I’m sure everyone has their “go to plugins” and so do I. In this article I am revealing my Top 7 SEO WordPress plugins. I am sure there are others that deserve to be on the list, but this is my view and opinion from my own experience. Also, these plugins are in no particular order as they all do different things, but they can all help with either your site’s speed or SEO in one way or another.
#1 Yoast SEO
This is by far one of the most popular plugins for SEO on WordPress. It is a great plugin to help specifically for on-page optimisation as you can easily edit the SEO Title and Meta Description. In addition, you can fill in your “Focus Keyword” to see how well optimised your page is for that keyword.
From experience, I wouldn’t worry too much about getting a green light. For those who don’t know, SEO Yoast have a traffic light system to indicate how well optimised your page is for your focus keyword. Green means it is well optimised, amber is okay, and red is not so good. Again, don’t worry too much about turning the light to green.
#2 WP Fastest Cache
This plugin is a great solution to improve website speed as it has numerous functions to help improve your website’s site speed. Firstly, as you can tell by its name, you can enable cacheing. In addition, the plugin allows you to minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but please check over your website when minifying because it can mess up the design or functionality on your site.
Site Speed is not necessarily an SEO factor, but it does improve user experience. Let’s face it, your users don’t want to wait 5-10 seconds for a page to load. In this day and age, people expect a fast and simple service with no errors.
#3 Scripts-To-Footer
This plugin is probably not as known as the ones mentioned so far. This plugin is very simple to set up and use. All you need to do is install the plugin and that’s pretty much it. The plugin moves all the scripts on your site and puts them in the footer. However, this can ruin the design or functionality on your website, so use this with caution.
If some functionality does break, simply disable the plugin to make them work again. If it doesn’t fix the problem, then you may need to contact your web hosting provider or web designer for help. Alternatively, if you took a backup of your site, you could restore your backup.
#4 Goolytics
Again, this plugin is nothing complicated and is very simple to use. There are many plugins that do pretty much the same thing, so there are alternatives, but this is a great plugin to make it easy to add Google Analytics to your website. There’s only one box you’ll need to touch and that’s the one where you paste your UA number from Analytics.
#5 EWWW Image Optimizer
This plugin is not necessarily for SEO, but again, it helps speed up your website when users are loading it. This image optimiser compresses your images to help load them faster. Now, you will lose some image quality, but I don’t normally see anything different, so in most cases, it will will be fine.
Make sure you use the Bulk Optimize as this will save you time. It will do all the images for you instead of making your way through them one by one.
#6 Wordfence
Okay, so this one is not really for SEO or even site speed, but it is still important. Wordfence is a great solution for improving the security on your website. Although it looks complicated to set up, it can protect your site from malicious hacks. If you experience a hack, then Google may highlight that in the search results. In addition, your site will start dropping in the search results.
Therefore, this plugin can be beneficial for your SEO. It should identify and remove any malicious file or highlight any potential issues immediately via email alerts. I hope you can see why I’ve included it in my Top 7 as it can help you avoid a Google penalty.
#7 Simple 301 Redirects
Finally, but not least, we have the Simple 301 Redirects plugin. This plugin is easy to use and is especially helpful if you change the URL of a page or remove one. It has two columns; the left one is the old URL and the right one is the new one. Simply put in the old URL then the new one you want it to redirect to. This is also a great way to solve any 404 errors on your site.
Note: There are plugins that will redirect all 404 errors to the home page, but this is not necessarily a good solution. Sometimes it is better to redirect the 404 error to the most appropriate page on your website, which may not be the home page.
Conclusion
So, that’s my Top 7 SEO WordPress Plugins. I will most likely write another article in the near future specifically about my top plugins for Site Speed, which I partly covered in this one. If you have any questions about WordPress or SEO, please feel free to contact our support team via email (support@peakplex.com).