WordPress is deservedly called a SEO-friendly CMS. But how to build a truly profound friendship between Google and your WordPress website? Well, there are useful friendship-enhancing practices! They include caring about your WordPress website performance, creating unique and interesting content, using relevant keywords, and much more. In addition, you can rely on special friendship strengtheners — awesome WordPress SEO plugins. Let’s view a couple of them right now.
Best WordPress SEO plugins
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Yoast SEO
This plugin’s philosophy is “Yoast: SEO for everyone” — and it is really so. Yoast SEO is a comprehensive SEO tool installed on millions of websites. It creates an XML sitemap for your site and sends it to Google or Bing, does a complete SEO analysis of your pages, helps you optimize your content, meta titles and descriptions, shows you how your text snippets will look in search results, supports canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content, helps create robots.txt files, and does almost any other SEO tasks imaginable.
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All in One SEO Pack
Here is another “millionaire” among WordPress SEO plugins. Compared to 5+ million active installations of the Yoast SEO plugin, the All in One SEO Pack has 3+ million ones. However, it is no less powerful. It has a support for XML Sitemap, Google Analytics, and Google AMP, automatically optimizes your titles, has an advanced functionality for canonical URLs, notifies search engines about changes on your site, automatically generates META tags, and does lots of other useful SEO tricks.
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All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Let’s move on from the multi-purpose to more specific WordPress plugins for SEO. The All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin will make your site’s content look irresistibly attractive in search results, which will increase your click-through-rates. The plugin provides you with short summaries of your pages for search engines, also known as snippets. It makes snippets rich and interactive by adding special elements — star ratings, content author names, prices, photos, and many more.
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Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology is meant to make your website’s mobile performance lightning-fast, which may give it a significant SEO boost. Here is an awesome plugin that lets you use the capabilities of the Yoast SEO on AMP pages. The Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP plugin integrates, or “glues” the Yoast SEO plugin into them.
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Google XML Sitemaps
An XML Sitemap is essential for SEO because it guides search engines through your website structure. When it comes to XML Sitemap generation, you can use multi-purpose plugins like Yoast SEO, but there are also specialized ones — for example, Google XML Sitemaps. Among its benefits are the support for custom URLs and the ability to inform search engines about your updates.
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Kraken.io Image Optimizer
Optimized images increase website loading speed and improve user experience. This is definitely reflected in SEO rankings. To optimize your images, you can use a WordPress SEO plugin like Kraken.io Image Optimizer. It helps you optimize new and existing images using the power of Kraken.io. JPEG, PNG, and GIF formats are supported.
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Automatic image ALT attributes
ALT attributes to images help search engines understand what the image is about. That’s why ALTs help your images be found. If a WordPress theme is written according to standards, ALT images will be available by default. If not, plugins like Automatic image ALT attributes can be very helpful to you.
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Simple 301 Redirects
If website migration, redesign or other reasons make it impossible to preserve your existing URL structure, redirects can be a salvation. The Simple 301 Redirects WordPress plugin offer you handy ways for applying redirects. Your old pages will be redirected to the new ones, and their pagerank will “travel” together with them like a valuable luggage.
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Broken Link Checker
One of the things Google certainly does not like are broken links. They increase bounce rates and impact overall users experiences, which usually reflects a site’s rankings. A great solution is to use the Broken Link Checker plugin. It monitors all the pages to find non-working links, missing images, or redirects. It also notifies you about these via the dashboard or email, offers great link searching and filtering options, lets you easily fix the the links, and is even capable of preventing search engines from following these links.
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SEO by SQUIRRLY
Is it possible to make your content equally lucrative both for search bots and human readers? Yes, with the SEO by SQUIRRLY plugin. It helps you use keywords effectively in your content and URLs, as well as gives you suggestions. Its nice features also include the green color to signal properly optimized content, real-time tips, statistics and audits, progress monitoring, and so much more.
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WooCommerce — All in One SEO Pack
Here is a WordPress SEO plugin created to extend the functionality of the previously mentioned All in One SEO Pack plugin. It shows the All in One SEO Pack data in Woocommerce screen for creating and editing products. It also allows you to easily add, edit and otherwise manage the All in One SEO Pack meta details.
Final thoughts
It’s a pity one article cannot include all great WordPress SEO plugins. But the expertise of our WordPress developers will let them select the most relevant ones for your website. Contact our WordPress support team to boost your SEO. Let the best sites be found!