I’ve complied this list of my best SEO plugins for WordPress to download and install for your website or blog. Can you believe I first started writing this post on the 28th of September 2009! I never really got the time to finish writing it until now.
Post Update April 2012: I’ve updated some of the plugins to reflect what I use and recommend in 2012. (Formerly, I previously used the AllinOne SEO plugin to handle my title tags and meta descriptions. I now use WordPress SEO by Joost De Valk. It is the only SEO plugin I could ever recommend to my clients and readers).
All these plugins have been developed for one sole reason, to allow you to improve your SEO on your WordPress site with little or no SEO knowledge. It does helps if you understand how to use these plugins to your advantage, however they will help you, even with a limited or basic knowledge of SEO.
If you need help understanding the basics of SEO, I suggest you read my blog post 10 Golden Rules of Search Engine Optimisation.
The Top 5 SEO Plugins for WordPress
1. WordPress SEO
WordPress SEO is hands down the BEST SEO plugin you can install on WordPress. Why? It does everything, from helping you to optimse your title tags and meta descriptions better, to helping you analyse your optimisation of your content and how well it is structured for your keywords that you are targeting. It will also help you with indexing and contains easy setup to create a Google Sitemap. This is for Google to allow it to index and crawl your site more quickly. Even Novice WordPress users can get the hang of it. (Note: I don’t add meta keywords into any website code anymore, since Google stop reading them). This plugin will also auto-generate meta descriptions for you based on your post content, though I don’t recommend auto-generating anything.
2. Google Analytics for WordPress
Joost De Valk, or Yoast as he’s know online, is the king of WordPress SEO. I’ve been an avid reader of Joost’s blog now for a while and his Google analytics plugin is one, if not the most popular WordPress plugin out there. Joost’s plugin allows you to easily add the Google analytics tracking code to your website. I am an absolute believer in measurement, measurement and more measurement. Google analytics is a free web analytics tool,which will help you track your search engine traffic and referring links so you can monitor, A. What referring links you are getting? B. What Keywords people are finding you by? and C: How much traffic comes from search engines?
3. Broken Link Checker
Having broken links on your website isn’t good for your search engine optimisation, you don’t want to linking to old website that aren’t active either. How do you think you’re visitors would feel if they found a useful link on blog, clicked on it, and it went to 404 page or a website that didn’t exist anymore. Worry not my friends, the Broken Link Checker plugin will help tell you where the broken links are on your website, it’s really useful and it will even e-mail you reports to let you know if it finds any new broken links, it will even find missing images too. Totally clever stuff!
4. Google Site Verification Plugin
When doing SEO it is important to setup Google Webmaster SEO tools in order for you to keep an eye on your website health, if Google detects any problems when crawling or indexing your website. It will even help you monitor page load times so you can improve your user experience. This plugin will help you verify your website or blog with Google automatically and in seconds!.
5.Keyword Statistics
This plugin can do very much the same as the All in One SEO plugin. I wouldn’t recommend running both plugins together, unless you know to customise the Keyword Statistics plugin settings. Essentially, I only use this plugin to track the density of keywords that I’ve written into my blog posts. It works extremely well, by telling you what the highest count for single words, 2 word phrases and 3 word phrases are. Useful for determining how effective your blog post is written in terms of keyword density.
Hopefully, these plugins will help you improve your own search engine optimisation on your own WordPress website. Good luck!
