Today, most of businesses are promoting their goods and services via the Internet. Both the large and small scale companies are adopting online marketing technique to boost their reputation across the nation. And, with the help of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques you can increase the ranking of your sites on all popular search engine sites, such as Google, Bing and more.
Over the last few years, SEO has developed and is continuing to develop. With the help of SEO techniques, you can improve your user experience, and also boost the productivity of your site.
If your visitors are not getting an excellent experience, then they might leave your site and never come back. That’s why in this blog, we will not just explore the top WordPress SEO plugins that can help you get the technical aspects right, but also plugins that will leave a positive impact on your WordPress site’s usability.
Free WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the best plugins that can help you add essential features to make your site more SEO-friendly. However, there have been many bugs in the recent versions, but the best thing about the plugin is that Joost de Valk and the team from Yoast do a nice job of quickly patching up the plugin and releasing bug fixes for any issues that come up.
Features:
- Manage your site’s meta data at a per post/page level
- It manages over how search engines list your post types & taxonomies
- Page analysis functionally offered by Linkdex
- Creates XML sitemaps
- Develops your RSS feeds
- Enables you to include breadcrumbs for developed indexing and usability
- Import and export support for settings
- It support for Twitter card meta data
- Support for Facebook Open Graph meta data
- And, also support for Google Authorship
WP Social SEO Booster
Well, there are various number of plugins that can help you include a few lines of meta data, kinds of rich snippets and other structured data, but WP Social SEO Booster is one of the most used plugin. This plugin offers a settings page that enables you to manage the top level Open Graph Settings, star ratings and Authorship mark-up.
When you view your individual posts, you will get the option to adjust your Open Graph settings and find out your individual rich snippets. Moreover, there is also a pro version of WP Social SEO Booster plugin that includes extra features, such as Twitter cards.
Features:
- It supports review, business, product, recipes, people, videos, software and event rich snippets
- It supports Open Graph at the post level
- You can disable or enables the plugin on an individual page/post basis
- Support for Google Authorship
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is a WordPress SEO plugin that can automatically optimize your WordPress blog for Search Engines such as Google.
Who can forget this plugin? The All in One SEO Pack is one of the most popular WordPress plugins developed and released specifically for SEO purposes. Aside from the numerous features and options, this plugin is always maintained and frequently updated by the developer.
Features:
- XML Sitemap support – submit your sitemap to Google and Bing and improve your SEO
- Google Analytics support
- Support for SEO on Custom Post Types
- Advanced Canonical URLs
- Fine tune Page Navigational Links
- Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
- ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
- Nonce Security built into All in One SEO Pack
- Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
- Automatically optimizes your titles for Google and other search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blog
Add Meta Tags
Add Meta Tags is a plugin that adds basic meta tags and also Opengraph, Schema.org Microdata, Twitter Cards and Dublin Core metadata to optimize your web site for better SEO.
Features:
- Generation of basic meta tags, such as the description and keywords meta tags
- Supports the generation of metadata for embedded media (only a subset of the embeddable media in WordPress are supported)
- The metadata generators support social media profile links for each author
- Custom locale setting, which is used in all generated metadata
- Generation of a HTML link with the hreflang attribute according to the locale of the content
Supports both the default ‘latest posts’ front page or static pages, which are used as the front page and as the ‘latest posts’ page.
Free WordPress Plugins That Improve Website Usability
Quick Post/Page Redirect Plugin
Quick Post/Page Redirect Plugin is a plugin that allows users to easily redirect pages/posts or custom post types to another page/post or external URL by specifying the redirect URL and type (301, 302, 307, meta).
Features:
- Works with WordPress Nav Menus and WordPress Custom Post Types
- Add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the page or menu item link for the redirect
- Re-write the URL for the redirect so it takes the place of the original URL
- Redirect without needing to create a Page or Post using Quick Redirects. This is useful for sites that were converted to WordPress and have old links that create 404 errors
- Request URL can be a full URL path, the post or page ID, permalink or page slug
- Option Screen to set global overrides like turning off all redirects at once, setting a global destination link, make all redirects open in a new window, etc.
- View a summary of all redirected pages/posts, custom post types and Quick Redirects that are currently set up
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache boosts the user experience of your website by increasing server performance, minimizing the download times and offering transparent CDN integration.
Page load times of a site always play a critical role. And, we know that the speed of a page is worked into Google’s algorithm, but you possibly will not get a direct ranking improvement from boosting your site’s page load times.
If your website is having a high bounce rate or users are repeatedly pogo sticking (it occurs when a user performs a search, click on a particular result and very quickly go back to the search result page, and clicks on a different result), you can use W3 Total Cache plugin for such a situation and prevent it from happening again. It is a jam-packed speed booster plugin that offers in-depth customization options.
Features:
- Support CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Caching of page
- Caching of database
- Caching of Object
- It offers minifying options
- Provides Debug options
- Import & export of your settings
- And many more
Search Everything
Search Everything enhances WordPress default functionality without even modifying any of the template pages. It enables you to take some control over how the internal search performs on your website by including some in-depth configuration option.
Features:
- It highlights keyword in search
- Custom taxonomies support
- Exclude posts and categories from search
- Search every Draft
- Search every custom field
- Search every page and tag
- And more
Simple URLs
This plugin is a fully URL management system that enables you to create, organize and track outbound links from your website by using 301 redirects and custom post types.
Features:
- Uses custom post fields to track clicks and this would decrease load on your server
- Add your URL and redirect then publish
Use Google Libraries
Use Google Libraries plugin enables your website to utilize common JavaScript libraries from Google’s Ajax Libraries CDN, instead of WordPress’s own copies. In other words, it enables you to access Google’s AJAX libraries Content Distribution Network so that the large numbers of JavaScript libraries will be served from it, instead of your own site.
Use Google Libraries plugin that supports the following libraries and components:
- MooTools
- jQuery & jQuery UI
- Dojo
- Prototype and more
Conclusion
In this post, we explored some of the most useful WordPress SEO plugins that can help you to boost your site’s ranking or improve the usability (user experience) of your site.
Among the plugins listed above, two of them are currently being used here on JaypeeOnline. Those plugins are Yoast SEO and W3 Total Cache. These tools have definitely helped improved the overall performance of the blog not only in terms of SEO but also the user experience.
Anyone of you guys use one or several of the plugins included in the list? Do you know of other good WordPress plugins that can help improve a blog or website’s SEO and user experience? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
This is a guest contribution by Lucy Barret, a WordPress Developer at a leading WordPress Development Company, WPGeeks Ltd. She has a team of experienced WordPress developers who are working hard to meet the requirements of their clients and are dedicated to achieve 100% client satisfaction. You can follow her company on various social media platforms like Facebook and Google+.
