Best SEO Plugins
Like many bloggers, you may be looking for the best SEO plugins for your SEO strategy. As you conduct your research, you will find that there are oodles of WordPress SEO plugins that all seem to promise the same thing: a search engine optimization plugin that makes it easier for the user to optimize content to increase website traffic and improve your SEO strategy. This can often be a broken promise.
WordPress SEO plugins help you build the best SEO strategy for your content. There are many WordPress SEO plugins such as the All-In-One-SEO-Pack and the Squirrly SEO plugins that have provided much value in the past. However, there is a new kid on the block getting much attention: WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast. Not only is this new plugin quickly rising to the top of the “Most Popular Kids in School” list because of its user friendly functionality, but it’s also proving to be highly effective.
Should it be a part of your SEO strategy?
Yes, and here’s why. The WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast offers many advanced features that many other traditional WordPress SEO plugins did not in the past. Here is what WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast includes:
- Post titles and meta descriptions – Allows you to set templates and completely optimize for each page’s titles and meta descriptions by using the snippet preview functionality, which shows how it will appear on Google.
- Robots Meta configuration – The WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast provides the easiest way to install and configure robot meta tags on your WordPress site. This prevents your content, logins, etc., from getting indexed by adding noindex, follow robot tags.
- Canonical – A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content. Google added the Canonical link element to help differentiate the “original” page from its subpages. The only downfall of the Canonical link elements is that it is only applicable to single posts rather than the whole site. This plugin helps to combat this issue.
- Breadcrumbs – This feature is a code that has been around for a while as Yoast Breadcrumbs. This plugin uses this code to give you more granular control by allowing you to determine which post, page, and taxonomy to use for that specific entity in the breadcrumb paths it appears in.
- Permalink clean up – This feature ensures that your specified URL appears only as you want it. Having control over the links will clean up any extra outlying links that you do not want.
- XML Sitemaps – This feature is a must for any SEO strategy. If it isn’t already, get started. Not only does this plugin add style and fashion to your site map, but it also takes into account your indexed pages.
- RSS enhancements – This feature enhances your current RSS feed by taking it one step further. With this plugin, you can link back to your blog and specific blog posts.
- Edit your robots.txt and htaccess – As an added bonus to the Robot Meta configuration, you can edit your robots.txt and htaccess files. You can do this by going straight from the Files menu of the plugin. It is easily accessible so that you can check and/or update these files as needed.
- Clean up head section – The WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast will allow you to edit the <head> section and clean it up.
- API Docs – This plugin comes with a variety of actions and API docs that can be accessed here.
All-in-all, the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast is a must-have for your SEO strategy and is one of the best SEO plugins we’ve seen yet! If you don’t believe us, just give this search engine optimization plugin a try!
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This is a very nice list of things that a good SEO plugin should do. I have to say I swim against the crowd and use SEO Ultimate. The reason is very simple, it allows me to do siloing which is a lost art in SEO.
That’s interesting. I’m going to install it today because it seems very helpful in improving seo.
It is a good plugin, but it is flawed. I installed it and my page load times increased significantly. Deactivated. Retested. Page Load times back to goodness.
Seems like it still needs some work on it.