7 Popular Free SEO Plugins For WordPress

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a topic most website owners deal with. Actually most of them struggle to get enough visitors to their websites from Google and other search engines every day. It takes serious effort to get everything right and still keep focus on delivering true value oriented content. WordPress has become the most popular publishing platforms and it is known for its strong focus on doing SEO right. Along with WordPress comes a truckload of WordPress themes and plugins that will make your SEO basement even stronger.

In this article I’m going to introduce you to some quite useful and free SEO plugins making WordPress even more powerful on the SEO front. If used right SEO plugins for WordPress may help you do just enough SEO in your daily work to stay in the online competition. You can get WordPress SEO plugins to help you with most SEO related tasks, but choosing the right ones depends on your SEO needs and skills. For many it is almost like finding a needle in a haystack.

On-page optimization is one of the most vital concerns you should address to get good rankings. Basically it is about making it easy for search engine spiders to understand and categorize your content. For most people, this is quite technical, and fortunately WordPress is doing a lot of the work in the background. However, although WordPress is a fantastic platform that deals with a lot of the SEO mechanics, it does not mean that you cannot enhance SEO further. This is where SEO plugins comes into the game.

You should always bear in mind that there are plenty of WordPress plugins out there, and not all of them are great. Finding the right SEO plugin for your website will require some serious research. It is highly recommended looking for up-to-date plugins with good ratings, recommended by professionals and developed by credible sources. To help you get started check out this SEO plugin collection, and please make sure to read installation guides and set-up information before proceeding. Also, if you haven’t already found a solid backup plugin solution you should check this our backup plugin WordPress article.

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WordPress SEO by Yoast – MORE INFO

This SEO plugin is very powerful and a real favourite among WordPress users. It is an “all in one” SEO plugin with a variety of options that are just awesome! The features include a snippet preview that will show you how your page will appear in the search results; as well as page analysis that helps you keyword optimize the content, images titles, meta descriptions and more. This feature is great for SEO learners as it provides SEO best practice as you write within the post edit page. Further it inserts a visual overview of how well posts are optimized using traffic light coloring in the posts list.

If your WordPress theme is compatible you can also use the built-in Breadcrumbs functionality to create a visitor and search engine friendly navigation. The “push bottom” XML sitemap functionality is also  extremely useful in the same way as the social integration and RSS optimization function. Guides and additional information can be found at Yoast.com.

All-In-One SEO Pack (AIO) – MORE INFO

AIO is one of the best known SEO plugins with more than 12 million downloads and good rankings. I recently read an interview with Matt Mullenweg in Webdesignermag issue 200 where he specifically recommended to use this plugin.  AIO has lots of SEO features. It  automatically optimizes your titles for search engines and automatically generates meta tags. You can also override any title, set any meta description and any meta keywords you want, just to mention some of the options. It is not hard to get started, even if you are a beginner and if you are more experienced, you can also tweak many of the options and utilize special parameters.

HeadSpace 2 SEO – MORE INFO

HeadSpace 2 SEO is also one of the most powerful SEO plugins around. It provides a variety of options giving you full control over meta-data, tags/keywords, descriptions, page titles and more. These features allow you to make useful SEO optimization on you pages although the plugin requires a bit of familiarization. However, once you know how to use it, it can work wonders for your website.

SEO Ultimate – MORE INFO

This SEO plugin is also a leader in the field. It is a very useful collection of SEO tools that will give you a ton of SEO optimization features. SEO Ultimate will give you a Title Tag Rewriter, a Meta Description Editor, a Meta Keywords Editor, a Meta Robot Tags Editor and much more. Find out about all the options available on the SEO Ultimate home page.

SEO Rank Reporter – MORE INFO

It is vital for your website traffic to get page one rankings in Google and to maintain these attractive spots. SEO rank reporter will allow you to monitor ranking for particular keywords on your website and provide you with reports every three days that contain useful information and graphs. Rank Reporter will also inform you through email whenever there are major changes in the ranking of certain keywords.

Google XML Sitemaps – MORE INFO

This free plugin will create an XML sitemap that will help Google search engine spiders index and crawl your WordPress website. Google XML sitemaps will reveal the content structure of your site in a transparent manner for search engines. This is essential SEO practice and it will make a difference for you SEO efforts.

Platinum SEO Pack – MORE INFO

This WordPress SEO plugin is loaded with useful features that include automatic meta tag generation and automatic 301 redirects for any permalink changes. It also helps you optimize your post titles and pages for search engines as well as in dealing with identical contents. I like to include Platinum SEO pack here because it is very popular, but I’m also aware that it is not updated recently.

Let’s talk about WordPress SEO plugins!

Please share this article with your friends and let us know about your thoughts, suggestions, comments or experiences on SEO plugins. Do you think SEO plugins for WordPress are useful tools? And do you think that using plugins, like the ones mentioned in this article, can boost your website performance? Let me hear your opinion about this.

Anders

Anders is Co-founder of Tripwire Magazine. He is into WordPress topics, Web design, Web-development and also interested in SEO and Online Marketing. He has started Splashmagazine.com and he’s also writing for other blogs. Anders is a passionate blues musician and a family-man, as well.