New sites tend to rely heavily on search engine rankings to obtain visitors, but even established sites could use a good boost in web ranking when their site traffic plateaus. Fortunately, whether you’ve just created your first WordPress site or have been running it for years, these topnotch SEO plugins should give your site better recognition and visibility in no time.
- Yoast’s WordPress SEO – There’s a good reason why Yoast’s WordPress SEO consistently tops lists for the best SEO plugins for any WordPress site – it’s comprehensive and easy to use, giving you options to tweak your SEO title, meta description, and meta keywords for each page of your site. You also get a live preview for your changes, making it much easier to optimize your site. The features of this plugin exceed the scope of this article, but being one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins of all time, tutorials are quite common.
- RB Internal Links – While this plugin is a little dated (last updated about 2 years ago), it remains an indispensable tool that lets you create internal links using post ID instead of the actual URL of the site. This allows the URL to be changed dynamically, therefore reducing the chances of the user stumbling upon frustrating internal 404 errors.
- Simple URLs – this plugin allows you to track outbound links, and therefore give you better insight regarding the conversion rate of people who visit your site.
- W3 Total Cache – There’s always room for improvement when it comes to loading speed and site performance. That being said, W3 Total Cache lets you minify, combine, and optimize code for HTML, JS, CSS, etc., therefore boosting your site’s loading speed, performance, and responsiveness.
- Members – WordPress sites that give different types of possible actions to different users will want to control the type of access they get to some parts of the site. This plugin allows you to edit the current roles of the users and add new ones as needed.
- Google Libraries – Google undoubtedly has more bandwidth to spare, so it makes sense to delegate as much libraries as you can to Google’s servers. Furthermore, some users may already have some of Google’s libraries in their cache, therefore eliminating the need to download additional files, further improving your site’s performance.
- LinkPatrol – Link Patrol, as the name suggests, cleans up the links on your website, therefore helping you get rid of spammy and problematic links that either you or members of your site may have posted. While there are free plugins available that do the same thing, this one is less of a resource hog and is much quicker in cleaning up your site.
Conclusion
There are, of course, more plugins available out there that will help you boost your WordPress site’s ranking using SEO techniques, but no matter how well you optimize your site, if your web host is unreliable, other sites will easily outrank you. It’s a good idea to first try out all the plugins that help improve your site’s speed, then check if your site’s performance improves. If it doesn’t, find a new WordPress server. If it does, you can go ahead and try the other plugins listed.