The Best WordPress Plugins for Search Engine Optimization for Your Website. You want to get your website found by potential customers, clients or patients. Or maybe you are an agency looking for the best intel on the newest options for improving your clients’ SEO. Our comprehensive, unsurpassed-in-detail plugin reviews and comparisons will ensure you make the right choice when selecting a WP SEO Plugin for your website.

The purpose of this article is to discuss using WordPress SEO Plugins to improve the SEO of your site. Before doing that, however, I should stress that these plugins will only help if you are already on the right track and have thought through your SEO from the outset.

In particular you must have chosen keywords for which it is practical to get a high ranking. If a keyword is dominated by large companies (with big marketing budgets) it is highly unlikely that they can be dislodged! You should also have included a primary keyword in your domain name.

The other thing to remember is that you must avoid, if you want to be successful at SEO, is anything that might be a considered Black Hat SEO practice and you must not associate with any other site that uses these techniques. This includes making sure that you do not link to such sites (although it doesn't matter if they link to you).

There are many WordPress SEO plugins available many of which are targeted at configuring your site so that it is search engine friendly. Other WordPress SEO plugins help optimize your content. Some can just be installed and left to work and others require on-going interaction.

Which WordPress SEO plugins you actually need depends on how deeply you want to get into SEO and how much you are prepared to let happen automatically. Install one of the multifunction WordPress SEO Plugins such as All In One SEO Pack. This can be installed leaving the settings as they are and all you have to do is enter the meta information for the home page. This plugin will address issues such as the duplicate content that WordPress creates.

Install a Sitemap plugin so that the search engines can easily find your pages and posts. Google XML Sitemaps is a good example. Install a caching plugin so that database calls are not necessary each time a page is served. This will avoid speed issues as the site grows. Quick Cache is an easy to use option. Install an automatic linking plugin like SEO Smart Links this can automatically add links to your content. It does need setting up but it then saves a lot of time.

Another of my favourite WordPress SEO Plugins is SEOPressor. Having good content which is written so that the search engines see it as highly relevant to the targeted keyword is vital for successful SEO. This plugin checks each page and post, gives the SEO a score and tells you how to improve it.

Another of my favourite WordPress SEO Plugins is "SEOPressor". Having good content which is written so that the search engines see it as highly relevant to the targeted keyword is vital for successful SEO. This plugin checks each page and post, gives the SEO a score and tells you how to improve it.

Is it actually necessary for an average user to install any WordPress SEO Plugins?

Yes, all sites will benefit from some of the many WordPress SEO plugins available. How well your installation is already search engine optimised depends on your theme. Some themes are just designed for appearance whereas others are designed with SEO in mind.

Whatever your theme I would recommend installing two WordPress SEO Plugins as a minimum:

Site Map

Install a plugin to create and maintain a site map aimed at the search engines. Google XML Sitemaps is a good choice which, regardless of its name, will also support Bing and Yahoo. This plugin will enable the search engine spiders to discover all your pages and posts and will get them indexed as quickly as possible.

General SEO Plugin

Perhaps the most popular of these general WordPress SEO plugins is All In One SEO Pack. You can simply install it with the default settings and all you have to do is enter the meta data for the Home Page (i.e. the text that will appear in the search results). The plugin also adds the ability to enter the meta data manually on each post/page. Whilst the default settings are ok, at some point it will be worth understanding what the plugin is doing (such as preventing the indexing of duplicate content) as some adjustments of the settings may be beneficial.

SEO Slugs

One of the simplest WordPress SEO Plugins that you just install and leave to work. It contains a list of common words which it removes from a page/post title when generating the URL. This makes the URL search engine friendly as the keyword is more obvious.

SEO Smart Links

The aim with this plugin is the automatic generation of links both internal and external. You can define your own keywords and URLs for the link as well as controlling, amongst other things, how many links are created. Whilst these WordPress SEO Plugins are very good it is important not to forget that content is the most important aspect of on page SEO. A site needs good, unique content which is added to on an ongoing basis. This content must also be optimised for the search engines, which means that you must structure your pages/posts around a keyword. There is a plugin to assist with this:

SEOPressor

Rather than helping setup the site for SEO purposes like most WordPress SEO plugins this one runs when a page/post is saved and analyses it for SEO purposes. The result is presented as a percentage (the higher the better) with recommendations.

In particular you must have chosen keywords for which it is practical to get a high ranking. If a keyword is dominated by large companies (with big marketing budgets) it is highly unlikely that they can be dislodged! You should also have included a primary keyword in your domain name.

Is it actually necessary for an average user to install any WordPress SEO Plugins?

Yes, all sites will benefit from some of the many WordPress SEO plugins available. How well your installation is already search engine optimised depends on your theme. Some themes are just designed for appearance whereas others are designed with SEO in mind.

Whatever your theme I would recommend installing two WordPress SEO Plugins as a minimum:

Site Map

Install a plugin to create and maintain a site map aimed at the search engines. Google XML Sitemaps is a good choice which, regardless of its name, will also support Bing and Yahoo. This plugin will enable the search engine spiders to discover all your pages and posts and will get them indexed as quickly as possible.

General SEO Plugin

Perhaps the most popular of these general WordPress SEO plugins is All In One SEO Pack. You can simply install it with the default settings and all you have to do is enter the meta data for the Home Page (i.e. the text that will appear in the search results). The plugin also adds the ability to enter the meta data manually on each post/page. Whilst the default settings are ok, at some point it will be worth understanding what the plugin is doing (such as preventing the indexing of duplicate content) as some adjustments of the settings may be beneficial.

SEO Slugs

One of the simplest WordPress SEO Plugins that you just install and leave to work. It contains a list of common words which it removes from a page/post title when generating the URL. This makes the URL search engine friendly as the keyword is more obvious.

SEO Smart Links

The aim with this plugin is the automatic generation of links both internal and external. You can define your own keywords and URLs for the link as well as controlling, amongst other things, how many links are created. Whilst these WordPress SEO Plugins are very good it is important not to forget that content is the most important aspect of on page SEO. A site needs good, unique content which is added to on an ongoing basis. This content must also be optimised for the search engines, which means that you must structure your pages/posts around a keyword. There is a plugin to assist with this:

SEOPressor

Rather than helping setup the site for SEO purposes like most WordPress SEO plugins this one runs when a page/post is saved and analyses it for SEO purposes. The result is presented as a percentage (the higher the better) with recommendations.

Is it actually necessary for an average user to install any WordPress SEO Plugins?

Yes, all sites will benefit from some of the many WordPress SEO plugins available. How well your installation is already search engine optimised depends on your theme. Some themes are just designed for appearance whereas others are designed with SEO in mind.

Whatever your theme I would recommend installing two WordPress SEO Plugins as a minimum:

Site Map

Install a plugin to create and maintain a site map aimed at the search engines. Google XML Sitemaps is a good choice which, regardless of its name, will also support Bing and Yahoo. This plugin will enable the search engine spiders to discover all your pages and posts and will get them indexed as quickly as possible.

General SEO Plugin

Perhaps the most popular of these general WordPress SEO plugins is All In One SEO Pack. You can simply install it with the default settings and all you have to do is enter the meta data for the Home Page (i.e. the text that will appear in the search results). The plugin also adds the ability to enter the meta data manually on each post/page. Whilst the default settings are ok, at some point it will be worth understanding what the plugin is doing (such as preventing the indexing of duplicate content) as some adjustments of the settings may be beneficial.

SEO Slugs

One of the simplest WordPress SEO Plugins that you just install and leave to work. It contains a list of common words which it removes from a page/post title when generating the URL. This makes the URL search engine friendly as the keyword is more obvious.

SEO Smart Links

The aim with this plugin is the automatic generation of links both internal and external. You can define your own keywords and URLs for the link as well as controlling, amongst other things, how many links are created. Whilst these WordPress SEO Plugins are very good it is important not to forget that content is the most important aspect of on page SEO. A site needs good, unique content which is added to on an ongoing basis. This content must also be optimised for the search engines, which means that you must structure your pages/posts around a keyword. There is a plugin to assist with this:

SEOPressor

Rather than helping setup the site for SEO purposes like most WordPress SEO plugins this one runs when a page/post is saved and analyses it for SEO purposes. The result is presented as a percentage (the higher the better) with recommendations.

The purpose of this article is to discuss using WordPress SEO Plugins to improve the SEO of your site. Before doing that, however, I should stress that these plugins will only help if you are already on the right track and have thought through your SEO from the outset.

SEOPressor is a WordPress SEO Plugin which analyses your pages/posts and reports on your Search Engine Optimisation by giving a percentage score and recommendations for improvement. This makes it a highly desirable WordPress SEO Plugin if you are serious about getting your pages and posts highly optimised to achieve high search engine rankings.

This on page SEO is important because what you are doing is making sure that the search engines understand that your content is highly relevant to the keyword you are targeting. It has been argued that off page SEO (i.e. link building) is more important and it is true that off page factors do have a greater weighting in deciding where to list a page but on page SEO is the foundation of all your SEO activities. If you do it well you will, in effect, be able to get your site ranked with less backlinks than if you do it badly. As on page SEO is under your control you may as well do it properly particularly when you can get a good WordPress SEO plugin to help.

Use one keyword per page/post

The WordPress SEO Plugin is built to do this and it keeps things simple as you only have one keyword to consider. This approach also makes it easier to produce good content for the visitor while still being search engine optimised.

Always include a relevant graphic

This makes your page or post more attractive to the eye and breaks up the text. For SEO purposes putting the keyword in the Alternative Text field is a major benefit.

Don't get too obsessed with Keyword Density

It is generally considered that the keyword density should be in the range 2-4% (the SEOPressor WordPress SEO Plugin will calculate this for you). Higher than this may be considered to be keyword stuffing and have a negative effect. However, sometimes it is difficult to achieve even 2% and it is not worthwhile forcing this at the expense of producing unreadable content.

Try to write with SEO in mind

It is quite annoying to produce great content for you visitors only for the SEOPressor WordPress SEO Plugin to give it a low score. You then have to rewrite it which will probably take longer that it did to write it in the first place. It is therefore a good idea to look at the points SEOPressor reports on a blank post then try to write with these in mind.

Think of SEOPressor as a training tool

When you first use this WordPress SEO Plugin you will inevitably have to spend time correcting pages/posts but this teaches you what you need to do. From my own experience it is surprising how quickly you start getting it right in the first place.

It is quite annoying to produce great content for you visitors only for the SEOPressor WordPress SEO Plugin to give it a low score. You then have to rewrite it which will probably take longer that it did to write it in the first place. It is therefore a good idea to look at the points SEOPressor reports on a blank post then try to write with these in mind.

SEOPressor is a WordPress SEO Plugin which analyses your pages/posts and reports on your Search Engine Optimisation by giving a percentage score and recommendations for improvement. This makes it a highly desirable WordPress SEO Plugin if you are serious about getting your pages and posts highly optimised to achieve high search engine rankings.

This on page SEO is important because what you are doing is making sure that the search engines understand that your content is highly relevant to the keyword you are targeting. It has been argued that off page SEO (i.e. link building) is more important and it is true that off page factors do have a greater weighting in deciding where to list a page but on page SEO is the foundation of all your SEO activities. If you do it well you will, in effect, be able to get your site ranked with less backlinks than if you do it badly. As on page SEO is under your control you may as well do it properly particularly when you can get a good WordPress SEO plugin to help.

Use one keyword per page/post

The WordPress SEO Plugin is built to do this and it keeps things simple as you only have one keyword to consider. This approach also makes it easier to produce good content for the visitor while still being search engine optimised.

Always include a relevant graphic

This makes your page or post more attractive to the eye and breaks up the text. For SEO purposes putting the keyword in the Alternative Text field is a major benefit.

Don't get too obsessed with Keyword Density

It is generally considered that the keyword density should be in the range 2-4% (the SEOPressor WordPress SEO Plugin will calculate this for you). Higher than this may be considered to be keyword stuffing and have a negative effect. However, sometimes it is difficult to achieve even 2% and it is not worthwhile forcing this at the expense of producing unreadable content.

Try to write with SEO in mind

It is quite annoying to produce great content for you visitors only for the SEOPressor WordPress SEO Plugin to give it a low score. You then have to rewrite it which will probably take longer that it did to write it in the first place. It is therefore a good idea to look at the points SEOPressor reports on a blank post then try to write with these in mind.

Think of SEOPressor as a training tool

When you first use this WordPress SEO Plugin you will inevitably have to spend time correcting pages/posts but this teaches you what you need to do. From my own experience it is surprising how quickly you start getting it right in the first place.