11 WordPress SEO Plugins To Skyrocket Your Rankings

The very next day of my first WordPress blog my main question was: How can I improve my on-page SEO on wordpress blogs? What plugins should I use and what I might be missing but that is cool? Didn’t took me long enough to go on wordpress’s plugins page and start searching for SEO plugins, testing them one by one and classifying the ones I like and found useful and discard the others.

However, during the last 2 years I discovered much more plugins that I had missed for a long period (trust me, I could have saved loads and loads of hours on link building if I just knew about all these plugins since the start). Today I am willing to share with you all the plugins that I usually use (and in combination with the tips and tricks that I previously mentioned on my seo for wordpress post) on every site I get my hands on that is on wordpress platform.

My Top 11 WordPress SEO Plugins

Note: To install plugins it is not necessary to download the file in your hard drive, you can simply use the Plugins>Add New function and search for the title of the plugin then automatically install it.

All In One SEO Pack

I first discovered this excellent plugin back in 2007, and since then is a must install plugin for me. It gives you the options to create custom title, description, meta keywords and other meta data for each and every post or page that you write. For example, this post title in the body is “11 WordPress SEO Plugins To Skyrocket Your Rankings” while in the title attribute I have “11 Best WordPress SEO Plugins”, this way I can make attractive titles for the readers and specific titles for the search engines where I keep my keywords density higher.

Category SEO Meta Tags

While we are at the title section let me tell you that all in one seo pack plugin is lacking at one part, you can’t work out with the titles of the categories that much. You can set a format to display titles in categories but that’s it, which limits the use of keywords in the titles of the categories. However, Bala Krishna has noted already that weak point of all in one seo pack and created a plugin called “Category SEO Meta Tags”, which to be honest is a great piece of work and gives the exact freedom I have been looking around. It requires that you modify one line in the all in one seo pack plugin but it is worth doing it.

The category seo meta tags plugin lets you change the title of the categories, add custom meta description and meta keywords. An example of how is that done is the seo tutorials category of this blog. Before installing this plugin the title of that category was: SEO Tutorials .. and that’s it. The meta description was the one you give when you create the category, so I had the same text in the category page and the meta description. Today the title of the seo tutorials category, thanks to this plugin, is: SEO Tutorials | How to Learn SEO Articles, a longer, more descriptive and better title for my category I would say. In addition the meta description of the category page is different then the text you can read in the body (which actually is the description option that you have when creating a new category by default with wordpress).

Related Posts

The related posts plugin shows a list of other posts of your blog related to the post that the visitor is reading or the search engine is crawling and links to those posts. This practice assures a proper interlinking of related pages within your blog and improves your internal linking structure. There are different plugins for this same matter, so anyone would work just good as long as it shows relevant results. The one that I use is the wasabi’s related posts plugin (which I am not sure it can be found any longer, however you can find many more by performing a search on wordpress extend plugins).

Automatic SEO Links

Automatic SEO Links plugin is another plugin that I really like and it comes very handy when there is a keyphrase that I often use and would like it to be used as anchor text linking to another internal page. By simply assigning anchor text and a corresponding URL for that anchor within the panel of the plugin I can link to that specific page without needing to worry and add the link manually on the post while I type. This becomes also handy for affiliate links, it is free and there is no need to purchase some funky “premium” plugins. You can download automatic seo links plugin from wordpress.org at any time.

XML Sitemap Generator

The bread and butter for the search engines as I like to call it. Creates a XML sitemap of your site and updates it every time as you publish a new post or page and automatically pings the search engines to let them know a new page is live that should be crawled. This plugin is as well free and can be downloaded from wordpress.org.

HTML Sitemap Generator

The HTML sitemap generator, creates an additional page that has links to your internal pages with their titles as anchor text. Not very excited of these type of plugins but they are still good as it is also a good guide for the lost visitors too (well, if a visitor really needs to get into your sitemap to get what he/she needs..for me it is an indicator that you got serious problems with your internal linking structure). There are hundreds of similar plugins that can be downloaded for free from wordpress.org.

Gzip Output Plugin

Google announces that there is a new rule in the game, so we got to get adapted. Gzip output plugin will help us keep up with the game and make sure our sites loads as faster as possible. (note: make sure your host support gzip compression before installing and using this plugin).

WP Minify Plugin

Another gamer for the speed load time, compressing and minifying your javascript and CSS files to decrease load requests and increase our sites speed. Note, some plugins that use jQuery might not work properly if this plugin is installed and activated, but from the options panel you can always indicate which codes should not be included.

Search Meter Plugin

Search meter plugin is not actually a plugin that will help your on-page optimization, but instead will help you understand what are the visitors of your website after when they use the wordpress search form of your blog. Precious information’s and a great way to find new topics to blog about.

Headspace2 SEO Plugin

Headspace2 SEO plugin is a really all in one seo plugin and enables a lot of options such as assign custom titles to posts, pages, categories, tags, add to the same description meta tags, meta keywords and many other tags. It is a complex plugin that it takes some time to get used to it and work with it, but once you understand the plugin and its full potential you could not build a site without it. It also has options to import titles/description/meta tags from other plugins, such as all in one seo pack so nothing to worry about losing data or having to go through each and every post of your blog to reassign the titles.

SEO Pressor

Just recently I learned about this plugin and had the pleasure to work on it on a clients site. Long time ago I blogged about on page seo optimization factors, however it is easy to miss out something when writing a new post unless you are addicted into checking every single thing before publishing with another tool. However, with SEO Pressor you get everything right in front of your nose as you write the plugin, it shows your on page seo score and highlights what you should add as extra to improve your seo score. I really loved this plugin and I recommend it to everyone that is serious about his/her blog.

Got to recommend a SEO plugin for wordpress? Leave a comment bellow and help others.

Sharing is caring!