Any online presence is dependent on the traffic received and this situation will remain valid no matter how the Internet and web design will evolve. The number of websites is growing exponentially while the number of new Internet users grows with a considerable smaller ratio. In this context, attracting more visitors to your website is day by day more challenging. Google and other “big players” from the www world clearly mention that good content will always attract new visitors and many of them will turn into regular readers. Undoubtedly, good content is the fundament of any successful website, but the quality of the content isn’t the single entity responsible for the success.
The Internet users are assaulted with tons of information and it’s difficult to select what is relevant, useful and interesting for them. This job comes into the hands of the search engines that try all the best to provide the most relevant and useful content. Personally, I think that some search engines manage to do this task very well, even though there is some room for serious improvements.
In conclusion, a website should provide quality content, but at the same time it must be “liked” by the spiders of the search engines. The classification algorithm of the search engines is secret, therefore Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is partly art, partly science.
Making a better website from SEO perspective is mandatory, but many resources must be invested in order to have a well optimized online presence. Luckily, for the ones that own WordPress based websites we created a list of 20 essential SEO plugins. The list contains famous and widely used plugins that were downloaded by millions of users, but we also added some fresh plugins that seem to bring something new to the market. Anyway, all the plugins are efficient and help a lot in having an optimized website. Enjoy the collection and please let us know which your favorite ones are!
WordPress SEO
WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most used SEO plugin and it’s hard to believe that there is a webmaster out there that has no clue about the features of this plugin. In the WordPress plugins repository it’s rated with 4,7 out of 5 stars which is amazing. It is almost a mandatory plugin and in spite of its complexity, it’s simple to work with it. In addition to all these advantages, WordPress SEO by Yoast is free!
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is downloaded for almost 22 million times and it is rated 3.9 by the ones that used or use it. I believe that these numbers give you an idea about the mighty power of this plugin. You should know that this plugin is compatible with many others, it submits your sitemap to Google and other search engines and it generates META tags automatically. It has advanced options for WordPress experts, but once installed it works fine so it’s a good option even for the less experienced users.
Sitemap Plugin
Google is by far the most important search engine and neglecting it is definitely the sure path to disaster. Creating a sitemap for a website is capital in order to have it crawled by the Google bots. By installing this plugin, the sitemap is created automatically and it may be updated any time.
SEO Ultimate
SEO Ultimate is another well-known WordPress SEO plugin. It’s one of the most complex SEO plugins ever created. It has more than 20 modules and 200 features including a title tag rewriter, a META description editor, a rich snippet creator or a 404 monitor. I guess that all these convinced you to give a try to this powerful plugin.
Platinum SEO Pack
Platinum SEO Pack is a free plugin that is “responsible” for onsite SEO. It optimizes the posts and page titles, automatically generates META tags, helps in avoiding duplicate content and generates canonical URLs. This plugin isn’t as powerful as the previous ones, but it’s doing its job very well.
SEO Friendly Images
Optimizing the images is an important aspect of SEO and this plugin helps a lot in doing this job. It adds “alt” and “title” attribute tags to images and in this way one is able to save a lot of time.
Scribe
Writing quality content is a necessity for any webmaster. Both the Internet users and the search engines are in love with interesting and useful content, which is why Scribe represents a precious tool that may help in this regard.
Squirrly SEO
Squirrly plugin is one of my favorite because it was created not only for the search engines, but also for the average reader. It helps the WordPress users to find the best keywords for new posts, it creates SEO audits and it monitors the progress. Another plus of this plugin is the interface – and these being said I wish all your posts to be green (100% green means that that the post is fully optimized)!
Infinite SEO
WPMU Dev is a famous professional team of developers that releases amazing themes and plugins. Infinite SEO is their SEO plugin and its features are amazing. Unfortunately, this plugin isn’t free, but WPMU offers various payment solutions.
Premium SEO Pack
Premium SEO Pack isn’t a cheap plugin, but it fully deserves each dollar. It’s a very complex plugin and it covers any aspect related to SEO. It perfectly does the onsite optimization and as a bonus, it offers precious information about the situation of traffic received. Another plus of this plugin is the social media integration (Facebook and Twitter).
Rankie
Using the suitable keywords is vital in gaining more traffic and Rankie is one of the most competitive solutions for selecting the best keywords. The video live preview is extremely suggestive and I strongly recommend watching it.
SEO Post Optimizer
SEO Post Optimizer is a plugin that helps in finding the best keywords, too. Besides that, it “takes care” of the posts and it gives important hints to the website administrator to optimize these.
Web Tracker
This plugin isn’t a “pure” SEO one, but I guess that it may help a lot the website owners. I added it to this list because Web Tracker allows tracking the traffic received and secondly, its interface is very good-looking.
Ultimate Video SEO
Some time ago, SEO for video was something rarely heard of or even impossible. Nowadays, we have plugins that are able to optimize videos and in the eventuality that you use this format into your website, Ultimate Video SEO plugin may be a good choice.
SEO WordPress
This plugin is simple, reliable and efficient. SEO WordPress is recommended for users that aren’t too familiarized with managing a website because it’s very simple – you just have to install it and it will do its magic. It’s free so you have all the reasons to take it into consideration.
WP Optimize
The most impatient persons in the world are the Internet users. Consequently, a plugin that will load a website faster is a must. The loading speed is an important factor in optimizing a website, too. WP Optimize is a plugin that will help you deal with this issue, in order to make the readers and the search engines crawlers happier.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is absolutely the most famous catching plugin and any presentation is in vain. A good catching plugin is part of the SEO arsenal of any webmaster and this one is one of the best “guns”. Despite of exhibiting its features I think that it is more suggestive to mention that many huge websites such as WebDesignerDepot, SmashingMagazine or Mashable use it.
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) is very useful in the case that you have installed multiple plugins. If you are curious to learn what it can do you should know that it measures the impact of various plugins over the website performance.
I am sure that some from the above plugins are extensively used by many website administrators, but I guess that some of them are totally new to the huge majority of the readers. I tried to offer a mix of some famous plugins and some new ones that seem to offer quality help. If you appreciate our endeavor or if you installed a plugin recommended by us, then it will be great to share the post with your friends!
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