If WordPress is one of the most widely used CMS around the world, it has many advantages for website owners. It is particularly effective in terms of natural referencing, mainly through SEO plugins that must be installed. These extensions are fundamental in that they can help you gain valuable places in Google's search results. What are the best SEO plugins for WordPress?
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is arguably the best-known and most comprehensive
plugin on the market, with over 260 million downloads and 25,000 five-star
ratings. Available for free, Yoast SEO also has a premium version with several
advanced features.
In its free version, Yoast SEO will allow you to effectively
optimize the natural referencing of your website. Through a pleasant and
well-thought-out interface, directly integrated into your WordPress back
office, Yoast plays the role of a real SEO assistant. For example, it will give
you the ability to configure your tags, optimize your content (titles and
keywords in particular), avoid the presence of duplicate content or even add
rich snippets.
Yoast SEO also includes many resources to learn more about
SEO, whether you are a beginner or an expert in natural referencing.
Considering the countless possibilities offered by the extension, it is also
nice to be able to count on a huge community of users of the solution in case
of questions or problems. Finally, the plugin is regularly updated by the
developers, which allows it to be always in tune with the latest news from
Google.
The SEO Framework
Here again, accessible free of charge, The SEO Framework
differs from Yoast SEO by being easier to handle. This is explained in
particular by the desire of developers to keep only the really essential
functionalities in terms of natural referencing. The result is a clean
interface that is accessible to all. For example, a playful coloured scale tells
you if your content is optimized enough to rank well in search engine results.
To complement its native features, The SEO Framework offers
many complementary addons, most of them free, that will allow you to target
specific needs. From the "Local" extension to ensure perfect
visibility on search engines locally to "Focus", a precious help for
writing optimized content, through "HoneyPot", a spam blocker in
comments, there are has something for everyone.
Fast and light, this complete plugin is a real alternative
to Yoast.
SEOPress
Launched in October 2018, SEOPress is a 100% French SEO
plugin for WordPress. It is also positioned as a more than credible alternative
to the giant Yoast. This extension works on a freemium model, with a free
version that offers practical basic features, and a premium version, available
for $ 39 per year, which allows you to go even further in your SEO.
This powerful plugin has the advantage of being constantly
evolving. Its creator aims to make it accessible to as many people as possible,
both beginners and SEO experts. Regarding the features of the free version, you
will be able to manage your titles and other meta-descriptions, create XML and
HTM sitemaps, optimize your tags in order to share your articles on social
networks or take advantage of a system of analysis to ensure the quality of
your content in terms of SEO.
The premium version has more advanced features, including a breadcrumb optimized for SEO, optimizations for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Download, a local SEO solution, automatic redirection of 404 errors, Google Structured Data Types or the import and export of metadata.
Rank Math
Any WordPress SEO plugin should aim to improve the
positioning of a website's pages in the SERPs. This is what Rank Math, another
strong competitor of Yoast, is committed to doing. Easy to install and configure,
this extension has a simple and clear interface and offers an excellent user
experience to fully manage your on-page SEO.
It offers many free features such as an SEO audit, the
ability to connect the Google Search Console, tracking 404 errors, improving
local SEO, generating rich snippets or a backlink counting tool. In other
words, you will find all the services you need to optimize the SEO of your
pages.
The creators of this powerful WordPress plugin also added
the ability to import Yoast data into the tool.
SEO Squirrly
SEO Squirrly is a free WordPress plugin intended for those
who do not necessarily master all the cogs of natural referencing. It will
indeed allow you to optimize your visibility on the web and generate qualified
traffic on your website. This plugin thus has effective functionalities that
can be used without any special skills in digital marketing.
The main advantage of this powerful tool is its ability to
provide you with real-time guidance as you write your content. Your goal will
therefore be to achieve a 100% SEO optimization rate.
SEO Squirrly also includes a valuable tool that will analyze
the performance of your competitors to help you get better results.
Broken Link Checker
In addition to the quality of your content, the reliability
of your links is also an essential criterion taken into consideration by Google
when positioning your website in the SERPs. Indeed, the American search engine
estimates that the broken links which redirect your visitor to a 404 page negatively
impact the user experience. But how do you locate and fix every broken link?
This is where the WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin comes
in. Unlike previous SEO extensions which are intended to be rather complete
toolkits, the sole purpose of Broken Link Checker is to spot broken links. This
plugin saves you hours of work trying to identify every broken link on your
website to fix it.
Broken Link Checker also allows you to edit each broken link
directly from its main page. So this is a great way to earn valuable places in
Google's search results.
Rel NoFollow
To measure the popularity of your website and thus ensure
that it is relevant to promote it to its users, Google constantly analyzes your
inbound and outbound links. It is to meet this criterion that digital marketing
experts are implementing netlinking strategies. But more than the number, it is
the quality of these links that will interest the search engine in the first
place.
It is therefore in your best interest to link up with sites
that enjoy a good reputation as a priority. However, in their search for links
some webmasters may be inclined to spam certain sites, forums and blogs by
posting comments solely for the purpose of obtaining an inbound link. In order
to counter this, adding the rel "nofollow" attribute to your blog
comments will prevent getting too many spammy comments.
The WordPress Rel NoFollow extension will allow you to
easily add the "no follow" attribute to your external links. To do
this, all you need to do is check a box when creating your link in the
WordPress back office, without having to browse the HTML code.
All in One Schema Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are very valuable in SEO. This data, which can
be viewed directly from Google search results (photo and rating of a recipe,
number of reviews on a product, details of an event, etc.), in fact offer excellent
visibility to sites that manage to find them. develop.
The All in One Schema Rich Snippets extension will thus
effectively support you in this process. It is essential since WordPress does
not natively integrate features dedicated to the management of these rich
snippets. The strength of this plugin lies in its ability to support many types
of content. It will therefore allow you to attract new users and generate more
traffic to your pages.
Thanks to its many SEO plugins, WordPress is therefore an
excellent CMS to improve your visibility in search engines. From all-in-one
tools to specialized solutions on a single aspect of SEO, you will no doubt
find the extension that will effectively meet your needs.