Ignoring SEO in 2020 is asking for your business to fail. More than 90 percent of internet activity begins with a search, which means getting your website to pop up near the top of related searches is infinitely valuable. WordPress offers several highly effective plugins to make SEO for your site convenient and easy. That way, you can spend your time on more critical tasks. These five WordPress plugins are top of the line and are likely to give your website quite a boost in traffic.
Yoast SEO
The majority of WordPress users will tell you that Yoast SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin out there, and for a good reason. Integrated into this plugin is everything you need for website optimization where SEO is concerned, and it’s straightforward to use. SEO titles and descriptions can easily be added to any post and page. Yoast SEO even allows users to add Open Graph metadata as well as social media images directly to articles.
Another amazing Yoast SEO feature is that it generates an XML sitemap for your content automatically, allowing search engines to crawl your website with no extra work from you. With over five million sites using Yoast SEO globally, they must be doing something right to attract so many users.
The most basic version of the Yoast SEO plugin is free. You can upgrade to the premium version for $89 per year if you want more advanced features, such as internal link suggestions, options for redirect management, no advertisements, page previews on other platforms, and support 24 hours a day.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is an excellent free SEO plugin that shows users who want to use their website or blog to advertise which keywords they can bid on for their advertising campaigns. On top of that, it also assists advertisers in choosing the best keywords based on search volume, how many results there are, and difficulty. Bloggers find this data useful in determining keywords that will allow them to outrank other sites, have a high search volume, and have a high advertiser interest.
Effectively, Google Keyword Planner helps you obtain more Google traffic, suggesting keywords that probably wouldn’t have occurred to you to use in your advertising. To use this plugin, you’ll need a Google account.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links on your WordPress blog make your page look sloppy. Google’s algorithms also penalize your site for them. The problem is, broken links can be hard to find, especially if you’ve been maintaining a blog for a while. That’s where Broken Link Checker comes in. It’s a WordPress plugin that finds broken links on your site and lets you fix them without even having to go in and edit your posts. Not only is it easy to use, but it’s also as convenient as it gets.
Broken Link Checker is great for SEO, and it’s free, two more huge plusses for this plugin. The only downside is that it can bog down your server and make your site load slowly if it has a lot of content.
SEO Squirrly
If you are not an SEO expert, but you need SEO for your blog, SEO Squirrly is your dream plugin. It was made for SEO beginners specifically. With its SEO assistant feature, you enter in your desired keyword, and it provides green lights or suggestions as you write your blog, showing you how to incorporate that keyword into what you’re writing.
SEO Squirrly also allows you to scan and analyze content from competitors’ websites, helping you to outrank their pages. Your weekly progress is tracked in the plugin automatically. Even more, it has a research assistant feature that keeps a record of past keywords and builds a keyword portfolio, even providing better keyword options when available.
There is no free version of SEO Squirrly, and though it is not cheap, starting at $29.99 a month, it can really prove its worth for businesses.
MonsterInsights
Marketing decisions should not be left up to chance, and the MonsterInsights plugin can help with that. MonsterInsights can help drastically improve your SEO strategy and get more traffic onto your site. It allows you to install Google Analytics right to WordPress and provides reports that are easy to read on your site’s dashboard. Those reports include which is your best content, where your website’s traffic is located, how your web traffic behaves while on your site, and lets you track your WooCommerce SEO so you can see which of your products are popular and which are not.
MonsterInsights has over 12 million downloads, a statistic that clearly shows the value of this plugin. It is widely used for good reason—it works, and it’s easy to use. While it isn’t free, it is only $99.50 per year for the Plus version, which is ideal for small businesses and publishers looking to take their sales to the next level.