The 9 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress Blogs + One Reality Check

best wordpress seo pluginsOf the world’s top 100 blogs, 48% rely on WordPress, the content management system that makes it easy to blog. In fact, 60 million of the over 634 million websites in existence at the end of 2012 are powered by WordPress. With all these blogs competing for attention online, how will people see your new content these days without good SEO?

Making sure your content is optimized for search engines and distribution across the web is paramount. Fortunately, a number of WordPress plugins, plus some interesting WordPress hacks we’ll discuss later, make it easier.

First, to understand SEO, it helps to understand a bit about how how Google ranks your site. Over 200 factors go unto the search engine’s calculation. These include content, PageRank, incoming links, speed and multiple SEO factors. Google has provided some Webmaster Guidelines to help you with the design, creating quality content, and other technical aspects of your site. Now, once you’ve perfected your site layout and you’re ready to write a post, you’ll then want to optimize your article content to increase its chances of getting discovered by search engines and linked to search queries. That’s SEO optimization and it’s where these plugins come in.

General Search Engine Optimization Guidelines for Content

search engine optimzation guidelines

WordPress SEO plugins typically give you control over setting metadata, like the title and description, for each new post. Here are nine of the very best SEO plugins out there in the market:

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast
Considered by many to be top SEO plugin available, WordPress SEO by Yoast offers a broad range of features to help you take care of technical optimization aspects and to also write better content. The plugin forces you to choose a focus keyword when writing an article to populate it throughout the content. The robust list of features for this plugin include: snippet previews, page analysis, automatically optimizing and inserting meta tags, link elements, XML sitemaps, RSS optimization, breadcrumbs, editing your .htaccess and robots.txt file, social integration, import & export functionality, Google News SEO module and much more.

2. All-In-One SEO Pack

All-in-One-SEO-Pack-plugin
 
The All-In-One SEO pack is another robust WordPress plugin with a host of SEO features for your site. It does the basic stuff like automatically optimizing titles for search engines and generating meta tags. The plugin also supports Google Analytics, custom post types, advanced canonical URLs, fine tuning page navigation links and has a built-in API to extend its functionality. The plugin also helps you avoid duplicate content found on most typical blogs, and is one of the only plugins to provide SEO integration for WP e-Commerce sites.
 

3. SEO Ultimate

seo-ultimate
The SEO Ultimate plugin is another all-in-one SEO plugin with some powerful features. The plugin gives you the ability to rewrite title tags, edit meta descriptions and help you use anchor text to create deeplinks. Some of the advanced functionality includes the rich snippet creator, author highlighter, link mask generator, canonicalizer, 404 monitor, permalink tweaker, slug optimizer and more.

seo-ultimate-screenshot

 

4. FV Simpler SEO Pack

FV-All-in-One-SEO-Pack-Simple-and-Safe-Wordpress-SEO-Foliovision
 
The folks over at foliovision are big WordPress enthusiasts and understand the importance of search engine optimization. It’s common knowledge among Internet marketers these days that keywords in meta data are basically ignored by search engines (due to lots of keyword stuffing previously in an attempt to trick them). So the FV Simpler SEO Pack looks to remove unwanted features from previous SEO Plugins, to minimize the effort of writers. They found that authors were often times confused having to enter both keyword tags and keywords in the meta description when creating a new post. So this plugin looks to make it easier to optimize sites with advanced functionality available but mostly hidden out of the way for simplicity and speed.
 

5. Scribe for WordPress

Scribe-Content-Marketing-Software-that-Works
 
Scribe is a powerful SEO plugin that provides you with content marketing tools for research, optimization and interaction. Scribe gives you research tools to help discover topics that matter most to your intended audience. The step-by-step on-page optimization and content development guidance enable you to build a site with greater authority giving you a chance for better PageRank. Scribe also helps you identify authoritative social media users and high-ranking sites in your industry to connect with. What’s also great about Scribe is that it’s compatible with all the WordPress plugins mentioned above giving you some robust options to choose from (like SEO by Yoast + Scribe for example).
 

6. SEO Friendly Images

SEO-Friendly-Images
 
SEO Friendly Images automatically adds proper alt and title attributes to all your images (according to the options you set) improving traffic from search engines. The ALT attribute plays a significant role with search engines by describing your images (otherwise unreadable) with some meaningful text. The TITLE tag plays a lesser role in SEO but is still important as this text provides tool-tips for your readers when they hover over an image. Not all WordPress themes insert ALT and TITLE text into your images automatically after inserting them into a post, making this issue a frequent SEO problem for websites.
 

7. Google XML sitemaps

Google-XML-Sitemaps
 
The XML Sitemap plugin will generate a special XML sitemap that provides navigation for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to better index your blog. These sitemaps make it much easier for web crawlers to view the complete structure of your site to retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports auto generated pages by WordPress plus custom URL’s. But most importantly, this plugin notifies all the major search engines every time you create a new post!
 

8. Nginx Helper

Nginx Helper
 
Website speed can also play a large factor in SEO. Using a cache to temporarily store static resources like images, CSS and JavaScript files in RAM can greatly speed up your website. While WordPress has many cache plugins available like W3, we prefer to use a Nginx server-level cache with FastCGI.

First, NGINX can serve PHP files quicker than traditional LAMP servers using Apache and NGINX offers more control over your settings than adding caches at the WordPress plugin level. Neatly this plugin can even serve PHP files temporarily when PHP/MySQL crashes. The Nginx Helper plugin also lets you purge your server cache from the WordPress dashboard along with letting you customize rule settings based on events like a new post or comment.

9. Remove Query Strings From Static Resources

 
Remove Query Strings From Static Resources
 
While the Nginx Helper above provides rewrite support for permalinks including the removal of index.php from URLs, you may also want to clean up query strings for static resources. When you serve CSS or JavaScript resources with a “?” or “&” in the URL, it may not get cached by certain proxy servers or older browsers. This plugin lets you move the query string parameters into the URL to increase your website performance and speed scores as measured by popular services like Google PageSpeed and YSlow.
 

A Warning Not to Overdo It

This list outlines some popular plugin choices for WordPress SEO, but don’t get carried away and install each one. Every plugin adds additional code to your site which ultimately slows it down, so use a minimalist approach when it comes to adding plugins. In fact, you should test the performance of any new plugins you add with P3 – the Plugin Performance Profiler – to ensure it’s not slowing down your site too much.

 

Custom SEO with No Plugin

Each of the SEO plugins mentioned have some nice features to enhance the SEO of your blog content, but not all these options are necessary which can then add unwanted overhead (extra code) and complexity to your site. You could consider customizing your WordPress site/theme to automatically set meta data for your posts like title and description, which is the primary automation of these SEO plugins. Your article title would be copied over to the meta title, and the first 160 characters of your content would populate the meta description (note: most search engines allow up to 160 characters within the description). These features can be easily added to your site by any competent WordPress developer. This is how we do it here at DashBurst, and we have custom feilds for meta title and description to manually overwrite if needed. As far as keyword optimization and other benefits those SEO plugins provided, they’re all pretty much extracurricular, and any best practices (like using keyword placement) can be enforced on your own without the need of an extra plugin slowing down your site. It might take some practice, but considering speed is a factor of SEO, do you have any performance to give up just for a few extra pointers when you create a post? Well if you’re not an experienced blogger or have little development resources, then that extra overhead may be worth it.

But WordPress plugins constantly change and go out-of-date, and aren’t always properly maintained with the new builds of WordPress. By adding only the basic needed functionality of a WordPress plugin directly into the theme of your site, you increase your sites performance and avoid other potential maintenance issues down the road. So the ultimate minimalist approach here for optimal performance and SEO would be to automate the meta data yourself (via your WordPress theme code) and just add the one light Google XML Sitemap plugin to take care of refreshing search engines after new posts.

So what SEO plugin strategy have you implemented on your WordPress blog?

Daniel Zeevi

By Daniel Zeevi

Daniel is a social network architect, web developer, infographic designer, writer, speaker and founder of DashBurst. Full-time futurist and part-time content curator, always on the hunt for disruptive new technology, creative art and web humor.

12 comments

  1. It will be difficult for a small time website owner to update the customization based on the new updates of SEO. I am using some of them and they are great I agree with the Post….

  2. Please tell me if I use 3-4 of theese plugins in one site, does it reduce the performance of the site (and this way bad to sEO), or only needs bigger disk space?

    1. Hi Andras, may be the present reply comes to you so late, at all case i confirm to you that the more you add plugins the more you reduce the performance of your site because simply all those plugins will ask your database, will ask more resources, and that will takes surly an extra time to load your site, and the speed loading of a website became a major seo factor, in addition plugins can come into conflict. to measure the effect of your plugins, you can use this plugin too :), P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) . cheers

  3. Wow, great arcicle Daniel. I was using 50% of plugins you mentioned, and as I discover how SEO is important and started making money from Internet Marketing, started using some of the premium plugins like those here http://wordpress-review.com/best-seo-plugin-for-wordpress/ and I must tell you that every little feature of Optimization is made by clicks, so WordPress plugins realy make it easy to do SEO these days.

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