If you have a website or blog, making sure it is SEO-optimized is key to a better search experience for your readers to find you. Aside from marketing your site, organic search engine searches are still a big part of finding your site online. How about to a tune of 5.6 billion Google searches on any given day? More fascinating Google Search Statistics here.
So what does this mean for you? It means that if you want the visibility, and more importantly, you want the position of being found on the first page of a Google search, then you need to consider using available Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools to boost your chances of being at the top of a page. If you have a WordPress site, there are a number of free and premium SEO plugins that you can install and configure within minutes. I promise you once you add your site title, site description, and keywords, Google will be alerted and will start crawling your site for viable content and will make an effort to index it at a higher position than it was before. Keep in mind, however, that SEO is not an exact science. It can take time to be at the top. Here are five of the best SEO Plugins to consider using for your website:
1 – WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO is the #1 SEO plugin and it is the most downloaded of all time. It allows you to add an SEO title, meta description and meta keywords to each page and post of your site. You can also write your own custom title for your home page. It has a ton of other features that you can review on their plugin page here. And just so you know, I use the WordPress SEO plugin on my site and other client sites as well. It’s definitely my number one pick!
2 – All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack plugin runs second in line behind WordPress SEO in popularity. It does have more SEO backend tools, and it offers premium features and support for a longer period of time. The premium support will cost you $57 per year for a single site, but you can also get a developer business license for $97 per year and an agency license for $419 per year for unlimited sites. A premium license may be a better option as it provides advanced support for WooCommerce sites.
3 – The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework plugin is a good option if you want a fast and lightweight plugin that comes without ads or upsells. It’s considered the alternative to the higher-ranked competitors like Yoast or All In One SEO Pack. The SEO settings are controlled with a few tabs, one of which uses a color scale to show exactly how close you are to making your post search-engine ready. With this scale, you can immediately tell where you need to put in some additional work with your SEO efforts, unlike the confusing versions of Yoast.
4 – SEOPress
SEOPress is a free All In One SEO plugin with no ads. It’s simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to manage all your titles and meta descriptions for posts, pages, post types and terms. You can optimize tags, such as Open Graph and Twitter Cards, for sharing your content on your social networking sites. The free version also provides content analysis to help webmasters write better SEO optimized posts.This plugin also has a premium version that extends advanced features like:
- Local business SEO.
- Breadcrumbs optimized for SEO and accessibility.
- WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads optimizations.
- Video and Google News XML sitemaps.
5 – Rank Math
Rank Math SEO has all the SEO tools you need for your WordPress website. It comes with everything you need for taking full control of your site and page SEO. It combines the power of multiple plugins you may be using on your site for SEO and it brings it all into one easy-to-manage plugin. You can manage the on-page SEO of your posts, pages, products or other taxonomies. You can also control noindex/nofollow/noarchive meta tags of all taxonomies in general and individual posts or pages in particular.
Some of its other features to consider:
- Each post/page/product runs through an SEO Analysis tool based on 40 factors.
- The user interface is very clean, and the options are easy to understand.
- It gives you options to automatically add alt or title tags to images that are missing them.
- Rank Math comes with a 404 monitor to tell you where users see errors.
- It also comes with a Redirection module that lets you point those 404 errors to something a little more useful on your website.
- Breadcrumbs are also part of the plugin, so you don’t have to rely on another plugin for that.
- Open Graph and Twitter Card support is bundled.
So there you have it. You have a great set of SEO plugins to choose from. If you have another SEO plugin that you use, please share it in the comments box below. I would love to hear what works for your website.
Until tomorrow…Day 9 of the Ultimate Blog Challenge!
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I routinely use the first two. I will be checking out the others. Thanks!
I have used the same top two above, but may be looking at trying out the Rank Math plugin in one of my test sites. I love simplicity!