Best WordPress Plugins to Boost Your SEO

Are you looking for ways to make your WordPress site more powerful?

There’s no better way to do that than to boost your SEO. And instead of learning new things and making changes to old content or hiring a designer or programmer, you can simply install and activate the following WordPress plugins.

Yoast SEO

Also known as the #1 WordPress SEO Plugin, Yoast SEO is the tool that more than 5 million happy website owners are using.

The features it has, even in the free version, are amazing.

Once you install it, the plugin will guide you through the first steps and help you set it up. That includes creating an XML map so your site can be indexed, verifying your website with some of the biggest search engines, enabling or disabling archives and breadcrumbs, and using some of its social settings such as adding Open Graph metadata for Facebook and Twitter cards.

But what the tool does once you are preparing a blog post or page for publishing is even better.

You can easily add a new title for social media and search engines (a more appealing one), fix your meta description and see how it will look in a Google snippet, write your focus keyword and see how well the article is optimized and what changes you can make to boost on-page SEO.

Here’s what Mario Peshev, CEO of Devrix, says about it:

“Yoast’s internal link suggestions is among my most favorite SEO features within the WordPress dashboard. Maintaining thousands of posts on relevant topics is a maze consuming your energy – until you employ your own assistant that scans your content and offers you relevant articles to link internally. All of that within the comfort of your own editorial screen!”

Broken Link Checker

The next practical step you can take as a WordPress site owner is to make it a habit to check for broken links. While that can be done with a free software on another platform and without a plugin, many people find it easy and simple to install Broken Link Checker.

It crawls all the links on your site and detects the ones that need fixing. Then, you can update them in bulk and either delete them or take another action.

W3 Total Cache

Caching is important. In fact, experts suggest that one of the first things you do when you’re setting up your site is to install a caching plugin. And W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular ones.

It will immediately increase website performance and boost SEO. Caching plugins are important for user experience too as they reduce download time thanks to a content delivery network and browser caching.

When a page loads faster, a visitor is less likely to hit the ‘Back’ button and thus affect your bounce rate negatively. So expect happier users on your site who have a good experience on every page, even on mobile devices.

Smush Image Compression and Optimization

The next thing you should take care of is the visual content on your platform. Optimizing images is often as important as optimizing text. You need to make sure they are compressed in order to save space and load them fast, and that they have Alt text that basically tells search engines what the image is about (which is where you can add keywords to rank this higher and thus bring more attention to the blog post or page itself).

A great tool to use to do that is Smush Image Compression and Optimization. The plugin is used by more than 1 million WordPress site owners and resizes all of your previous images automatically, as well as any new ones you add to your site the moment that happens. It does all the job for you. You just need to install and activate it.

There are many plugins you’ll start hearing about once you set new goals for your website, do a research, and network with other bloggers and website owners. To get an immediate boost in your SEO, though, all you need to do is install the 4 powerful tools listed above.

Once your site is optimized and starts ranking higher, you will be able to focus all your attention on content creation and distribution, finding new leads, and selling your products.

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Georgi Todorov is a digital marketer. He recently started his own blog about digital marketing called DigitalNovas. His passion is to help startups grow and thrive in a competitive environment. Hit him up on Linkedin or Twitter under @GeorgiTodorovBG.