My Favorite WordPress SEO Plugins

WordPress is quickly becoming a technology that touches most people’s lives in some way or another.  One thing about websites that’s important to remember… if you build it, they might not come.  You need to take Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into consideration.

WordPress itself was built with SEO in mind, and if you use a good theme, you’re probably set from a technical SEO perspective.  However, Google keeps saying “Content is King” because they are leaning more and more heavily on content quality in their ranking factors.  That’s why it’s important to have tools that help you write SEO-friendly content.

I won’t get any deeper into the discussion of SEO for now, but I want to offer my two cents on my favorite plugins for WordPress that help you better optimize your WordPress website’s content for search engines (meaning Google).

So without further ado…

Yoast SEO

While the world of SEO is changing every week and it seems as though the old style of SEO is dead, there is still a lot of value in having a plugin like this.  WordPress SEO by Yoast doesn’t try to automate SEO or do any “tricks” that make your site get more traffic.  Instead, it is a tool that is there to help you, the author, as you try to properly structure your content for SEO.

Meta keywords are dead, so instead, this plugin has a “Focus Keyword” field.  Type a simple keyword or short search phrase on which you are trying to focus your post.  It’s doesn’t use that for anything other than judging your post in various ways giving you tips on what you can do to improve your post’s content to focus on your keyword.

It also give you a spot to type in your SEO Title and Meta Description which are use in Google’s search engine results page (SERP).  It even gives you a preview of that as a Snippet Preview.

WordPress SEO (by Yoast)

SEO Smart Links

This one does do some automation to help save you time.  You configure it with a few settings, and it will automatically find any content in your posts that match tags that are associated with more content, and it will create the hyperlink for you.

Whether or not this actually helps SEO, I’m not convinced.  But it helps with cross linking content within your own site which is a good thing for user experience, reducing bounce rate, and increasing page views.

But a word of caution, make sure to set the “number of times a tag is used” threshold high enough, otherwise, your posts may start to get littered with links if you tend to use a lot of tags.

SEO Smart Links

Redirection

301 redirects are an important part of any SEO strategy, especially if you redesign your site or simply rename some categories.

Instead of getting into your .htaccess file and coding the 301 redirects yourself, this WordPress plugin gives you a nice and easy way to setup and manage your redirects from the comfort of WordPress.  It also keeps track of hits that each redirect receives.

I do, however, wish this plugin had more features.  I which I could search by either the keywords in the source URL or the target URL.  I also wish I could filter by whether or not the redirects use regular expression.

Redirection

Schema.org Rich Text Snippets

This one’s not a specific plugin because I haven’t found one that I really like.  But rich text snippets are an important part of SEO because it’s an open standard way of using meta data in your content to tell Google more context about your content.

You can declare what type of document it is and you can even use it in pieces of your content to call out a 5-star rating area, event details, a person’s contact information, product info and price, etc.

If anyone out there knows of a good plugin to do this intuitively within the WordPress editor without appending a duplicate piece of content to the bottom of the page, please share!  Thanks.

So, what do you think?

Do you know of WordPress SEO plugins that are better alternatives to mine?  Or, do you have more to add?

I would love for you to share in the comments below!

Want More WordPress Tips?

Check out my other blog, WPForTheWin.com, for lots of tips to supercharge your WordPress site.