WordPress – Top Five Plugins to boost SEO success

You may have thought that Wordpress is simply a tool for making blogposts look pretty, but actually the platform is becoming increasingly popular for company sites too. Thankfully, there are a number of plugins that help with your SEO strategy. This enables you to keep your site fully optimised, even if there are multiple people working on developing aspects of it.

Here are our top five tips:

1. All in One SEO Plugin

Certain on-page elements are vital for optimal SEO performance. If several people are updating a website (especially non-SEOs) often the elements can be forgotten about or not created properly for SEO purposes. The All in One SEO plugin allows you to set the page title, meta description and meta keywords for the homepage. Additionally, it allows you to create dynamic page titles and descriptions for every page and post. Subsequently, this creates a consistent structure for the elements across your site, for example the page title structure could be set so that it’s created using the name of the page along with the name of the company. Furthermore, the plugin adds the option to create a page title and meta description within the page edit screen so they can be customised easily.

2. All in One Webmaster Plugin

In the case of embarking on any SEO project, you'll need webmaster tools and analytics installed on the site. Installing these programmes is a much faster process with the All in One Webmaster plugin. You can install tools such as Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics really easily by simply pasting your verification code or ID numbers into the settings. It’s so easy to do and there is no need to know HTML or manually add the code into every page.

3. Broken Link Checker Plugin

Want to avoid re-directs to a 404 error page? This plugin alerts you in the case of any broken links. In terms of SEO, broken links create problems for search engines as the spiders can’t crawl the site properly, meaning the page being linked to might not be indexed! Obviously using this tool means that you don’t have to regularly go through every page on your site checking each link works, what a time saver!

4. RB Internal Links Plugin

Internal linking should happen naturally on any website, again more so for usability purposes than SEO. This is why anyone working on the site might create them, whether they know about HTML or SEO, or not. Although the link they create will work to start with, it could be possible that someone else updates a particular page on the site, subsequently changing the URL of that page. In doing so, they will have to go and update any internal links to that page so that the link still works instead of a 404 page being returned, as well as allowing the spiders to crawl those links. With the RB Internal Links plugin, this problem is bypassed meaning time saved should any URL change ever happen. The RB Internal Links plugin adds the function to select the page you want to link to by ‘page ID’ rather than the URL address of that page. So for example, you create a link to ‘page 32’ on the site, rather than /products/category3/172 , so when you decide to update that URL to /products/shirts/red the link will still work. Not only does this have SEO benefits, but also usability benefits for anyone who will be updating the site, as the plugin function nicely allows you to simply select the page you want to link to, rather than having to find the URL or page ID number.

5. Redirection Tool

Redirections are often a forgotten thought about when launching a new website or updating an existing one. Any time URLs are changed or removed, it is crucial to set up redirects so that anyone who visits an old URL will see a new page rather than a 404. This includes search engines. Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. might have indexed a long list of your old pages, which means that these could show in the SERPs (search engine results page), especially if the site has been optimised for SEO already. Search engines often take a few days to a few weeks to crawl your site and index your new pages, therefore people will still see the old URLs in the SERPs and will therefore see a 404 page if no redirect is in place to take them to the newer version of the page.