WordPress is a completely open source content management system (CMS). This means that the community of web developers who use WordPress are able to create plugins to make their, and your, life easier. Best of all, most of these plugins are free. Implementing a strong SEO strategy would be close to impossible for a web design novice if it wasn’t for these extremely user friendly plugins. Here are 3 of the most useful SEO plugins for WordPress.
1: Yoast SEO
This plugin has been around a while but it continues to improve. The people that created this plugin went to great lengths to make SEO accessible for your average user by stripping away complications and simplifying processes while also giving you tips along the way to keep you on track. The Yoast SEO plugin tells you when you’re approaching a search engine’s character limit when writing headlines, title tags and meta descriptions. It also measures keyword density so you can see how relevant your posts are to the keywords you are aiming to rank for.
2: Redirection
Redirection is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to implement and maintain 301 redirects and keep track of any 404 errors on your website. Best of all it allows you to do this without needing any knowledge of Apache .htaccess files. It also automatically creates a redirect if a live page’s URL changes. This means you will have far less error 404’s and 301 redirects to worry about and when you do they are simple to implement.
3: Broken Link Checker
Broken links on your website are a pain for users which is why most search engines factor them in heavily when determining your rank. Broken Link Checker allows you to quickly and easily crawl your website for broken internal and external links. Once found you can then easily fix the broken links from the plugin interface, saving you the time and effort it would take to fix them all individually on your post pages. Fixing broken links is a great way to boost your SEO efforts.
If you have a WordPress site and you want to rank highly you should book a consultation with an SEO specialist. In the meantime make sure you are using the Yoast SEO, Redirection and Broken Link Checker plugins. They are extremely user friendly and can seriously help your SEO efforts.