Positioning your website to be Search Engine Optimised (SEO) friendly can be a very daunting task depending on the industry you are operating in. Once you figure out SEO strategy and start receiving traffic from search engines, it’s one of the most stable sources of traffic versus social traffic.
There are several facets of SEO and it can get really confusing when you are trying to make sure all the aspects are covered. Some hire various experts to help and one of the areas that we also specialise here at WPLobster is helping our clients with SEO. Feel free to contact us anytime with your SEO needs.
Even though figuring out SEO for a website whether it’s new or old can be hard, using WordPress gives you an advantage. The good thing about WordPress is that there are several good plugins that have been developed and well supported to help website owners with the challenge of creating search engine optimised sites.
In this post, we have selected the 7 (seven) best SEO plugins for WordPress in 2017 which we usually recommend to our clients and how they can improve your website’s overall SEO standing.
1. The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework is currently one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins. It is in the top 3% of most-used plugins, with over 20,000 installations while consistently maintaining a 5-star rating. It’s also 100% free: This means it’s free of ads, nags and upsells. All without holding anything back. It is hard to get a complete package like this.
The SEO Framework plugin provides an easy to use, fully automated and advanced SEO solution to your WordPress website. The plugin is renowned for quality coding, performance, and stability and it is seen as the go-to alternative for the market leaders “Yoast SEO” and “All In One SEO Pack”.
For non-technical folks, The SEO Framework provides a very user-friendly UI and easy-to-understand boxes for getting your website SEO ready. It covers the basics of SEO including titles, descriptions, tags, index tags etc. It is fully open source and the code comes highly recommended. The SEO Framework plugin is one of the plugins we recommend to all our clients.
View and Download2. WooCommerce – All in One SEO Pack
This plugin is particularly important for e-commerce websites using the very popular WooCommerce WordPress plugin. This plugin works with a companion SEO plugin used for setting up SEO on a website.
It extends the All in One SEO Pack Plugin which was developed by Michael Torbert and is described in this post below and is used to display the All in One SEO Pack dialogue window on the Add/Edit Products screen within WooCommerce.
Without this Plugin, you cannot add/edit/manage All in One SEO Pack meta details which are why I developed this solution. If you are running an e-commerce website with the WooCommerce plugin, this plugin is highly recommended.
View and Download3. Premium SEO Pack
The Premium SEO Pack WordPress plugin a is a paid premium plugin which is currently sold on Code Canyon. For a paid plugin you can rest assured that it delivers a ton of functionality that easily makes it worth paying for. Of all the features, aside from providing rich snippet integration, video sitemap, and local SEO one of its most notable features is that it can help you compress CSS and JS to help you improve your site’s load speeds which is quickly becoming a ranking factor for Google.
As described in the video above, you will notice that the plugin also packs in bulk optimisation for your WordPress pages and posts to make things less time consuming and simple. The plugin also helps you to create an XML sitemap, show you stats from Google Analytics at the convenience of your dashboard, and also helps you to monitor and redirect all the 404 pages.
One last feature that this plugin provides is the Social Network growth. This feature is crucial in gauging your ranking on the search engine ladder. It, itself is also an important source for traffic, and luckily, Premium SEO Pack keeps tabs on the size and growth rate of your social network. You can also interlink your content, provide ALT tag to your images and use a built in 301 redirect module to handle all the links on your website.
View and Download4. SEOPressor Connect – WordPress SEO Plugin
The SEOPressor Connect made this list because it has a lot of features that most of the other plugins don’t provide. The SEOPressor Connect plugin scans your whole WordPress website and gathers the data of completed, incomplete, and missing SEO points to optimise the website and make it more search engine friendly. All the scan metrics are provided in an easy to read dashboard.
Some of the metrics that this plugin provides include Keywords Analysis, Usage of Schema, Meta Tag suggestions, smart-linking, 301 link redirections, OpenGraph and Twitter Card validation and Canonical URL tags.
Once very important metric that this plugin also provides is SEO trends which can be useful for providing insights into the direction of various keywords and competition.
View and Download5. SmartCrawl
SmartCrawl is another paid premium WordPress SEO plugin developed by WPMUDEV. SmartCrawl provides four main features are sitemaps, Moz integration, Title and Meta tags customization and Automatic Links. It has a very visually aethetic user-friendly interface and simple set-up, saving content creators time when publishing posts and pages.
The plugin can be downloaded by joining WPMUDEV (fees start at $49.50/month) or a one-time fee of $19.
View and Download6. WordPress SEO
Thw WordPress SEO plugin is a very simple SEO plugin and requires very minimal setup after instaltion and works right out of the box. This WordPress plugin which stands out only for its Google Authorship and Google Analytics integration.
In addition to all these feature, the plugin includes most of the SEO features including keyword, title and meta optimization, XML sitemaps, Breadcrumbs, Google and Bing Webmaster Tools Verification.
View and Download7. SEO Squirrly
Squirrly SEO is a WordPress SEO plugin that ensures content is optimized for both search engines and readers. It’s a plugin that is best suited for the average user with little to no SEO knowledge, however, having a basic knowledge of SEO helps when configuring the plugin.
The one thing about this plugin that makes it worthwhile is that it provides real-time SEO advice while writing blog posts, with green indicators letting the writer know their SEO is covered. It also provides analytics for posts and pages on a weekly basis. If you don’t know the first thing about SEO but want to improve it for your site, this plugin will help you out a lot.
Conclusion
We hope your learnt something new about the best plugin to use when you are looking to optimize your page for SEO. Feel free to reach out to one of our experts to talk about the best ways to optimize your website for SEO. If you enjoyed reading this article or it was a helpful resource, then please share it or leave a comment below and let us know what you think.
