With more than hundred million blogs available on internet today, how you will get targeted visitors to your blog from search engines? You can do so by optimizing your WordPress blogs for search engines. Once you start working on SEO factors of your blog, you will see people are able to find your blog in search engines for targeted terms of their interest.
Luckily there are lots of plugins available on internet that could help you in making your WordPress blogs SEO friendly. Since website speed, engagement metrics and social media signals are playing a major role in Google Search Algorithm these days, so we need to look at look at ways to improve our blog on these parameters as well. So here is the ultimate list of 10 SEO plugins which will not help in making your WordPress blogs search engine friendly but will also help in improving its social media signals and engagement metrics.
1. Google XML Sitemaps
Are you able to index all of your blog contents in major search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing? If your answer is no, you can do so easily by creating XML Sitemaps for your blog. That would be great if you know how to generate XML sitemaps. But what you will do in case you have no idea about XML sitemap creation. You can do so by using Google XML Sitemaps plugin which will automatically create XML sitemap for your blog.
2. Related Post Plugin
How you go about improving the important engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site, page views per visit etc. on your blog. You can improve these engagement metrics to certain level by adding a related post section in your blog posts. YARPP (Yet Another Related Post Plugin) will help you in showing related posts section in your posts and RSS feeds level.
3. WP Super Cache Plugin
WP Super Cache is one of most recommend plugin for improving the speed of a WordPress blog. It’s a page caching plugin which will convert heavy PHP files from your WordPress blog into static HTML files and your server will use these HTML files for majority of requests coming from your blog readers.
4. SEO Smart Links
After installing this SEO plugin on your blog, you can easily autolink your blog contents in an optimized way. SEO Smart Links plugin is available in free as well premium version. I have been using its free version and really satisfied with its performance. In case you are managing a big business website and really satisfied with SEO Smart Links free version, can try its premium version as well.
5. All In One SEO Pack
This is the one of oldest and most popular SEO plugin for WordPress blogs. You can use this plugin for managing your blog titles and meta data in an efficient way. There are many more features you will enjoy after installing this SEO plugin like fixing of canonical issues and duplicate content issues etc.
6. WP Smush.it
This is one more recommended plugin for improving the performance of a WordPress blog. After installation, this plugin will start reducing the size of images that are available on your blog. This plugin used to run in background so you will not do anything for using this plugin. It will automatically keep on doing its good work for all images that you are adding on your blog on daily basis.
7. Broken Link Checker
Being an SEO Expert, I know how important it is to manage quality at link level on our blogs. If you are not serious or don’t know how to create links properly, may end up adding too many broken links on your blog. Not only can you, even your blog readers can add broken links through their comments. You need to look at ways to find and fix those broken links. Broken Link Checker plugin will exactly do that. It will first find the list of all broken links that are available on your blog in different sections and then will help in removing those links in quick succession.
8. SexyBookmarks Plugin
Have you given your blog readers the facility to share your blog contents on popular social media websites? If not, you should do it instantly as social media shares are playing a major role in your blog rankings on Google search at least. You can show icons for major social media websites using the SexyBookmarks plugin on your blog at post and page level.
9. Top Commentators Widget
You should install Top Commentators widget plugin on your blog if you want to improve the flow of comments coming on your blog. More comments on your blog means more targeted content in the form of comments, more engagement and thus will result in better positioning of your blog on search engines for its targeted terms. I himself have been using this widget on my personal blog Bloggers Passion in its sidebar section. And I noticed after adding this plugin into my blog, flow of comments has definitely increased to great extent.
10. Plugin Performance Profiler
This is one more mush have plugin in case you want to improve the load time of your blog. Plugin Performance Profiler (P3) will record the load time of all plugins you are actively using on your blog and will share a graphical report for the same. By looking at this report you can make decisions related to plugins which are taking too much time in loading. Action element from your end should be removal of those plugins you are no more using and replacing the heavy loading WordPress plugins with faster loading plugins.
With this I’m finishing this special guest post mentioning the list of SEO plugins for WordPress blogs. It would be interesting to know which SEO plugins you are currently using on your blog and are you thinking of giving a try to any of the plugin that I shared above on your blog, share your views in this regard in the comments section below.
Thanks for sharing these awesome free SEP WP plugins, I used most of them, they are working very well for my blog
I like DiggDigg than SexyBookmarks Plugin. You can choose it to share your post to Social Network
I also like DiggDigg more than SexyBookmarks
Does installation of these app increase the time taken by page to load ?
You should use Plugin Performance Profiler (P3) to keep track of load time of all plugins that you are currently using on your WordPress blog
First time I have heard of the P3 plugin but it sounds some that would be very useful. Is there any impact to performance from running the performance profiler? Total Cache is compatible with HostGator which is crazy but true. Would love to run it but on HostGator you have to go with Supercache from what all the techs have told me.
Bu using p3, you will have clear idea about the plugins which are taking too much time to load. You can either thought of deactivating those plugins or should look for other plugins (does not take much time in loading) that you can replace these plugins with.
Yoast is also best SEO plugin
You can give it a try!
I agree with you, WP SEO by Yoast is the best SEO plugin EVER!
Yoast and Platinum SEO Pack are also awesome ones.
WordPress can be complex but is definitely worth learning how to customize. Though if you just want to pop out mini sites, there is not real need to use WordPress.
Anil i am using almost all of the plugins except WP Smush which is new to me.
Use it
its also good WP plugin!
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Thanks Tran Tinh. WordPress SEO support good
Certainly one of the essential plugins list for any wordpress blog.
On wordpress blogs they give you free widgets to add to your site.But i want to add external widgets to my blog and iam not sure how to paste the widget code and where to add it.Do you paste under widgets or headers or in the main body of a post?
YOu should add WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Broken Link Checker is a essential plugin especially after panda and penguin update…
I recommend WordPress SEO plugin instead of All In One SEO Pack. All in One SEO pack is also pretty good but WordPress SEO is far better.
Thanks for the list. I love to subscribe your blog. I have already installed all plugin as your list. but Still got less traffic.
you have shared a good list of plugins but i want to ask you that whether i should all in one seo pack or s.e.o by yoast
The information which you have shared regarding SEO Plugins for WordPress Blogs, is quite impressive but I think I Google XML sitemaps is quite helpful than others.
My favorite is All In One SEO and its much effective on my blog
Great post Anil – I use several of these already but hadn’t heard of some so I’m off to check them out now! Love the All in One SEO as well, very helpful!
I swear by these plugins and have been using the custom keyword feature on it very successfully, and it could not be easier to implement. This, the All in one Seo Pack, Slugs, and the Google XML sitemaps are all I use to take my WP blogs to the stratosphere!
Why no ones shares tips regarding Blogger platform?
Awesome plugins! I will install few plugins that mentioned above into my WP blogs.
Internal Link plugin also importance.. We can do backlink onpage and it will done automatically. Really easy one.. Set anchor text and their link, then click save.. Tadaa!