Search engines are a major source of traffic for most websites. That’s why our users often ask us for SEO tips and plugins that can help improve SEO of their WordPress sites. In this article, we will share 9 best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that will improve SEO of your website.
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
It is one of the most downloaded WordPress plugin of all times. Yoast’s WordPress SEO is a comprehensive solution for all your on-site SEO needs.
It allows you to add SEO title, meta description, and meta keywords to each post and page of your site.
You can also write custom title for your main site, archives, category and tag pages. It also adds Open Graph meta data, Twitter Cards, Sitemaps and ping search engines whenever you update your site.
The list of features for WordPress SEO is extremely long. Check out why we use WordPress SEO on WPBeginner and all our websites. After that, head over to learnhow to install and setup WordPress SEO plugin.
Once you do that, then look at our tips for optimizing your blog posts.
2. SEMrush
SEMRush is a tool that Pros use to gather analytics and insights from their competitor’s to help improve their own SEO.
You can learn about organic keywords to rank for, places where you can get backlinks from, insights into your competitor’s advertising strategies, and so much more.
SEMrush is a paid subscription and is used by thousands of SEO professionals all over the world. It can provide you an enormous wealth of data.
3. Google Keyword Planner
No one on the planet has more insights into what people are searching for than the search giant Google.
Did you know that you can get your own keyword ideas from Google itself by using the Google Keyword Planner tool.
This free tool is offered to Google’s advertisers for free and anyone can use it. It’s main purpose is to show advertisers the keywords they can bid on for their advertising campaigns. It also helps advertisers choose right keywords by showing them an estimate of search volume, number of results, and difficulty level.
As a content marketer or blogger, you can use this data to find keywords with high search volume, high advertiser interest, and more importantly keywords where you can easily outrank all other sites.
4. KeywordTool.io
Keyword Tool is one of the best free keyword research tool available right now. It allows you to simply generate keyword ideas by typing in a keyword. These keyword suggestions are gathered from Google’s auto suggest feature.
These keyword suggestions are a treasure of information. Google autocomplete suggest keywords based on how often a keyword is used for the search. This means that the top most results are the most frequently searched terms on Google for that particular keyword.
Keyword Tool is amazingly fast, and most importantly it is completely free for anyone to use. You can use it to optimize content on your WordPress site. It also allows you to get keyword suggestions from YouTube, Bing, and App Store as well.
5. Open Site Explorer
Developed by Moz, this free tool allows you to check data for any domain name. You can see who is linking to that domain and what anchor texts they are using. Apart from that, Open Site Explorer offers a wealth of information like top pages, linking domains, which pages are linked on your site, etc.
This tool is free, but has daily search limits for each person.
To unlock the full power, you would need a Moz Pro Subscription which also gets you access to their other tools as well.
6. LinkPatrol
LinkPatrol is a premium WordPress plugin which allows you to control all the links on your website.
You can monitor all the outgoing links on your site, find out which links are giving away link juice, and more.
LinkPatrol is less resource intensive than other free plugins that do the same job. It provides a quicker and efficient way to clean up all your anchor text, spammy links, and link juice problems with a very intuitive and super fast user interface.
See our tutorial on how to analyze your links in WordPress with LinkPatrol.
7. Broken Link Checker
Broken links can not only create bad experience for your users, but they can also affect your site’s SEO. If you have been running a blog for sometime, then you should check your site from time to time for broken links and fix them.
Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to find broken links on your WordPress site. You can then fix those links without even editing your posts. See our tutorial on how to fix broken links in WordPress with Broken Link Checker.
It is a highly useful plugin, and its totally free. The only downside is that it can become resource intensive and may slow down your server. Some hosting providers like WPEngine has already blocked this plugin on their servers.
8. Rel NoFollow Checkbox
When you link to an external site, you are giving away some of your site’s authority to that link. If you don’t want do that, then you can add a nofollow attribute to that link.
In fact, you can even make all external links nofollow in WordPress. But this might not be a great idea. Sometime you may want to give a dofollow link to truly helpful sites.
Rel NoFollow Checkbox is a simple WordPress plugin which adds a checkbox in the insert link popup of WordPress post editor. This popup already has a check box which allows you to open links in new tab. Now whenever you are adding an external link you can easily make it nofollow by simply checking a box.
See our tutorial how to add a nofollow checkbox to insert link section in WordPress for detailed instructions.
9. SEOquake
SEOquake is a SEO tool available as browser addon for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari web browsers. It provides SEO related information for any website. These information parameters include page rank, age, last updated, alexa rank, and many other parameters. It is one of the most downloaded browser addon by SEO professionals.
Apart from that, SEOquake toolbar can show you all these parameters for all the search results. This information can be extremely useful if you are gauging competition for different keywords. You can even download search results in CSV format and prepare your own excel sheets of search data.
Bonus SEO Tips for WordPress Site Owners
Site speed is one of the many important factors in search rankings. Fast loading sites can easily outrank slower websites. While you are spending a lot of time improving your content strategy, give some of that time to improve your site speed.
Make sure your WordPress site loads fast. You can check your site speed on tools like Google Page Speed and Pingdom.
Always install and setup a caching plugin on your WordPress site. We recommend using W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. To give your site speed even more boost, you can set up a CDN service to work with your caching plugin. At WPBeginner and on all our websites, we use MaxCDN. It greatly improves our page load times.
You should also upload optimized images only. Images can affect your site’s speed and by optimizing them you can significantly improve your sites performance.
Lastly, if none of these tips are improving your page speed, then its most likely your web host’s fault. You need to move to a better WordPress hosting provider. We recommend using Siteground because they have fully optimized servers to run WordPress sites. If you want managed WordPress hosting, then we recommend either Pagely or WPEngine.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Google+.
This was 9 Best WordPress SEO Plugins and Tools That You Should Use