WordPress is a great CMS for user friendly blogging, ecommerce, content development and more. However, to fully take advantage of all the great things WP can help you do, you want to make sure your content gets noticed by the search engines. There are a number of plugins that will help you with your WP SEO. In this post, I will go over some of the top ones.
First, before you start adding plugins to your site, thinking they will solve all of your traffic problems, you have to realize what they can and can’t do, For example, “Yoast SEO” and “All In One SEO” are both great plugins for optimizing your content but, if your content sucks or is just rehashed text from other websites, those plugins won’t help you very much. The first trick to good SEO is good, unique content. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to write at the level of a modern day Shakespeare but your content should be coherent and it should be useful. You should also do a bit of keyword research before you start writing your posts and pages, make sure the topics you are going to discuss are relevant to your niche.
That said, when you’re ready to start playing with the SEO plugins, here are a few that I like:
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is by far the most popular right now. Yoast not only helps you display your title tags and keywords, it also analogizes your content to make sure you are doing the things you need to be doing. If you’re missing say alt tags from your images, Yoast will tell you.
All in one SEO Pack
All in one SEO: This is the granddaddy of WP SEO Plugins. I used it on many sites back in the day but I’ve been using Yoast exclusively for the last few years. Anyway, I took another look at the plugin today (as the still are a real player in the industry). They have added quite a few features since the last time I used them. I didn’t have time to do it today but I will check the plugin out in the new future to see what the offer.
One more thing to consider is your site speed. While technically not an SEO plugin, a good cache plugin (like W3 Total Cache) is also important to have. Most SEO’s say that Google is now using site speed as a ranking factor so a fast loading site can only help you with your SEO efforts.
