Improving your WordPress website SEO rankings is a highly effective way to drive traffic to your site. While WordPress provides great built-in SEO features, but using a dedicated SEO plugin can help optimize a post/page of your WP site for receiving more traffic. However, with thousands of WordPress plugins available online, finding the most suitable SEO plugins for your site can be overwhelming and challenging.
To help you figure out the best SEO plugin, I’ve listed a few free and premium plugins that can boost your site’s SEO in 2016 and beyond.
SEO by SQUIRRLY is one great plugin that not only help in making a website search engine friendly, but also make the site user-friendly. In fact, it helps boost a website’s search engine ranking, by providing great content to readers.
The popularity of this plugin can be estimated from the fact that: the popular online marketing expert Neil Patel and several content marketing experts recommend using the SEO by SQUIRRLY plugin. What’s more? Many e-commerce, review sites, etc. using the SEO Plugin By Squirrly have observed over 285 percent increase in their number of readers.
With this plugin, you get the ability to track your site’s SEO stats, get to know about the best keywords, and helps create an SEO audit report on a weekly basis. It comes bundled with amazing features such as:”lower your traffic”
- Help monitors the progress of your article on a weekly basis.
- Track the performance of your content marketing strategy to guide you in improving your website’s SEO.
- The plugin focus on improving search engine ranking of a site, by optimizing its content using various tools.
- Help to find suitable keywords for optimizing website content for search engines. Also, it helps provide headline suggestions on the basis of your SEO keyword and much more.
You can download this plugin for free from the official WordPress Plugin Directory.
2. SmartCrawl
Let’s face it, content still proves the best source to drive traffic. Perhaps, you might focus on adding quality content in your website or blog to encourage users to visit your site. But, you also need to ensure that users can easily locate your content, or else even good content won’t help in increasing your website traffic. This is where the SmartCrawl plugin comes in handy.
Created by WPMU Dev, the SmartCrawl plugin makes the process of finding content on search engines easy. Some great features of this plugin are:
- Automated Sitemap Generator: The plugin lets users discover your content by sharing updates with search engines automatically, using the automated sitemap generator.
- Moz Integration: SmatCrawl allows users to connect to Moz using a free account for receiving SEO reports.
- Customize Titles and Description: Help make changes to how the titles and descriptions of your page looks on the search screens.
- Automatic Keyword Linking: This feature, link keywords to a page or a post automatically.
This is a premium plugin and costs $19 per month.
The significance of internal linking in improving SEO is no more a secret. Simply placing keyword-rich keywords in your site won’t be of much use if there is no way that can help search engine crawlers find the text. But, linking web pages to each other can affect your search engine rankings. And, when it comes to performing internal linking, I personally find the SEO Smart Link plugin worth a try.
You just need to install the plugin, and it will automatically provide SEO benefits by linking the keywords and phrases in your comment section and blog posts with other posts, categories, etc. on your blog. In addition, you also get the ability to setup your own keywords, nofollow attribute.
Most importantly, the SEO Smart Links plugin perfectly suit the need to interlink your posts or for adding affiliate links to any other website.
Remember that optimizing your site’s images not just requires obtaining correct information, but it is also important that the images load quickly. That’s because, the more time an image will take to load, the more slow your page loading time will be which impact search ranking. And so, it becomes needful to optimize your images. For this purpose, you can consider using the WP Smush plugin.
Using heavy image files can slow down your website speed. The problem is that you might not even know about such a situation. However, the WP Smush scans all the uploaded – or the ones you are about to upload to your site – and eliminates the unnecessary bloat.
In essence, the WP Smush plugin helps in reducing the size of all your image files, improve website performance and thus boost SEO. The plugin is created by WPMU DEV and available for free. A few awesome features that this plugin offers are:
- Make use of advanced lossless compression techniques for optimizing images.
- Allows you to manually “smush” your image file attachments either one-by-one or in bulk (at least 50 attachments at a time) in the media library.
- Helps process image files of different formats such as JPEG, GIF and PNG.
Broken links in your web pages returns a 404 Error which is not good from SEO point of view. The 404 error code shows that the requested page by the search engine crawlers do not exist. Moreover, nothing frustrate visitors more than finding broken links in a site, which is likely to lower your traffic. As the name suggests, the Broken Link Checker plugin enables you to all of the broken links on your WordPress powered blog.
In case your posts receive plenty of comments, then after a while you may end up having hundreds of thousands of broken links. But, the Broken Link Checker helps evaluate all of your blog URL’s and provide a detailed report about all the broken links.
What’s more? The plugin helps detect missing images as well as all the redirections. How quickly the plugin will help find broken links in your posts or pages depend on how big your site is. Let’s look at some other features of this plugin:
- Notifies about broken links by displaying information on your website admin dashboard or by email.
- Stop the search engine bots from following broken links.
- You can edit the links in your posts from the plugin’s page, instead of having to update each post manually.
- It is totally free to use.
At times, visitors may end up visiting your site when following a link in your post. But, if that post is not of much use to them, they will immediately exit from your site. However, you can keep your visitors engaged with your website by recommending them some posts – that might be of their interest. In fact, chances are that your readers might even share your posts which helps in bringing more unique visitors, thereby improving search engines (such as Google’s) understanding of your content. To accomplish such an objective, I use the free-to-download Yet Another Related Post Plugin.
The YARPP plugin automatically finds relevant articles, in a better way compared to other post related plugins, and then display those posts at the end of a post. It comes loaded with several great features such as:
- Provide customization options to style the posts.
- Help show posts in thumbnail or listview to get more clicks.
- It makes use of a versatile algorithm that uses custom taxonomies, categories, post titles, etc. – to find related content anywhere from your site.
Wrapping Up
Though the post doesn’t provide a comprehensive list of SEO plugins, but you’ll get to know about some of the best plugins that you shouldn’t miss to use for improving your WordPress site’s SEO for 2016.
Author Bio:
Samuel Dawson is a PSD to WordPress developer in Designs2html Ltd. He has 10+ years of experience in basic and advance WordPress development and design techniques. He is also a technical writer who loves to write on Front End development technologies and CMS.
from http://monalisaofblogging.com/top-best-wordpress-site-seo-plugins-for-2016
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Let us get into the thick of it as they say... Now these are not just fluff stuff that will slow your blog down. These are actually the #1 things that can grow traffic to your blog and make your blog 200-500% better than where it currently sits if you're flying-solo without any at all.
Time to dive in!
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