Top WordPress Plugins To Improve Search Engine Visibility

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Google processes more than 40,000 search queries every second on an average. With more than 3.5 billion searches per day and more than 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide, it’s inevitable that people are looking for answers.

Customers are looking for solutions to their problems.

Your business solves one such problem. Chances are that your customers are looking for you.

If they are, they are searching on Google and other search engines. Modern day commerce starts from search.

Your website is the starting point for your business to get found on Google. Since there are about 130 trillion web pages already indexed on Google already, this only means that you have an uphill task to help make your website found on Google when users type in search terms that are relevant to your business.

SEO has changed over the years and there is a good chance most of those tactics that worked a few years ago would work today.

The emphasis for good SEO is the quality of backlinks and content along with a holistic approach to technical aspects of SEO such as speed of the website, link structures, and your website content schema.

Thankfully, WordPress is SEO friendly right out of the box. Plus, there are numerous tools, apps, and plugins that can help you in further optimization to give you enough control over how you’d like your pages to look in Google search results.

Here are some popular WordPress Plugins that help improve your website visibility in search engines:

WordPress SEO by Yoast

No list of WordPress plugins for SEO is ever complete without mentioning the popular WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. With a long list of features and an impeccable history of having helped many WordPress sites rise to the surface of search results, the plugin does it all.

Add SEO titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords to every post and page on your WordPress site. The plugin also adds Open Graph meta data, Twitter cards, sitemaps, and more.


SEMRush

SEO strategy is only as good as the research that goes into it. Without proper planning and information about which keywords and key phrases really matter for your business, everything else you do for search optimization is abortive, to say the least.

SEMRush  was originally built as a tool for “competitor research” in the world of search optimization. However, the tool is so robust that it also makes a perfect companion for self-analysis, SEO auditing, and to take a spot check of your own backlinks, keywords that you’re already ranking fo (or not), and more.
SEMRush evolved into an all-in-one marketing toolkit and provides you with insights on SEO, social media, content, PR, and also paid traffic.

Use SEMrush to audit your own website, dig into semantic core, gain competitive intelligence, track keyword position, and conduct backlink audits.

SEO Smart Links

Proper search optimizing calls for a holistic approach to getting a lot of things right: on page optimization, off-page optimization, content, structure, architecture of your website, the speed of each page on your website, and also your internal linking strategy.

The SEO Smart Links Plugin  at least helps you to develop and execute a sound internal linking strategy for your WordPress website as you go about developing content.

Use SEO Smart Links to automate the internal linking part of SEO and allow the plugin to automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with appropriate older content on your website. The plugin also allows you to set no-follow attributes and set links to open in new windows.

SEO Friendly Images

Graphics and images make up a large part of your website’s page sizes. The way you manage your images will also affect the speed at which pages load, which in turn affects how well you position yourself in search listings as Google is picky about page speeds.

While there are many different ways available for you to manage images on your WordPress blog or your website, one of the easier options is to use a plugin like SEO friendly Images plugin.

The plugin helps automatically update all your images with appropriate alt and title and also make sure that each of the images you use in posts or pages are W3C and xHTML validated.

The most important function of the plugin is to apply proper alt attribute to images to help you get visible by search engines.

Broken Link Checker

You don’t like dead ends, do you? Search engine spiders don’t like dead ends either. However, millions of websites still have links that don’t work and old tags, categories, or archives that lead both visitors and search spiders to 404 pages.

Broken links (both internal and external) are dead ends in the world of Search Engine Optimization

The Broken Link Checker is more of a house-keeping plugin for your WordPress and helps you to identify broken links, notify you, and help you actively work to keep all your links working.

The bigger your website or blog is, the more of a lifesaver the Broken Link Checker is going to be. The plugin also helps you find and fix redirections.

Despite all these plugins, you’d not make much headway without proper analytics.

Google Analytics is an incredibly effective, free, and robust analytics tool you should be using in tandem with a full-fledged Google Analytics WordPress Plugin. Make it a habit to delve deep into analytics, crunch numbers, and make rational decisions to improve overall visibility of your WordPress site.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins? How do you manage your SEO?

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