps you write content that is SEO friendly and Human-friendly at the same time. You’ll get to improve your Google rankings while providing your readers with great content.
See your SEO Stats and improve on them with your weekly reports from one of the best SEO tools Audit website. It will also help you find the best keywords your site could rank for. SEO Squirrly
Yuzo Related Posts
Related posts Yuzo is intended to show related post as accurate as possible, also has multiple features with more than 60+ customization options.
Also in this new version features a super widget to display related or the best post on your WordPress blog. This is fast to use & configure, intuitive and the best thing is it’s free.
One of the other benefits is this plugin helps to increase your website visitors time on site which is a metric that Google closely monitors. The longer a person spends actively on your website, the greater the SEO signal. The shorter the duration, the worse the signal is to Google. Yuzo Related Posts
The SEO Framework
Easy SEO for beginners, and an awesome API for experts. This plugin provides an automated, accessible, unbranded and extremely fast SEO solution for any WordPress website. For optional advanced SEO tools and output, they also have a companion plugin Extension Manager.
While this one may not have as many installs as the more well-known ones do, it provides a wealth of features that are extremely beneficial. The SEO Framework
SEO Redirection
SEO Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, you can build and manage redirections easily for your site,
This plugin is useful if you want to migrate pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress website. SEO Redirection
All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
WHAT IS A RICH SNIPPET? You might be asking.
It’s basically a short summary of your page in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing and sometimes in the Newsfeed of Facebook in a nice format with star ratings, author photo, image, etc. It helps to provide more relevant information in the search results that could lead to greater click-through rates. It makes your website stand out from the rest of the search results. All in One Schema
Simple Sitemap
Improve your SEO ranking by adding an HTML sitemap! Very quick and easy to use. Add a powerful fully responsive HTML sitemap to your website today! Simply enter the [simple-sitemap] shortcode in a post, page, custom post type, or text widget and you’re good to go. Simple as that! Simple Sitemap
Google XML Sitemaps
Use this plugin to greatly improve SEO to create special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.
With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally, it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. Google XML Sitemap
All in One SEO Pack
Use All in One SEO Pack to optimize your WordPress site for SEO. It’s easy and works out of the box for beginners, and has advanced features and an API for developers. This is also one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress with over 1 million active installations. All in One SEO Pack
Yoast SEO is formally known as WordPress SEO
WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO. This was true when Joost wrote his original WordPress SEO article in 2008 (updated every few months) and it’s still true today, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this Yoast SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. Yoast SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere. Yoast SEO
The Takeaway
These are the Top 10 WordPress SEO Plugins to help your website rank well in the search engines. Obviously, the most important thing is to make sure you’re creating high-quality content on a consistent basis and driving traffic to your website. As long as you do that, over time, you will find your website and articles ranking well on Google.
Don’t forget to watch the video that goes along with this article. Top 10 WordPress SEO Plugins
Also, subscribe, like, share and if you need a website, let me know.