There are many website factors that affect SEO or search engine optimisation. Some are simple, some more technical. Because different website software is coded differently, the platform you choose for your website makes a big difference. If you have a WordPress website, it’s already well structured for basic SEO, there are plenty of WordPress SEO plugins to make it a whole lot easier and efficient!

Let’s look at the top WordPress SEO plugins and how they can help you outrank your competitors.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

wordpress seo pluginsSEO expert Joost de valk is the developer of WordPress SEO by Yoast. Joost claims it is the most complete SEO plugin for WordPress available today. Over 4.5 million plus downloads and an average 4.7 star rating on WordPress.org means there are plenty of people that agree with him!

WordPress seo by yoast has an awesome onpage analysis which is powered by Linkdex. Tweak title tags, meta descriptions, and other on-page content optimization elements all with a nice preview function that predicts what your listing will look like in the search results.

Broken link checker

Broken links are bad for website navigation and search engine optimisation. This plugin checks your website content for broken links and missing images, and displays a notification if any are found.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin creates an XML sitemap for WordPress, which will help search engines like Google to better index your website. You can give Google a link to your XML sitemap using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

SEO Friendly Images

It’s best to manually edit your image ALT tags, but if you find this tends to be an afterthought, or not done at all, this plugin, automatically assigns image ALT and TITLE text so they are more easily understood by search engines. Just name your image files appropriately!

W3 Total Cache

Website speed is another important SEO factor. W3 Total Cache is a powerful caching plugin that compresses and optimises your website files for fast loading and website speed. This plugin covers everything from combining and minification of both CSS and JS files to browser caching and more.

Redirection

WordPress Redirection Plugin

Redirection is an easy interface to manage webpage redirects on your WordPress website. you can add redirects manually or you can upload a CSV file. This is especially handy for moving a website to a new domain or host or just tidying up any 404 errors from broken or moved webpages. You could just edit your .htaccess file but this plugin makes it much quicker and easier.

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

A critical part of any Website SEO is monitoring traffic and usage statistics via Google Analytics. The Google Analytics Dashboard for WP will display Google Analytics data and statistics inside your WordPress Dashboard.

This plugin connects with your Google Analytics API, so if you already have a Google analytics account set up, you’ll easily able to check all of your visitor information directly on your site.

Simply installing some of these plugins will help with SEO, but to use them effectively you should learn a little about website optimisation.