If you own a website, you have probably heard the word Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). But what is it and what role does it play on your website? SEO is a set of rules to be followed so that a specific website ranks higher in search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo, and Bing).
Search engines serve millions of users every day looking for answers to their dilemmas or for answers to their questions. If you have a website, a blog, or an e-Commerce website, SEO can help your business expand and meet its objectives.
The good news is that there are thousands of plugins you can install on your WordPress website to help you boost your SEO. However, selecting the most important and relevant plugins for your SEO needs can seem a bit overwhelming as many of those plugins offer the same service as the other. In this article, we chose only 5 of the best plugins for your website which we consider are crucial for SEO.
5 WordPress Plugins for SEO Power
Here are five WordPress plugins for your website which we consider are crucial for SEO
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins for fulfilling SEO needs. It’s a very user-friendly plugin both for newbies and the experienced. Yoast is a simple and intuitive plugin that makes everyone able to work with it. Its traffic light system gives detailed guidelines that will walk you through every step which is perfect for those who are new to SEO.
With its strong content analysis features, it can tell you what your focus keywords are, your content insights, and your content’s readability among others. It allows you to add SEO title, meta description, and meta keywords to each page of your website, which is perfect for your SEO needs.
2. Redirection
If your website contains broken links and 404 pages, then the chances are your SEO score is too low for search engines. One of the most important things website owners forget about SEO is user experience. Setting up redirects for dead links or deleted pages is key to securing a solid user experience.
Redirection is a helpful plugin that lets you manage all sorts of redirects from one open place. You can instantly make new redirects, control your present redirects, and fix any broken links. When all your links work, your visitors will be happy and they will learn to trust you which will lead to higher conversion rates and reduced bounce rate.
3. Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Slow loading time is a common reason people leave your website without even seeing your content. And when people leave your website, you get a high bounce rate that translates to poor SEO. Image size is the most common cause for sluggish loading times. Manually compressing each photo on your website is probably going to months.
Luckily, Smush Image Compression and Optimization is there to compress all of the images on your website at the touch of a button. Compressed images have reduced file size that loads faster both on mobile and on a desktop.
4. w3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache boasts of its powerful technology in improving your website’s performance by “caching” the data that have been previously loaded. It reduces loading time, boosts download speed and increases conversion rates. Thus, improving the overall speed and performance of your website.
So how do you benefit from this? Search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Bing consider and measure the speed of websites in their ranking algorithm. When your site’s load time is fast, visitors view more pages. With W3 Total Cache, you can enhance the user experience for your browsers without having to modify WordPress, your plugins, your theme or how you create your content.
5. All In One WP Security & Firewall
The security of your website is heavily taken into consideration by search engines. The most unfortunate kind of user experience would be one which ends in a malware or other form of a virus. In which case, search engines will rank you lower, or not show your website at all in their listings.
The purpose of the All In One WP Security & Firewall is to prevent this from occurring and put your website safe from hackers and spammers. To help you boost your security measures, invest in an SSL certificate.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization or SEO is a way to optimize your website so that search engines will understand it better and give you higher rankings. Nevertheless, a website with good content can do well with or without SEO. So if you try to SEO a website with poor content, your chances of succeeding are low.
Site speed and security is one of the many important factors in search rankings. Fast loading and virus-free sites can easily outrank slower and virus-filled websites. While you are spending a lot of time improving your content strategy, give some of that time to improve your security and site speed.
