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SEO is important to make your website visible in search engine rankings. The optimization process is important for every website because search engines can bring you tons of traffic if your site is optimized properly. Now, if your site is on WordPress, there are some amazing WordPress plugins for SEO which can use in your site to get tons of organic traffic.
WordPress is considered as one of the best SEO friendly CMS; it makes the process of optimizing your site easy. All you need to make sure is that you are using a quality WordPress theme for your site which is optimized properly and then top it up with a WordPress SEO plugin. The cherry on the cake is – WordPress plugin developers have created essential SEO plugins to help website owners with the challenge of creating search engine optimized sites. So, even if you are not an SEO expert, these WordPress plugins help you ensuring that your website ranks as high as it can in search engines.
To help you out, we’ve rounded up the Top 5 WordPress plugins for SEO in 2017 and how they can improve your website’s overall SEO standing.
All In One SEO Pack
The world’s most famous and one of the most advanced SEO plugin built for bloggers, online business, eCommerce, and magazines. With over 3+ million active installs and 4.5 overall rating out of 5, it has to be on the top on my list.
If you are one among the newbies who don’t understand SEO and rarely care to perform any on page optimization, then you must use this plugin. It can automatically generate meta description, meta keywords for your blog posts. It can automatically optimize your titles using best practices. Additionally, it can even add alternate tags to all your images within any of your posts. This is a crucial task as search bots can understand the graphics and they only need the text-based explanation.
Finally, it’s the only SEO plugin which has extended support for eCommerce websites. And with its advanced algorithms, it can check your blog for any duplicate pages so as to prevent panda penalty. Overall it’s a complete solution for a novice to advance users.
Yoast SEO
With over 3+ million active installs and with an overall 5-star rating, it’s definitely a must have plugin in its category.
WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin also includes an option to integrate the Facebook open graph and Twitter metadata so as to make your website more socially friendly. But its most important feature is the on-page analysis which is powered by Linkdex.
It gives you custom boxes to place meta description and keyword tags. Then it automatically checks keyword density in your post, checks if the targeted phrase is present in the title, post URL. It even provides you hint where to place the keyword so as to get a better position. Finally, with the complete analysis of links ( both inbound and outbound ), it provides you with the rating based on 100%.
You can even use its inbuilt Flesch Reading Ease scale to check whether your post is easy to read or not. This is a unique feature which allows you to optimize your content for your readers. But that’s not the end, Yoast gives you some advance options to bring some technical enhancements.
Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Optimizing images help you drive a significant amount of traffic from image search engines.
The amazing team at WPMU DEV has worked to bring this incredibly powerful and free image smusher which can resize, optimize and compress all your images.
Their servers do all the heavy lifting – stripping hidden bulky information from your images and reduce file size without losing quality. Large image files slow down your site without you even knowing it. WP Smush uses WPMU DEV’s super servers to quickly smush every single one of your images and cuts all the unnecessary data without slowing down your site.
WP Smush meticulously scans every image you upload – or have already added to your site – cuts all the unnecessary data and scales it for you before adding it to your media library.
SEO Internal Links
Internal links are extremely important part of overall optimization for your site because internal links guide search engines to visit and index other important posts and pages of your site.
One of the main difference between a pro blogger and a just another blogger is how they make the use of internal linking for the benefit of their blog.
Now, if you want to make the best out of internal linking practice, this internal link plugin automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages. It provides you a number of other important settings to create a network for positive SEO within your site.
All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
It is necessary for you to know how your post looks in the search results. Rich snippets improve that by providing more info about the post. Rich Snippets are very interactive and can display photos, star ratings, price, author, etc. which will make your blog post stand out from the competition.
So here comes the end of this list. They are my personal favorites, and I consider them as top WordPress SEO plugins. A good quality WordPress SEO plugin is a must for each and every WordPress site. Tell us which one if your favorite or do you use any another plugin.
