WordPress Plugins to Meet Various Essential Parameters of SEO

Every website requires efficient optimization to earn high ranking in the SERPs. However, the task of optimizing the site becomes more difficult if the CMS platform, on which you are building your site, does not offer the necessary tools. That is why WordPress proves to be the most popular CMS for web development nowadays. With an extensive repository of plug-ins and tools available for WordPress, you can practically add any feature or functionality you want to your website.

When it comes to SEO, a few major parameters determine the overall performance of a website and its ranking on the search engines. To make things simpler, we will categorize the plugins according to the purpose they serve. The categories are as below.

1. Generic SEO plugins

2. Plugins for indexation

3. Internal linking SEO plugins

4. SEO plugins for external links
5. Plugins for on-page SEO

Let’s have a look at the most popular WordPress SEO plug-ins in each category. The good news is that all these plugins are available to you for free!

All-purpose SEO plugins

You can call these the Swiss army knives in WordPress SEO, and you may be seeing the first couple of names in almost all WordPress SEO articles. Each of these plugins offers an array of unique features. You may not need all of these. Therefore, you need to decide which are the right ones for you based on your requirements.

‘WordPress SEO by Yoast’ and the ‘All in One SEO Pack’ are the ultimate favorites of almost all WordPress website developers who want to incorporate the SEO benefits. Both of these plugins have the ability to manage a myriad of technical on-page SEO elements. You can do tasks like:
Tweak the title tags of web page

Custom create meta descriptions
Optimize content

Generate the essentials elements of on-page content optimization

Create SEO optimized XML sitemaps

Manage the canonical tags

Yoast also features a user-friendly preview which will show you how the site would look like in the search results. All in One claims to be the only SEO pack which provides SEO Integration for the e-com WordPress sites.

SEO Ultimate is not as popular as the previous one, but it has got some fantastic features like Deeplink Juggernaut. It can crawl the entire site content for appropriate keyword phrases and automatically link them to a particular URL. It is an interesting feature if used judiciously to gain SEO value, but there is a scope of generating spam links if over-used.

Platinum SEO Pack is another popular SEO pack, featuring metadata auto generation. However, experts suggest that you should manually tweak everything that is auto-generated to be double-sure about it.

Indexation

Apart from the above all purpose plug-ins, with the specific requirement of indexation in hand, you can consider the following plug-ins.

Simple 301 Redirects and Redirection are two of the major WP plugins allowing you 301 redirect of any URL on the site. The Simple 301 Redirects also features bulk upload in ‘.csv’ format, which is useful for URL changes, redesigns, and platform migrations.

The Google XML Sitemaps offers the feature of creating updated XML sitemaps and posting them on a regular basis. For bigger sites, Vision Smash SEO Website experts suggest BWP (Better WordPress) Google XML Sitemaps.

Internal linking

The navigation plugins with internal linking SEO benefits help to strengthen the link network with which the link authority highlights the contextual relationship between various pages.

Breadcrumb is the leading plug-in which does exactly what you want in this regard by inserting breadcrumb links to your pages. The advanced Breadcrumb NavXT helps to make the standard navigational elements much more efficient.

Gecka Submenu helps to add the submenu links to the navigational menus automatically as you create new pages. It helps to strengthen the internal linking protocol by allowing the developers to use a chunk of navigation anywhere on the site.

WordPress Popular Posts and My Posts Order are both used to set the priority order of the posts and allow you to custom create the internal links to the posts which are already popular.

If you want to gain more control on tag cloud navigation, it is ideal to experiment with Simple Link List Widget. You can create multiple lists with it, each with a custom set of options.

Since Google has an increased focus on the context as a relevant signal in search engine rankings, it is becoming essential to create links to other pertinent posts. The most appropriate plugins for this purpose are:

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
Related Posts for WordPress by Microkid

Contextual Related Posts by WebberZone

External linking

There are a few handy plugins that encourage the visitors to share content and increases content visibility among a larger group. Many of those who get this shared content may take action in your favor, and resharing increases your level of acceptance.

Shareaholic features the horizontal row of sharing widgets with the feature to add related content. Sharebar also offers a horizontal or vertical module with sharing icons that follow the customer movements by scrolling up and down on the page.

AddToAny and ShareThis both offer a unique button which activates when clicked to display sharing options to merely any social network.

On-page optimization

As discussed, the all-purpose plugins also cover features of on-page optimization such as changing title tags from page to page.

However, if you want to do specific tasks like editing title tags and meta descriptions, it is ideal to try SEO Title Tag by Stephan Spencer. It allows you to edit just the meta descriptions and title tags on a single interface. You may just have to paste your content from MS Word document or Excel sheet instantly.

Hope that you have now found many of the handy SEO plugins to enhance the search engine performance of your WP site. Feel free to post your comments or raise queries about WP SEO Expert in the comment field below.

Author Bio: Jim Kocher is an SEO expert cum writer, offering consulting services through Vision Smash SEO Website. He started his career back in 1998 and held many SEO management positions at various organizations.