In today’s online world, having a quality website with great content is not enough to get the required attention. You have to make the website and the content SEO-friendly so that the web pages get higher ranks on the search engine result pages. There are two ways to make your website SEO-friendly. You can hire freelance SEO expert or you can install SEO plugins on your WordPress website so that you can optimize everything on your own. These SEO plugins will make all the on-page SEO works effortlessly. You can post freelance jobs only for hiring experts for off-page SEO works. Here are the top 9 SEO plugins for WordPress 2018 that will help your website get a higher rank easily.
This is the most popular SEO plugin with over 5 million active installations and over 4.7 average rating. It is the ultimate tool to optimize your content perfectly as you can evaluate your content and get suggestions for instant improvement. It also takes into consideration the length of the content, title length and word usage, meta description, and focused keyword usage. It can automatically create advanced XML sitemaps, do RSS optimization, and create breadcrumbs for better navigation and improved the user experience.
This is the next best SEO plugin with over 3 million active installations and over 4.5 average rating. It improves the on-page SEO score by blocking harmful bots that are responsible for the decrement of website speed. For advanced users, it lets them edit robots.txt and .htaccess file so that you can manually set how search engine crawlers should navigate through your site. One of the unique features it offers is the ability to create video XML sitemap in addition to textual and image XML sitemaps which is what search engines prefer and you can submit the generated XML sitemaps to any search engine. It also generates meta tags automatically and notifies the search engines when you publish a new web page.
You have to install this SEO plugin manually on your WordPress website as it is not available in WordPress Plugins Library. If you do not know how to install a plugin manually, you can post freelance jobs to hire a WordPress expert to do it for you. The reason for installing this plugin is that it is the fastest in terms of updating the latest features when search engine algorithms change from time to time. Therefore, your website will not suffer majorly when the algorithms change. It automatically creates internal links to reduce bounce rate and increase engagement time. It creates SEO-friendly XML sitemap and let the crawlers in the most effective way to understand your website better. You also get readability score and warnings for over-optimization.
Images are an integral part of on-page SEO and they happen to be the most neglected parts of a web page. This plugin puts SEO-friendly alt and title attributes once a pattern is defined by the users. It is a boon for website owners who might have hundreds of web pages with images but no alt and title attributes to enhance SEO score. You can also buy the premium version of the plugin for better optimization of the featured image and adding tags to images.
This plugin has been highly rated by WordPress and SEO experts across the globe. Just like Yoast’s SEO plugin, it uses colored lights to imply the SEO–friendliness of your content. You get headline suggestions based on your primary keywords. It provides a complete overview of the content strategies to improve it further to make your website a search engine’s darling. You can check the progress of your website on a weekly basis. It has been observed that content optimized for this plugin get double the organic traffic.
XML sitemaps are essential for websites as they are a way to communicate to the search engines what your website is all about and the web pages that are in it. The absence of XML sitemaps literally means that your website will never be crawlers by search engines crawlers. Even though XML sitemaps are generated automatically with other SEO plugins, it is better to have a dedicated plugin that can notify the search engines every time you publish a new web page.
One of the biggest factors that determine your website’s SEO score is the loading time of your website. W3 Total Cache is the plugin you must install for your website to optimize its loading speed to its best. It renders all the pages present and reduces nearly 80% bandwidth usage by compressing the pages and its components. It supports accelerate mobile page which is also an important factor for a better experience of the mobile users. It also improves web server performance and makes your website mobile-friendly.
This is a must-have plugin as it checks for any broken link on your website which is responsible for bad user-experience and bringing down your SEO score and rank on your website. The plugin actively monitors all the internal and external links on your websites including comment section. It also notifies you through email when it spots a broken link and lets to edit it directly on your web pages without going into the source code. The plugin has over half a million active installations.
This is a perfect plugin to automatically link the existing posts and pages to the desired list of keywords that you will provide. The keywords and phrases will get linked internally and this will reduce bounce rate and increase engagement. Most importantly, you can use nofollow attributes to prevent link juice passage and open all links in a new tab so that engagement time for the current post does not get cut.
You should install most of these top 9 SEO plugins for WordPress in 2018 to make your content SEO-friendly and increase the SEO score of the overall website. This will help you save a lot of money that you can invest to hire freelance SEO expert for off-page SEO works for fasting and higher ranks on search engines.