Search engines are the best places to get free and targeted traffic. Ranking a WordPress site on Google is not an easy task, but it can be a lot easier if you use the right plugins and tools.

In this post, I will be taking you through a list of the best SEO plugins to use for your blog or website. While compiling the list, ease of usage, simplicity, effectiveness and efficiency of each one of these plugin was put into consideration.

1. Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO Plugin is the most popular and most widely used SEO Plugin for WordPress sites. Yoast is widely regarded as the best WordPress SEO Plugin majorly because it is easy to use and functions well enough to achieve intended results.

Some basic features of Yoast SEO plugin include:

• Analysis of page functionality
• Creation of sitemap file
• It controls indexing of your WordPress blog
• It allows you to add meta elements to your site

Yoast plugin features are not limited to the aforementioned. There are a lot of possibilities to be explored using the Yoast SEO Plugin.

2. All In One SEO WordPress Plugin

All In One SEO WordPress plugin is very similar to Yoast plugin and can be used as an effective alternative to Yoast.  Some of the features of this plugin includes but are not limited to the following:

• Ability to configures additional pages for XML Sitemap
• It provides a quick edit option for contents.
• It also provides an impressive interface for easy access to SEO contents.

3. W3 Total Cache Plugin

As an SEO company, we have carried out several SEO tests over the years to ascertain the core ranking factors used by Google and other search engines. One of the ranking factors we detected during one of our numerous tests was time to first byte (TTFB). The result of this test corroborated a similar test done by Moz.

For those that are not tech savvy, time to first byte is the number of milliseconds it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of the response from your web server.

Google recommends that a website’s TTFB should be 200 milliseconds or less. To attain this feat, it is advisable to use a Cache plugin for your site. Of all the cache plugin in the WordPress plugins directory, W3 Total Cache has a very friendly interface and it is highly efficient.

4. Broken Link Checker SEO WordPress Plugin

Broken links are nightmares to users and search engine robots.  Broken Link Checker is very important to every website and blog. It detects broken links and redirections and gives various options on how to fix them. The following are some basic features of Broken Link Checker;

• It serves as a site or blog audit for SEO
• It monitors, detects and notifies about broken links and redirected URLs.
• It is easy to configure and also custom-configured.

5. SEO Optimized Images

Most bloggers and website owners rarely pay attention to the images on their site. Apart from the fact that images can help boost your topical relevance thereby improving your rankings, a well optimized image can also rank on Google images and help generate more traffic to your website.

SEO Optimized Images is a unique plugin which automatically generates image titles and ALT tags for your images. This can help boost your search engine rankings and can also reduce the amount of time you spend when adding contents to your site.

6. All In One Schema.Org

Have you ever wondered why some search results on Google have reviews attached to them? Having a rich snippet on your site makes search engines show more detail about your site rather than the regular results shown for most sites.

Apart from the fact that rich snippet helps increase Click through rate on your search results, they can also help boost your search engine ranking positions.

The All In One Schema.org Snippet plugin makes it easy to incorporate rich snippet into your blog.

Conclusion

WordPress is a great platform for SEO  and having the right plugin on your blog can reduce the amount of work to be done in positioning your site on the search engines.

Which of the above plugin is your favorite?