In the following post you’re going to learn about 20 of the top SEO plugins for WordPress. These plugins will help you take care of things like on page/technical SEO, redirects, XML sitemaps, rank checking and much more.
WordPress is the fastest growing and now most widely used content management system (CMS) available today but why is it so popular?
This is partly due to the fact that you can do so much with WordPress that it allows users who have no coding experience to do some truly great things that would take a huge amount of time and effort without the use of a CMS.
On a personal level, I am a WordPress fanatic, I’m not a developer or programmer but I have been tinkering about building websites for a good while now, all of which happen to use WordPress because it’s so flexible.
There are a lot of different aspects to the building of a website where the SEO is concerned so I have put together a list of 20 free SEO plugins for WordPress.
While off page factors still account for the majority of Google’s ranking algorithm these plugins will give you a huge head start and give you some quick wins.
This is an extremely powerful and well coded plugin that was created by Joost de Valk whom is not only a web developer but also knows his stuff when it comes to SEO too.
WordPress SEO by Yoast is compatible upto WordPress 3.5.1 and is regularly updated with fixes and extra functionality – I’m surprised this plugin is free considering all that it can do.
Some of the features include – snippet previews, page analysis, technical tweaks, control over meta data, XML sitemaps, RSS optimisation, breadcrumbs and social integration with the Facebook OpenGraph, Twitter card meta data and more.
If this is a WordPress SEO plugin that you haven’t taken for a spin yet then now is the time.
This plugin has been at the top for a good while and now has over 13.7 million downloads which is an insane number.
Some of the features include – control over meta data, support for custom post types, canonical URLs, Google Analytics support and advanced indexation controls.
There’s also an option to upgrade to a pro version with some great extended features.
If you’re an All in One SEO Pack user there may be an occasion where you wish to add titles and meta data to your category pages for example with an eCommerce store or if you have a theme that pulls in category descriptions for example.
Unfortunately this isn’t possible with All in One SEO Pack but this plugin will extend the functionality so you can add category meta data should you need it.
This is another extension for the All in One SEO Pack WordPress plugin that will allow the dialogue box that is displayed when you add posts or pages to be displayed for product post types within WooCommerce.
Note: you will also need the
WooCommerce plugin to use this plugin as well as All in One SEO Pack.
This SEO plugin isn’t as extensive as something like the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast but if you’re looking for a straight forward plugin to manage your meta data then this is it.
There’s also support for Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, CrazyEgg heat map, HitTail and a number of other tracking tools.
SEO Ultimate is another very complete SEO solution for WordPress that is packed with features, what’s great to see is the continued development of this plugin and the developers have continued to add new functionality in line with current trends within the industry such as rich snippets, OpenGraph, Twitter Cards and more.
SEO Ultimate will also take care of all of your meta data, 404 error monitoring, Google Plus authorship, URL canonicalization and much more.
This is a great no frills plugin for the important SEO essentials such as meta data, robots, descriptions, titles and canonical URLs etc.
Greg’s High Performance SEO allows you to configure your meta data for a variety of post types including your home page, posts, pages, tag/author/category archives, search results and 404 pages along with paged comments should you need modify them.
Redirection is a great solution for managing the redirects on your site; you can add redirects manually or you can upload a CSV file.
Whether you’re moving a site to a new domain or host or just tidying up any 404 errors then you’ll find this plugin very useful.
Sure you could just edit your .htaccess file but this is a great plugin for those that aren’t comfortable messing around with any code.
Social signals are a big deal and they’re going to become even more of a big deal in the future, so it’s important that you don’t skip past this plugin just because it’s quite new.
WP Social SEO Booster works alongside other SEO plugins (such as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to provide you with a powerful solution to display rich snippets (such as reviews, products, business, people, recipes, software, videos and events), incorporate Google authorship, Facebook OpenGraph, and Twitter card tags.
Creating XML sitemaps is extremely important because they allow search engines to see all of the pages or posts on your site that are available for crawling. They also incorporate other data that will show search engines which pages are priorities and how often pages are updated so search engine crawlers will know when to come back and take another look at the page.
There are a lot of tools you can use for this, but this plugin is the most straight forward option because it’s as simple as installing, activating and clicking the build button.
Google XML Sitemaps has a lot of additional features including; notifications to Google and Bing, adding sitemap URL to your robots.txt file, rebuilding sitemap when content is updated along with settings allowing you to choose which post types to include in your sitemap and display priorities of post types and update frequencies to search engine crawlers.
This should be an essential plugin in your SEO toolkit.
Read more: http://www.uklinkology.co.uk/top-free-wordpress-seo-plugins/#ixzz2nGHrQoV4
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